Credit: Far Out / Denis Pellerin
Fri 18 September 2026 3:00, UK
When Brian May first formed the band Queen, there was no intention of them being like every other rock band.
Their favourite bands were groups like The Beatles, and they were going to do everything in their power to challenge their audience the same way that their heroes did whenever they made a record. And while they had a distinctive sound that no one else could have possibly copied, there were always going to be bands that May would be chasing after every single time he came up with something new.
But when you look at the way that Queen progressed, their first records saw them as a band of many different talents. Everyone might like to remember the moustachioed Freddie Mercury holding the crowd in the palm of his hand at Live Aid, the version that they started out as was a lot heavier than most people realised. You have to remember that they idolised bands like Led Zeppelin, and a lot of the early sounds of heavy metal were present in a lot of their songs as well.
That might be a bit unconventional for a band that was usually known for tunes like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘You’re My Best Friend’, but you can really see why it would appeal to Mercury and May so much. The guitarist was known for coming up with these gargantuan riffs that could fill a stadium, and while Mercury did like to add a little bit of theatricality into the mix, embracing his inner Robert Plant was all that was out of the question when it came time to make tunes like ‘Ogre Battle’.
On the other hand, Queen should really get the credit they deserve for being a progressive rock outfit on their first records. No one was making the kind of musical journeys that they were, and while ‘Rhapsody’ most closely resembles their status as musical geniuses, an album like Queen II sounds the closest to a prog album, especially given the themes of both sides of the record and how different songs fade into each other.
A lot of that came from hearing those more ambitious Beatles songs, but you can’t really leave Pink Floyd out of the conversation here, either. The Syd Barrett years had shown an entire generation of kids that they didn’t have to make the same conventional rock and roll songs all the time, and for as far as Queen pushed themselves, they would always have records like The Piper at the Gates of Dawn as an example of how far a band could go to get the sound they wanted.
Floyd weren’t all that far removed from Queen’s age when they started, but May felt that the prog giants were always going to have a little bit of an advantage over them, saying, “Well I’ve loved Pink Floyd since ‘I was a kid’, you know, they were a little bit ahead of us. I remember seeing them at the Royal College of Art with one oil slide as a light show. It’s a whole different universe that they created. Piper at the Gates of Dawn is kind of the pinnacle for me. It’s a very old-school thing to say but I still love that because it was just breathtaking, dangerous and whatever.”
Further reading: From The Vault
While Piper is the kind of album that the band could never reproduce again, that doesn’t mean that people like Queen couldn’t build on what Barrett started. They weren’t going to be making strange songs the same way he was, but the campy nature of a lot of Mercury’s best songs in the band has all come from the kind of free-spirited attitude that Barrett seemed to have whenever he wrote a tune like ‘Bike’.
Because as much as Queen are their own unique entity, it sometimes took someone like Barrett to remind them that there were no rules in rock and roll. It was all about finding the best idea that suited whatever you were singing at the time, and May was more than happy to carry on the tradition of songs that no one would have ever considered playing before.
