(Credits: Far Out / Carl Lender)
Thu 2 October 2025 18:19, UK
Freddie Mercury was never going to rest until he satisfied every musical passion that he had.
Queen may have been a democracy in many respects, but he was always going to make sure that the best songs that he could think of found their way onto a record, even if they were more than a little bit camp. But the genre of any of his tunes didn’t really matter as much as the theatricality that he was able to put into them once they met the live stage.
After all, Queen was a band that lived and died on the success of their live performances. As much as they could be sonic innovators whenever they got into the studio, Mercury was the best example of what a frontman should be, often playing with the crowd whenever he could and putting every single ounce of his body into whatever song he was doing. He may have been shy and reserved offstage, but it’s hard to look at some of his performances and not think of him as the centre of attention in any room.
But it’s not like the music didn’t speak for itself, either. Sure, Mercury was doing a lot of heavy lifting whenever he got onstage, but there wasn’t much needed to turn ‘We Will Rock You’ into one of the greatest audience participation songs in history. All anyone needed to do was stomp and clap, and if they had a halfway-decent sense of rhythm, any stadium could turn into one of the biggest chant-alongs in history.
By the 1980s, there might have been a far greater pop sheen to what they were doing, but the 1970s was the era where they sounded the heaviest. It was a bit more cerebral diving into records like Queen II, but considering how many avenues that they went down, they were actually a lot closer to a traditional prog band when looking at ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or even earlier compositions like ‘March of the Black Queen’.
If we go back to their debut record, there’s also a fair helping of heavy metal in the way that they play as well. There was a certain grandeur in imitating heavier bands like Black Sabbath, but ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ is the closest thing to thrash that the world had ever seen before the genre even had a name. Sabbath may have been the ultimate example of what metal should be, but Mercury knew there was a far better case of Zeppelin holding the crown.
Even though Zeppelin themselves always maintained their status as a heavy rock band and wished to keep heavy metal at a distance whenever they performed, Mercury knew that they weren’t fooling anyone listening to tracks like ‘Immigrant Song’, saying, “We started off on a sort of heavy metal footing in the days of Led Zeppelin. I think Led Zeppelin are still one of the greatest heavy metal bands that ever lived.”
And when the band did eventually transition to making pop masterpieces like ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, they weren’t going to completely throw out their old influences, either. ‘Dragon Attack’ has the same swagger as one of Jimmy Page’s best riffs, and even towards the end of Mercury’s life, ‘Innuendo’ fits somewhere in between the prog epics of acts like Yes and the grandeur of ‘Achilles’ Last Stand’.
Not everyone was coming to Queen looking for them to fire up the guitars and make everything scream, but they didn’t need to, either. They were there to kick ass in no matter what genre they touched, and as long as it gave Mercury a spotlight that he could own onstage, that was more than enough to work.
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