It was the band’s principle songwriters, Mercury and May, who came up with the most potent ripostes to any claim that Queen had lost their mojo, with two of the finest, most memorable and long-lasting tracks (after Bohemian Rhapsody) of their career: May’s We Will Rock You and Mercury’s We Are The Champions, both of which open the album, in that order.Ī delicious coincidence, perhaps, but the fact that both tracks used the pronoun ‘We’ said a great deal about how the band saw themselves in terms of their own loyal fan base, and the slings and arrows they had suffered on their behalf. “I’ve got an idea for the cover, fellas…” Roger Taylor with a 1953 issue of the comic Astounding Science Fiction (Image credit: Getty Images) ‘ You’re just another picture on a teenage wall, you’re just another sucker ready for a fall…’ The second, Fight From The Inside, was essentially more of the same, although set against a less impatient, rock-steady beat, with Taylor kept on lead vocals, and again having a not-so-sly dig at the punks who saw the 28-year-old idol as now somehow past it. Punchy, repetitive, two-chord fury: ‘ Well you’re just seventeen and all you wanna do is disappear/You know what I mean there’s a lot of space between your ears…’ That told them snot-gobblers. The first, Sheer Heart Attack, originally aborted from the sessions for the album of the same name in 1974, here with the drummer on lead vocals (replaced on the final album version by Mercury), and redirected as Taylor’s ‘answer’ to punk. To help kick-start the sessions, Roger Taylor brought in demos of two tracks he’d recorded on his own earlier that summer. With an American tour booked for November they would have to work faster than at any time before. To try to enforce this new sense of purpose, a mere two months were booked at Notting Hill’s hip Basing Street Studios and Wessex Sound Studios, a former Victorian church in North London, with all writing and recording completed between July and September. Now, though, the buzz word around the new album was ‘spontaneity’. They had taken more than three weeks to record Bohemian Rhapsody.
Whatever they did next, it became abundantly clear to everyone in Queen that the follow-up to A Day At The Races would have to be something a little different. In fact Marx responded by saying they could have the title of his next movie, though: The Rolling Stones Greatest Hits. May reluctantly conceded that it “may have been over-produced”.Īny thoughts of simply aiming for a third bite of the same formulaic cheery were finally dashed when Groucho Marx refused them permission to call the album Duck Soup, which would have been the third time in a row they had ‘borrowed’ the title of a Marx Brothers film. Not a flop, but not “the way things should be going”, as Taylor delicately put it. Designed very much as what their former producer Ray Thomas Baker decried as a record that “absolutely screamed ‘sequel’”, it had sold less than a third of what A Night At The Opera had sold in both Britain and America, and less than half what it had sold worldwide. It was made from previously unheard vocal and instrumental takes from the original multi-track tapes.The World champions (Image credit: Getty Images)Īlthough Queen were loath to admit it, the thinking behind News Of The World had in fact been more than a little influenced by the lacklustre reception A Day At The Races had received – and not just from the critics. On 7 October 2017, Queen released a Raw Sessions version of the track to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of News of the World. The song has also been covered by many artists. In 2011, a team of scientific researchers concluded that the song was the catchiest in the history of popular music."We Are the Champions" has become an anthem for victories at sporting events, including as an official theme song for the 1994 FIFA World Cup, and has been often used or referenced in popular culture. In 2009, "We Are the Champions" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and was voted the world's favourite song in a 2005 Sony Ericsson world music poll. The song was a worldwide success, reaching number two in the UK Singles Chart and number four on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. Written by lead singer Freddie Mercury, it is considered one of rock's most recognisable anthems. "We Are the Champions" is a song by the British rock band Queen, first released on their 1977 album News of the World.