The Story
Queen formed in London in 1970: Freddie Mercury on voice and piano, Brian May on a guitar he built with his father, Roger Taylor on drums, with John Deacon completing the lineup on bass. All four wrote hits — a rarity that gave the band its unusual range, from vaudeville to hard rock to funk.
A Night at the Opera (1975) brought international success and 'Bohemian Rhapsody', which held the UK number one for nine weeks and — with its promotional film — helped invent the music video as a form. News of the World (1977) supplied the stadiums with 'We Will Rock You' and 'We Are the Champions'; The Game (1980) added 'Another One Bites the Dust' and 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love'.
The live band may have been the greatest of its era, a case settled in twenty minutes at Live Aid in 1985 — routinely ranked among the finest performances in rock history. Freddie Mercury died on 24 November 1991, the day after publicly confirming he had AIDS; John Deacon retired from music in 1997.
May and Taylor have carried the songbook forward since 2004 under the Queen + banner — first with Paul Rodgers, and since 2011 with Adam Lambert — while the original records keep doing what they always did: making everyone in the room sing the parts they can't reach.
