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Credit: Far Out \/ Carol Lee \/ Alamy<\/p>\n
October 27th, 2026 \u00b7 3:00am GMT <\/p>\n
There are two very different sides to the famous Queen<\/a> sound. <\/p>\n On the one side, there is the elaborate experimentation of their rock opera. Best seen in their cultural behemoth of a hit, \u2018Bohemian Rhapsody\u2019, 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\u2019s wild storytelling imagination and soaring vocal range<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to accept that the very same band responsible for \u2018Bohemian Rhapsody\u2019 could also write \u2018We Will Rock You\u2019, 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\u2019s not the sort of song you\u2019d associate with a band so synonymous with breaking new ground. <\/p>\n So, they\u2019re a somewhat paradoxical band, with one brow sunken below the floor and the other raised into the cosmic space of musical creation. Ultimately, it\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n That\u2019s 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 \u2018Bohemian Rhapsody\u2019 and also showcases some of their best songwriting of all time in songs like \u2018You\u2019re My Best Friend\u2019 and \u2018Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon\u2019. In that world, there was no room for something quite as simple, and once again, chant-based as \u2018We Are The Champions\u2019, a song that rivals \u2018We Will Rock You\u2019 for its simplicity.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI was thinking about football when I wrote it. I wanted a participation song, something that the fans could latch on to,\u201d Mercury admitted, confirming the terraces were on his mind all along. <\/p>\n So, when Queen got back in the studio after \u2018A Night At The Opera\u2019, and the album opened with \u2018We Will Rock You\u2019, the band decided that \u2018We Are The Champions\u2019, 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n After it was finally released on 1977\u2019s News Of The World, it followed the trajectory its writer set out for it, quickly becoming a football fan anthem<\/a> and the definitive victory song in sport.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mercury admitted, \u201cIt\u2019s lovely to hear that \u2018We Are The Champions\u2019 is a song that\u2019s been taken up by, you know, football fans \u2019cause that\u2019s a winners\u2019 song which keeps coming back; I can\u2019t believe that somebody else hasn\u2019t written a new song to take it over.\u201d<\/p>\n Ultimately, it shows the vast appeal of Queen and how their music can sit in various pockets of subculture. What I\u2019ve 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.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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<\/a> The Far Out Classic Rock Newsletter<\/p>\n