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November 3rd, 2026 · 5:30pm GMT
Building a Queen setlist is an enviable dilemma. With nearly 200 tracks and 40 hit singles to choose from, the band have never found it easy to squeeze five decades of music into two hours.
Fitting the chart-toppers alongside deeper cuts remains a puzzle, and Brian May has admitted that “part of me would love to do a whole set of obscure album tracks”. It’s true that singles as big as ‘You’re My Best Friend’ and ‘A Kind of Magic’ have gone long stretches without an outing, but before ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are the Champions’ turned into setlist staples, the band built their live reputation on something lesser-known.
Tucked away on side two of 1974’s Sheer Heart Attack, ‘In the Lap of the Gods… Revisited’ was the tune Queen would close the set with until the anthems of the late 1970s took over, and it became the template for getting a crowd to sing back.
“I love this song,” May admitted to Uncut, “It’s very epic. It’s Freddie being magnificent and being a god, which he was quite good at”.
The public knew Freddie Mercury as the ultimate showman, but his songwriting in this era often hid a very real inner turmoil behind the fantasy. “In the beginning, a lot of his writing was very fantastical, but underneath, I think he was really pouring his heart out,” May explained.
“Freddie was struggling with various things at various times, and we all know that his sexuality was quite fluid,” May added. “It was hard for him to express. And I think you can hear him in this song, struggling with his relationships, putting them into words and music.”
On record, the song builds to a crescendo and ends with an explosion. Live, it became a conversation between Mercury and thousands of fans, from the Hammersmith Odeon on December 24th, 1975, to Wembley Stadium on the 1986 Magic Tour, where tens of thousands sang it back. A deep album cut, it turned out, could land as hard as any hit.
Further reading: From The Vault
Singles such as ‘Killer Queen’ and ‘Now I’m Here’ led the charge for Sheer Heart Attack, and they did their job. The former reached number two in the UK and number 12 in the US, giving Queen their first American top 20 hit. When the album followed on November 8th, 1974, it also climbed to number two at home and became their first LP to reach the US top 20.
But for many devoted fans, ‘In the Lap of the Gods… Revisited’ is the heart of the record. Mercury wrote both the original ‘In the Lap of the Gods’, which opens side two, and this reprise, which closes the album. You can see it as his first draft of stadium conquest, pensive but triumphant at the same time.
May’s reading of the song as a confession is hard to argue with, because it catches a man working through his private life in public. Mercury’s gift was making an audience feel part of both, and the lines he struggled with became the ones a crowd could sing.
