A lot has already been written about the group Queen and their body of work. Those of you who grew up or were already grown up during the 70’s and 80’s will have found it impossible to have not heard any of their songs, even at the start of the 90’s they still had songs like «Barcelona» for the 92 olympics, which was also the time of the Expo 92 in Seville. Many of their songs became stadium songs which are still sung today at football stadiums, songs such as «We Are the Champions» or «Another One Bites the Dust» have become victory songs for many teams during sporting events. Even «Bicycle Race» was used during the Tour de France and other cycling events.
However, for me it is also their balads such as «Love of My Life» or «One Year of Love» which made them so ecleptic, stretching across a wide range of musical tastes. Perhaps their most famous example of merging styles would have to be «Bohemian Rhapsody» as they were one of the first bands to mix classical music with rock n’ roll.
Although Freddie Mercury has received a lot of acclaim over the decades for his song writing skills and vocal range, it has to be pointed out that all four members were song writers and each in their own right wrote many hits. This is uncommon these days, as usually the singer does all if not most of the song writing. Having said this, it is clear that at least 60% of the driving and creative force came from Freddie, as once he passed away, the individual band members attemps at solo careers were luke warm at best.
The Wembley concert or gig of 1986 was proof of Freddie’s crowd charming prowess and how well the band gelled together with precision timing. What is fair to say is that there will never be a frontman with such ability to interact and win over a crowd the way Freddie did, I would go further by saying that a lot of today’s performers rely heavily on technology and such things as auto-tune to hit those difficult out of reach notes. In addition to this, most of today’s music won’t survive ten years as so many modern acts are simply manufactured «one hit wonders». The golden age of music was the 20th century, your parents have nothing to envy; then again, this is all subjective.
