(Credits: Far Out / NASA / Uwe Conrad)
Mon 2 February 2026 17:10, UK
When Freddie Mercury stepped on stage during Live Aid, 1985, there was little to no doubt that Queen were one of the world’s biggest bands.
Mercury controlled the 72,000-person crowd with frightening ease, raising the tension with a tip of a finger and then releasing it with a smooth exhale. As Dave Grohl once said, the band set the barrier for live performance, claiming that “Every band should study Queen at Live Aid. If you really feel like that barrier is gone, you become Freddie Mercury.”
Midway through this changing musical decade, Queen grabbed the art form by the scruff of the neck and became the band that defined the era. But up until that point, they had patiently bided their time, allowing their contemporaries to get the sort of praise they would soon receive in 1985, lurking in the shadows and watching other bands be labelled true greats.
Mercury’s good friend David Bowie was perhaps the defining name of the previous decade, along with Led Zeppelin and The Who, who together defined what a real live show should look like. But it was a bizarre truth, really, given the fact that during the 1970s, the decade supposedly belonging to these aforementioned greats, Queen were the band that topped the charts the most.
During that decade, Queen did more than just play support act to those aforementioned bands. Instead, they not-so-quietly cemented a legacy as one of the decade’s biggest bands, popularising their distinct sonic brand of rock opera. They released seven studio albums, including their most iconic, 1975’s A Night At The Opera, which hit number one on the UK album charts and became the band with the most top 10 singles come the end of the decade.
How many number one singles did Queen have in the 1970s?
Along with their album success, Queen experienced triumph in the singles charts. Four of their songs went on to become the biggest-selling records of the ‘70s. 1975’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was unsurprisingly first, selling 17.5million copies, but it wasn’t just the top-rated single for the band; it was the biggest-selling single of the entire decade, selling 17.5m copies. Queen then grabbed the second spot as well, with the 1977 hit ‘We Will Rock You’, which sold 12m copies.
Their domination was finally broken up after those two tracks, with Earth, Wind & Fire, Brenda Lee, AC/DC, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Billy Joel populating the rest of the charts before Queen regained their position within the top 10. They took the ninth and 10th biggest-selling singles of the decade with 1979’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now,’ and ‘We Are The Champions’ from 1977.
Across those seven albums and four mammoth singles, Queen cemented a musical reputation that allowed them to become one of the world’s biggest bands in the 1980s. The reason why Mercury had that Wembley crowd in the palm of his hand was because of how familiar every member was with the lyrics, thus allowing him to conduct one of the largest sing-alongs in music history.
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