Credit: Far Out / Carol Lee / Alamy
October 27th, 2026 · 3:00am GMT
There are two very different sides to the famous Queen sound.
On the one side, there is the elaborate experimentation of their rock opera. Best seen in their cultural behemoth of a hit, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, the sound was usually built on a spiralling Brian May riff that changed pace and direction with every new verse, in a desperate attempt to keep up with Freddie Mercury’s wild storytelling imagination and soaring vocal range.
It’s hard to accept that the very same band responsible for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ could also write ‘We Will Rock You’, thus displaying their rather concerning second side. The clap-and-stomp anthem is the sort a primary school music class would have proudly devised and subsequently sung in the playground for eternity. Ultimately, it’s not the sort of song you’d associate with a band so synonymous with breaking new ground.
So, they’re a somewhat paradoxical band, with one brow sunken below the floor and the other raised into the cosmic space of musical creation. Ultimately, it’s an approach that makes crafting an album all the more difficult, for there is no real way for them to bridge the gap between the simple and the complex in one record.
That’s especially true when the album is as brilliant as their 1975 effort, A Night At The Opera, the one that plays host to their hit ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and also showcases some of their best songwriting of all time in songs like ‘You’re My Best Friend’ and ‘Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon’. In that world, there was no room for something quite as simple, and once again, chant-based as ‘We Are The Champions’, a song that rivals ‘We Will Rock You’ for its simplicity.
“I was thinking about football when I wrote it. I wanted a participation song, something that the fans could latch on to,” Mercury admitted, confirming the terraces were on his mind all along.
So, when Queen got back in the studio after ‘A Night At The Opera’, and the album opened with ‘We Will Rock You’, the band decided that ‘We Are The Champions’, which was written two years prior in 1975, finally had a recorded home, somewhere it could rightfully exist alongside other songs and not wreck the wider sentiment of the album.
Further reading: From The Vault
After it was finally released on 1977’s News Of The World, it followed the trajectory its writer set out for it, quickly becoming a football fan anthem and the definitive victory song in sport.
Mercury admitted, “It’s lovely to hear that ‘We Are The Champions’ is a song that’s been taken up by, you know, football fans ’cause that’s a winners’ song which keeps coming back; I can’t believe that somebody else hasn’t written a new song to take it over.”
Ultimately, it shows the vast appeal of Queen and how their music can sit in various pockets of subculture. What I’ve called rudimentary songwriting might in fact be an exercise in restrained brilliance, proving that music in its most primal form has an ability to connect with the masses and really, nobody did that better than Queen.
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.