The Untold Truth Of Queen

Queen is one of those bands that can be easy to overlook. It's not that they're unnoticeable, it's that they're too noticeable. They're omnipresent. They're everywhere. They're a city skyline that you just sort of take for granted because you can't remember a time when they weren't taking up all of your peripheral vision. That sort of ubiquity can make people forget that there's a story inside the constant. Most people wouldn't ask how a mountain got there, they'd just be content knowing it existed. Same goes for "We Will Rock You."

It should come as no surprise that the story of Queen is one of innovation, drama, and fabulousness. The faces behind some of the catchiest songs of the last century belong to almost shockingly complex human beings with accomplishments that would have made them remarkable even if they hadn't been the dudes behind "Brighton Rock." What follows is a look at the drama, transformation, and surprising amount of science that went into making Queen.

Band logos can be a tricky thing. Everyone's seen a poster for a local metal show with a pile of unreadable lettering spelling out the names of the groups playing. It's a thin line between an eye-catching symbol and a nonsense eyesore, so how do you make sure you land on the right side of album art history? Well, it helps if the guy doing your design work is one of the most iconic rock stars in history.

Yeah, it wasn't enough for Freddie Mercury to perform on some of the best-selling, most revered songs of all time. He also designed the band's crest, incorporating the astrological signs of all of the band's members: two Leos for Roger Taylor and John Deacon, a Cancer crab for Brian May, and two fairies symbolizing Mercury's Virgo. If you're curious, you can see Mercury's original sketch of the design on the back side of the group's first album.

"Under Pressure" was the result of a combination of David Bowie, cocaine, and failure. Put bluntly, it was the '80s.

Here's the scene: In July 1981, Bowie had come into the studio to record backup vocals for a Queen song called "Cool Cat." You know, "Cool Cat." You might remember "Cool Cat" from, well, nothing. It didn't go anywhere. The song was scrapped. No matter what they tried, they just couldn't get it to work, so they did what anyone would do in that situation: a bunch of wine and cocaine.

As the evening progressed, nose candy- and booze-fueled creativity took hold. Queen and Bowie started messing around with a completely different song, a number by Queen's drummer Roger Taylor, tentatively titled "Feel Like." In a burst of era-specific creative hedonism, the song metamorphosed into something amazing. The bass line came together, the duet was improvised, and "Under Pressure" was born.

Queen's bassist, John Deacon, has been a lot of things in his life. For example, on Queen's first album, he wasn't even himself. He was credited as Deacon John because the other band members thought it sounded more interesting. Show biz is weird.

More importantly, John Deacon is a professionally trained electronics engineer, and without him, Queen wouldn't sound the way it does. Sure, he wrote "You're My Best Friend" and "Another One Bites the Dust," but at a much more literal level, he invented the band's trademark sound. Deacon was the creator of the legendary Deacy Amp, the sound system that gave Queen their almost orchestral tones. It's a piece of equipment that enthusiasts and engineers spent years trying to replicate, with limited success. It wasn't until 2008 when engineers tore the original machine apart that they managed to find some semblance of an understanding of its inner workings. The most impressive part? Deacon made it out of some pieces of broken stuff he found.

Trench coats. Decapitations. Stunt swords attached to car batteries so they'd make sparks when they hit each other. Truly, Highlander was a work of genius.

If you haven't seen Highlander, it's an unusual brand of pure '80s concentrate. It's the story of a race of immortals who spend a few centuries cutting each other's heads off until there's only one left alive. The winner gets hit by lightning. The only man in Scotland with a Scottish accent is Sean Connery, who is playing an Egyptian. It's an epic on the same scale as Ulysses or those Old Spice commercials. All it needed was an equally brilliant soundtrack. If only there were a band with the cartoonishly overinflated charisma to match the movie's in no way ridiculous tone.

Enter Queen, who said those three perfect words: "No, thank you."

For real, the band initially turned down the opportunity to write songs for Highlander, but changed their minds after seeing a 20-minute cut of footage from the film. Brian May claimed he was so moved by the story of an immortal falling in love with a woman who would grow old and die that he immediately wrote "Who Wants To Live Forever." Freddie Mercury wrote "Princes of the Universe," Roger Taylor penned "It's A Kind of Magic," and the world was an objectively better place for it.

With all of the glamour, fame, and international jet-fueled sybaritism, you might very well wonder why the story of Queen hasn't been turned into a movie. The answer? They've been trying for almost a decade, and one is finally here.

It's been a long road to getting a Queen movie made. The first shot at one was announced in 2010, with Sacha Baron Cohen attached to play Freddie Mercury. Three years later, and with nothing filmed, Cohen left the project. He cited a number of reasons for exiting the film, with the big one being creative differences with the surviving members of the band. While Cohen had wanted to make a gritty, adult-oriented look at the life and death of Freddie Mercury, Brian May and Roger Taylor instead wanted a more family-friendly vibe, with half the movie focused on how Queen had kept going after Mercury's death.

From there, the project continued to hit speed bumps. It burned through more actors and directors before landing (as of this writing) on Rami Malek to play Mercury and Bryan Singer Dexter Fletcher to direct. Bohemian Rhapsody releases November 2, 2018.