His years of touring experience provided him with an arsenal of stagecraft prowess: strutting, holding poses, dressed in his glam rock style, with white spandex.Īudiences adored his showmanship and flamboyance.ģ0 years on from his death, Mercury’s incredible compositions are still part of the soundtrack of our lives. Twelve minutes into the footage, Mercury slowly struts to the piano and improvises a segue into "Somebody to Love" in a gospel style with a call and response with the audience. When the entire crowd of 72,000 joins Mercury in beating out the rhythm to "We Will Rock You," it is electrifying.įurther evidence of Mercury’s masterful stagecraft can be found in a bootleg video of Queen performing in Sydney in 1985. Mercury and band were in stellar form, having just completed a world tour for their album The Works, recorded in 1984. Queen’s appearance at the historic Live Aid Concert at London’s Wembley Stadium in July 1985 remains one of the greatest rock performances of all time. Mercury solos again at the end of the song with a loose vocal reference to Duke Ellington’s "It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)." It is a driving, high spirited and fearless vocal solo. Here, he employs scat singing and the opening syncopated repetition of a single note hints at Ella Fitzgerald’s influence. Mercury demonstrated his versatility, genre crossing and creative exploration on the 1985 song "Living On My Own." His vocal timbre could depict a delicate vulnerability, especially with his falsetto, or use dynamic extremes to accentuate lyrics with screams and growls.
Strong musicianship, excellent pitch and vocal control enabled Mercury to draw on a broad array of note choices, dynamics, tone colours and vocal effects. A lyric rock tenor with over three octaves in range, Mercury could belt into his upper register with his signature fast vibrato, or use a controlled pure falsetto with smooth legato phrasing. Technically masterful, Mercury possessed a voice that was powerful, agile, and highly expressive. The song, which topped the British charts for almost nine weeks, was described by Mercury as a “mock opera”.
This six-minute epic is unrivalled in complexity of form, lavish production, vocal layering and the sheer number of choral overdubs. It features a radically different approach to the guitar solo and includes May's count-in immediately prior to the recording.In 1975’s "Bohemian Rhapsody," perhaps Queen’s most famous song, Mercury took genre crossing to a new level. 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. It has also become a clichéd stadium anthem at sports events around the world, due mostly to its simple rhythm.
Since its release, "We Will Rock You" has been covered, remixed, sampled, parodied, referred to, and used by multiple recording artists, TV shows, films and other media worldwide. Soon after the album was released, many radio stations began playing the songs consecutively and without interruption. In 1977, "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions" were issued together as a worldwide top 10 single. Other than the last 30 seconds, which contains a guitar solo by May, the song is generally set in a cappella form, using only stomping and clapping as a rhythmic body percussion beat. In 2009, "We Will Rock You" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone ranked it number 330 of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" in 2004, and it placed at number 146 on the Songs of the Century list in 2001.
"We Will Rock You" is a song written by Brian May and recorded by Queen for their 1977 album News of the World.