About Queen

Even if you don’t know the band Queen, you know the music of Queen. “We Will Rock You” is a sports stadium anthem heard around the world. They’ve sold over 300 million albums worldwide. Their Greatest Hits is the highest selling album in UK history, beating out some album called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by some band called The Beatles by over 600,000 copies. Queen albums have spent a total of 27 years on the charts in the UK, more than any other band in history. The album, Queen’s Greatest Hits I & II is the most downloaded albums on iTunes in the US. In 1968 by a couple of college students and a dental student decided to start a band. They were soon joined by an art student named Farrokh Bulsara. The band would become Queen, Farrokh would become Freddie Mercury, and the rest would become history. In 1975, after picking up Elton John’s manager, the band released their 4th album A Night at the Opera, at the time the most expensive album ever created. It featured a variety of musical styles, from rock to folk to classical, including the operatic “Bohemian Rhapsody” which is Britain’s 3rd best selling single of all time, reached the top 10 in the US (twice), and is often voted the best song of all time. It’s also considered by many to have the first proper music video. The band would continue to set records, this time for attendance with their free concert at Hyde Park, London with 150,000 people confirmed attending. In the 80s, Queen would update their sound to include synthesizers and would work with David Bowie on “Under Pressure” (later sampled by Vanilla Ice), would appear on several soundtracks, and would perform at Live Aid in a concert considered by many to be the greatest live performance by a band ever. Sadly, in 1991, Freddie Mercury passed due to bronchial pneumonia brought on by AIDS. In early 1992, the Freddie Mercury Tribute concert took place featuring a huge all star cast: Extreme, Def Leppard, Guns N Roses, Roger Daltrey of The Who, and many others raised over £20,000,000 for AIDS charities. Queen has continued to perform with a variety of frontmen, from hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean to Paul Rodgers of Bad Company. They influenced everyone, whether it’s the punk of Green Day, the alternative rock of Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins, the metal of Iron Maiden, the modern rock of Keane and The Killers, the classic rock of Styx, the pop of Katy Perry or Mika, or the performance pop/rock of Lady GaGa and Marilyn Manson.