Queen’s beloved 1979 song, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” off their eighth studio album, The Game, became a number 1 hit 46 years ago.<\/p>\n
The track, written by Queen’s frontman and vocalist, the lateFreddie Mercury<\/a>, secured the number one spot on Billboard’s Top 100<\/a> on March 8, 1980.<\/p>\n In a 1984 interview,<\/a>Mercury<\/a>, who died in 1991 at the age of 45, shared that the idea for the song came to him while he was taking a bath. He recalled asking his manager, Paul Prenter, to hand him an acoustic guitar to bring the song to fruition while he remained in the bathtub.<\/p>\n “I was in a bath and then suddenly I had an idea, I called up Paul, and I said, ‘Just get me a guitar.’ Just an acoustic just in the bath,” said Mercury in the 1984 interview. “And I was just in the bath, because I was restricted in the bath, I could only play three chords. So I was limited, and I came up with ‘Crazy Little Thing.'”<\/p>\n In a 2011 interview with Absolute Radio<\/a>, Queen’s guitarist,Brian May<\/a>, said Mercury was inspired by the music<\/a> of Elvis Presley<\/a> while writing “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”<\/p>\n “It’s Freddie’s tribute to Elvis in a way. He was very fond of Elvis,” explained May in the Absolute Radio interview.<\/p>\n He also noted that “Freddie wrote it very quickly” and went to the studio to record most of the song with his Queen bandmates, which included Roger Taylor and\u00a0John Deacon.<\/p>\n “By the time I got in there, it was almost done,” recalled May.<\/p>\n He also attributed the song’s authentic sound to the band’s producer and engineer, Reinhold Mack.<\/p>\n “I think the sounds that Mack managed to get, these very elemental, very real sounds, real ambient sounds, had a real big contribution to make. It does sound very authentic. Everything about it is very original rock-and-roll. Very ’70s,” said the musician, now 78, in the 2011 interview.<\/p>\n This story was originally published by Parade<\/a> on Mar 8, 2026, where it first appeared in the News<\/a> section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Queen’s beloved 1979 song, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” off their eighth studio album, The Game, became a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":336983,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[154794,154795,5667,93,4551,61,60,278,154793,154796],"class_list":["post-336982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-absolute-radio","tag-crazy-little-thing-called-love","tag-elvis-presley","tag-entertainment","tag-freddie-mercury","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music","tag-paul-prenter","tag-reinhold-mack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336982\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}