30 Quick Facts About Queen – One of the Best Rock Bands In History

Queen, with record sales ranging from 170 million to 300 million records, has been considered as one of the world’s best-selling music artists. The British rock band formed in 1970, with classic line-up of Freddie Mercury, Brain May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon, have been a great influence for the younger generation of musicians. Here are some interesting facts about the one of the greatest bands in history:

1.  All the four members Freddie Mercury, Brain May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2003, while the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.
2.  Queen is the first ever Western band to be officially accepted in Iran, following the release of the “Greatest Hits” album featuring "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "I Want to Break Free" in August 2004.
3.  The band was honored with the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song Collection from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, in the year 2005.
4.  Their song “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which is one of the greatest rock songs of all time, became the most streamed song from the 20th century, having been streamed or downloaded over 1.6 billion times in December 2018.
5.  The song, which was written by Mercury, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, while Mercury’s vocal performance was chosen as the greatest in the history of rock music, by the readers of Rolling Stone.
6.  The last album with Mercury, “Made in Heaven” was constructed from the lead singer’s final recordings, along with the material left over from their previous studio albums and solo albums.
7.  The album features the song “Mother Love” which is the last vocal recording Mercury had made. After completing the penultimate verse, he had told the band that he was not feeling good, before leaving the studio.
8.  He had stated that he will finish it when he comes back the next time, but May has to record the final verse, as Mercury never returned to the studio after that.
9.  Queen is one of the most bootlegged bands ever, and more than 12,225 websites dedicated to Queen bootlegs were discovered in a 2001 survey, which is the highest number for any band.
10.  In a project titled “Queen: The Top 100 Bootlegs,” most of these were officially available to download for a normal fee from Queen’s website, with the profits going to the Mercury Phoenix Trust.
11.  Their most famous music video “Bohemian Rhapsody” was shot in just a period of four hours at a cost of just £4,500 on November 10, 1975. The editing process took only five hours, as it was due to be broadcasted the same week.
12.  While there is a misconception that this music video was the very first pop video, it is indeed that the first to have had a phenomenal success, making it a regular practice for record companies to promotional videos for singles.
13.  May and Taylor performed at the 46664 Concert hosted by Nelson Mandela at Green Point Stadium, Cape Town, in an effort to raise awareness of the spread of HIV/AIDS in South Africa, on November 29, 2003.
14.  Following this, May and Taylor discussed at Mandela’s home, about the various problems in Africa, and how it can be approached. The band was named as the ambassadors for the 46664 cause, two years later.
15.  The final single “The Show Must Go On” from their 1991 album “Innuendo” chronicles the effort of Mercury, continuing to perform, despite being seriously ill, approaching the end of his life.
16.  It was said that at the time of recording the song, May was concerned if Mercury would be physically capable of singing it, but the lead singer had simply said “I’ll fucking do it, darling” and performed it.
17.  While the lyrics are full of metaphors and allusions, with other figures of speech, it was actually used to announce a thinly disguised tragedy, dealing with things that were hard to talk, like the furious desire to live, despite the vanishing strength.
18.  In fact, the line “My make-up may be flaking but my smile still stays on” truly refers to Mercury during his last days, as no matter how ill Mercury was, he never grumbled and wore a brave face always.
19.  When the band got the news that “Bohemian Rhapsody” had topped the charts, they were actually in an elevator, and they all jumped for joy. The elevator suddenly stopped, due to this, and the members thought they would suffocate in the lift.
20.  During the Queen + Adam Lambert 2016 Summer Festival Tour, Lambert performed the “Who Wants to Live Forever,” at the closing of the Isle of Wight Festival, as a tribute to the victims of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
21.  Their song “One Vision,” released as a single in November 1985, later included in the 1986 album “A Kind of Magic,” was inspired by the life of Martin Luther King Jr., and Taylor said that the lyrics were "sort of half nicked off Martin Luther King's famous speech."
22.  In July 2019, the music video of “Bohemian Rhapsody” surpassed one billion views on YouTube, making it the oldest music video to have reached that figure. It is also the first pre-1990s song to have achieved the feat.
23.  The band’s 21-minute performance at the Live Aid concert, on July 13, 1985, is ranked among the greatest in rock history by several publications. Mercury’s sustained note—"Aaaaaay-o"—during the call-and-response, a cappella section came to be known as "The Note Heard Round the World."
24.  During the Fire Fight Australia concert at the ANZ stadium in Sydney, Queen reprised their Live Aid set for the first time in 35 years, in an effort to raise money for the 2019-2020 Australian Bushfire crisis.
25.  The song “Tie Your Mother Down” from their 1976 album “A Day at the Races,” was written by May while he was working for his PH.D as an astrophysicist, in Ternerife.
26.  He had simply composed the riff, while singing “tie your mother down” a line he considered as a joke, but Mercury insisted him to keep the line as such.
27.  Queen became the first band to join Queen Elizabeth II on a British coin – the commemorative £5 coin, featuring the instruments of all four members of the band, in January 2020.
28.  The band, after the Beatles and Pink Floyd, is the third band to have been featured on a series of UK postage stamps, issued by the Royal Mail in July 2020.
29.  A biopic of the band “Bohemian Rhapsody” was released in October 2018, which focuses on the Queen’s formative years, leading up to the 1985 Live Aid concert.
30.  The film, which received mixed reviews from the critics, grossed over $900 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing musical biographical film of all time.
31.  Queen Net Worth: $600 Million