Credit: Far Out / LastFM
Sat 26 September 2026 10:00, UK
There’s having a sudden wave of inspiration that only comes once in a while, and then there’s having waves of inspiration that seem to arrive at an almost constant rate. If you’re ever going to succeed as a rock band, having a songwriter capable of the latter is going to help you out a great deal.
While all four members of Queen were evidently talented songwriters, Freddie Mercury seemed to have this golden touch that allowed him to conjure up complex songs with little to no effort. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ might well seem as though its development over several years was drawn out, but it seemed to come as a result of Mercury having constant waves of inspiration as to how to get his magnum opus to come together exactly as he wanted it to.
But not every band has the time to wait five or more years for their best and most laboured-over material, so it’s probably a good thing that, as well as being able to write a song in half a decade, Mercury was also capable of writing effortlessly catchy pop songs in half an hour.
In 1979, Queen were gearing up to record their eighth studio album in Munich, and while early preparatory sessions for the album appeared to be going well, they were significantly aided by one of Mercury’s most inspired moments, which occurred in, of all places, the bathtub of his hotel room. Suddenly overcome with an idea for a complete song while enjoying a relaxing soak, he exited the bathroom with haste once he’d worked it out and finished it on an acoustic guitar.
“‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ took me five or ten minutes,” Mercury would later divulge in a 1981 interview for Melody Maker. “I did that on the guitar, which I can’t play for nuts, and in one way it was quite a good thing because I was restricted, knowing only a few chords. It’s a good discipline, because I simply had to write within a small framework.”
Evidently aware of the fact that he’d come up with an idea for a hit on the spur of the moment, he immediately took the song to the studio and showed it to the rest of the band. Roger Taylor remembers being presented with the song by Mercury as a matter of urgency, and that they had to cut the song there and then in the hope that the idea wouldn’t get lost among the other things they were working on.
“We recorded that song, really, six months before the rest of the album,” Taylor later said in an interview with In the Studio With Redbeard. “It took half an hour to record. I remember he came in the studio. He says, ‘My dear, I just wrote this in the bath,’ and he did. He’d just been lying in the bath, and there it was. It was very simple, very easy, and it had a great fresh sound to it.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Brian May, the band’s irreplaceable guitarist, wasn’t even there for the initial session that produced the recording, and his lead guitar parts and vocal harmonies would have to be overdubbed at a later stage. May’s absence didn’t slow them down; they’d managed to bash out one of the band’s biggest hits in just as much time as it had taken for Mercury to write the song in the first place.
‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was the band’s first US number one and reached number two in the UK. There’s inspiration, and then there’s Mercury: a songwriter who could enter a place of supreme creativity almost on a whim. The song may well be comparatively simple when pitted against other Queen songs, but that doesn’t make the circumstances any less exceptional.
ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 
The Far Out Classic Rock Newsletter
All the latest Classic Rock content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.