Roger Taylor - The Unblinking Eye (Everything Is Broken)

Roger Taylor - The Unblinking Eye (Everything Is Broken) - The New Single - OUT NOW!

Defying Gravity - Kerry Ellis

We Will Rock You and Wicked star Kerry Ellis performs and records the track 'Defying Gravity'. Produced by Queen's Brian May.

Queen - Absolute Greatest TV Advert

Queen Absolute Greatest TV Advert

Queen - Somebody To Love (Subtitulada en español)

"Somebody to Love" is a song English rock band Queen. Written by singer Freddie Mercury, the track featured on their 1976 album A Day at the Races, from which it was also released as the lead single.

Like "Bohemian Rhapsody", the major hit from Queen's previous album A Night at the Opera (1975), "Somebody to Love" has a complex melody and deep layering of vocal tracks, this time based on a gospel choir arrangement. It was the first single off the album A Day at the Races. It is a rock ballad on which band members Freddie Mercury, Brian May and Roger Taylor multitracked their voices to create the impression of a 100-voice gospel choir. The lyrics, especially combined with the gospel influence, create a song about faith, desperation and soul-searching; the singer questions both the lack of love experienced in his life, and the role and existence of God. Staying true to Queen's guitar-driven style, it was also filled with intricate harmonies and a notable guitar solo by Brian May, and it went to number 2 on the UK charts and number 13 on the U.S. singles chart. The song requires many high notes, ranging from a C5 in full voice to an A♭5 in falsetto.

A promotional video was made combining a staged recording session at Sarm East Studios (where the A Day at the Races album was recorded) and film footage of the band's performance at Hyde Park that September. The song was included on their first Greatest Hits, released in 1981.

Queen - 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love'

"Crazy Little Thing Called Love" was a song performed by the English rock band Queen, written by singer Freddie Mercury. While it peaked at number two in the UK, it hit number one on the U.S. charts on February 23, 1980, remaining there for four consecutive weeks. It topped the charts in Australia for six weeks.

The song is written in a rockabilly style. As reported by Mercury in Melody Maker, May 2, 1981, Mercury composed "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" on the guitar in just five to ten minutes. Other accounts say that he wrote it while lounging in a bubble bath in the Bayerischer Hof Hotel in Munich during one of Queen's extensive Munich recording sessions. He took it to the studio shortly after writing it and presented it to bandmates Roger Taylor and John Deacon. The three of them, with their new producer Mack, recorded it at Musicland Studios in Munich. The entire song was reportedly recorded in less than half an hour (although Mack says it was six hours).

American country music singer Dwight Yoakam included a cover of the song on his 1999 album Last Chance for a Thousand Years: Dwight Yoakam's Greatest Hits from the 90's. Yoakam's version was released as a single, peaking at #12 on the U.S. country singles charts in 1999. It was also used in a television commercial for clothing retailer Gap at the time of the album's release.

American Idol 8 - Adam Lambert with Queen

Adam Lambert and Kriss Allen were joined by Queen to perform We Are The Champions on stage of American Idol season finale on May 20.

Queen - 'Killer Queen'

"Killer Queen" is a 1974 song by the British rock band Queen. It was their breakthrough hit, reaching #2 in the UK and #11 in the United States. The song was taken from Queen's 1974 album Sheer Heart Attack, and was written by pianist and lead singer Freddie Mercury. In 1986, it was featured as the B-side to "Who Wants to Live Forever".

Mercury commented that he wrote the lyrics first before adding the musical arrangements. The recording features elaborate four-part harmonies (particularly in the choruses, and also providing backing parts in the verses), and also an elaborate multitracked guitar solo by Brian May, including use of the "bell effect".

"People are used to hard rock, energy music from Queen, yet with this single you almost expect Noel Coward to sing it. It's one of those bowler hat, black suspender belt numbers – not that Coward would wear that. (...) It's about a high class call girl. I'm trying to say that classy people can be whores as well. That's what the song is about, though I'd prefer people to put their interpretation upon it – to read into it what they like." - Freddie Mercury

"Killer Queen' was the turning point. It was the song that best summed up our kind of music, and a big hit, and we desperately needed it as a mark of something successful happening for us... I was always very happy with this song. The whole record was made in a very craftsman-like manner. I still enjoy listening to it because there's a lot to listen to, but it never gets cluttered. There's always space for all the little ideas to come through. And of course I like the solo, with that three-part section, where each part has its own voice. What can I say? It's vintage Queen. The first time I heard Freddie playing that song, I was lying in my room in Rockfield [a residential recording studio in Wales], feeling very sick. After Queen's first American tour I had hepatitis, and then I had very bad stomach problems and I had to be operated on. So I remember just lying there, hearing Freddie play this really great song and feeling sad, because I thought, 'I can't even get out of bed to participate in this. Maybe the group will have to go on without me.' No one could figure out what was wrong with me. But then I did go into the hospital and I got fixed up, thank God. And when I came out again, we were able to finish off 'Killer Queen.' They left some space for me and I did the solo. I had strong feelings about one of the harmony bits in the chorus, so we had another go at that too." - Brian May

Queen - Calling All Girls

Calling All Girls

The first Roger Taylor song (however with Mercury on vocals) to be released as a single (albeit in selected countries, including the United States and Australia, but not the United Kingdom), "Calling All Girls" failed to create much of an impact on the charts where it peaked at #60 in the U.S., despite having an entertaining music video based on the George Lucas film THX 1138. Taylor composed "Calling All Girls" on guitar, and played the feedback noises during the song's break. Queen rarely performed the song on tour, but a live recording from Japan in 1982 is commercially available on the Queen on Fire - Live at the Bowl DVD, where "Calling All Girls" accompanies the photo gallery. The single was released in July of 1982 and reached #33 in Canada and #60 in the US.

Queen - 'We Will Rock You (Fast)'

The official 'We Will Rock You (Fast)' music video. Taken from Queen - 'Greatest Video Hits 1'.

Queen - 'We Will Rock You'

"We Will Rock You" is a song written by Brian May and recorded and performed by Queen. One version was used as the opening track on their 1977 album News of the World. This version consists of a stamp-stamp-clap-pause beat, and a power chorus, being somewhat of an anthem. The stamping effects were created by the band overdubbing the sounds of themselves stomping and clapping many times and adding delay effects to create a sound like many people were participating. When performed live, this version is usually followed by "We Are the Champions", another of the album's hits, as they were designed to run together. The double A-side reached number 4 on the U.S. Billboard singles chart, becoming their second hit in the U.S. On the 45 of the song's original vinyl record release, the song was actually the flip side of "We Are the Champions" in Britain, however the American record company requested to put the two songs together as a "double A-side" because American radio stations were playing them back to back. This is a reason why the songs are often paired on the radio and at sporting events, where they are frequently played. The songs are also paired back to back on the album, and they are still played together to this day on American classic rock radio stations.

Queen also performed the song in another arrangement (known as the "fast version"), which featured a faster tempo and a full guitar, bass and drums backing track throughout. The band would often open their live sets in the late 1970s and early 1980s with this version, as captured on their 1979 Live Killers double album, on Queen Rock Montreal (2007), and on the Queen on Fire - Live at the Bowl album released in 2004.

The "fast version" is available in a studio performance. In 1977, it was recorded for John Peel's show on BBC Radio 1. This version is on the 1992 Italian bootleg CD "Queen - We Will Rock You" (On Stage CD 12018). It is part of a longer cut that starts out with the slow version. In 2002, the fast version was officially released on a promo single distributed by the tabloid The Sun. The "fast" BBC studio version can also be found on King Biscuit Live: Best of, Vol. 4 and online at Wolfgang's Vault.

Due to its prevalence in popular culture, "We Will Rock You" has been recognized by various authorities as being quite influential, including Rolling Stone, which ranked it #330 of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004, and also the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) which placed it at #146 on its list of Songs of the Century.

The "stomp, stomp, clap" sounds were later reused in the Queen + Paul Rodgers song "Still Burnin'".

Don't Stop Me Now

"Don't Stop Me Now" was a 1979 hit single by Queen, from their 1978 album Jazz. Lyrics and music were written by Freddie Mercury. It was recorded in August/September 1978 in Nice, France.

Musically, the song is based around Mercury's piano playing, with John Deacon and Roger Taylor providing a bass guitar and drums backing track. The song also provides an example of Queen's trademark style of multitrack harmony vocals for the chorus lines. Several recordings were laid over each other to achieve the final sound. On the studio version, Brian May's only guitar playing is in his guitar solo, but on live versions performed on the band's 1978 and 1979 tours, May would also play rhythm guitar throughout the rest of the song to add a rockier feeling to it.

The lyrics have cosmic imagery describing feelings of power and exhilaration, for example "I'm gonna go, go, go there's no stopping me / I'm burning through the sky yeah 200 degrees…".

The single reached #9 in the UK charts but only #86 in the US.

It is famous for being a song Brian May did not like, and is the advertising jingle for the Trafford Centre.

Despite the fact that the studio version is one of Queen's most popular songs, it only lasted from 1978-1979 live, with the last performance in the Crazy Tour.

In 2005, this song was voted as "The Greatest Driving Song Ever" by viewers of the BBC television program Top Gear, but the trophy given to Roger Taylor (probably intentionally) was mis-engraved, reading Stop Me Now.

Queen + Paul Rogers - '39' (Live In Ukraine)

The song's lyrics are a science fiction short story which concerns twenty volunteers who leave a dying Earth on a spaceship in search of new worlds to settle. They return to report success, 100 calendar years later, with only a single year passing from the volunteers' perspective (due to time dilation). The lyrics imply that the song's protagonist faces his grandchild upon return to Earth: For so many years have gone/though I'm older but a year/your mother's eyes from your eyes/cry to me. This, and the fact that all his peers and friends have died, are a terrible grief to the protagonist, as the final words insist: For my life/still ahead/pity me!

To provide 100 years' time dilation on Earth in only one year of spaceship time, the velocity of the spaceship must average to 99.995% of the speed of light.

Brian May described the song as follows:

It's a science fiction story. It's the story about someone who goes away and leaves his family and... because of the time dilation effect, when you go away, the people on Earth have aged a lot more than he has when he comes home. He's aged a year and they've aged 100 years. So, instead of coming back to his wife, he comes back to his daughter and he can see his wife in his daughter... a strange story. I think, also, I had in mind a story of Herman Hesse, which I think is called "The River" (actually "The Poet").

A man leaves his hometown and has lots of travels and then comes back and observes his hometown from the other side of the river. He sees it in a different light, having been away and experienced all those different things. He sees it in a very illuminating way, 'cause I felt a little bit like that about my home at the time as well, having been away and seen this vastly different world of rock music... totally different from the way I was brought up, and I had those feelings about home.

In the first verse, the science-fictional nature of the story is hidden but hinted at by two non-rhyming couplets, which should rhyme based on the structure of the song. "The sweetest sight ever seen" is "rhymed" with the word "few", suggesting a line like "the sweetest ship ever flew", and "sailed across the milky seas" is rhymed with the word "day", suggesting the line "sailed across the Milky Way".

Queen - 'Dragon Attack' (Rock Montreal)

Queen perform 'Dragon Attack' live. Taken from 'Queen Rock Montreal'.

Words and music by Brian May

Take me to the room where the red's all red
Take me out of my head-'s what I said yeah
Hey take me to the room where the green's all green
And from what I've seen it's hot it's mean

-Gonna use my stack
-It's gotta be Mack
-Gonna get me on the track
-Got a dragon on my back

Take me to the room where the beat's all round
Gonna eat that sound - (yeah yeah yeah!)
Take me to the room where the black's all white
And the white's all black take me back to the shack

-She don't take no prisoners
-Gonna give me the business
-Got a dragon on my back
-It's a dragon attack

Get down - I said so
Hey hey - All right

She's low down
-She don't take no prisoners
Go down
-Gonna give me the business
No time
-Yeah chained to the rack!
Show time
-Got a dragon on my back
Show down
-Go find another customer
Slow down
-I gotta make my way

Queen - Nevermore

A video made for the Queen song Nevermore off of Queen II.

Lyrics:
There's no living in my life anymore
The seas have gone dry
And the rain stopped falling
Please don't you cry anymore
Can't you see (aahhh)
Listen to the breeze
Whisper to me please
Don't send me to the path of nevermore, oh, ooh

Even the valleys below
Where the rays of the sun
Were so warm and tender
Now haven't anything to grow
Can't you see (aahhh)
Why did you have to leave me (nevermore, nevermore)
Why did you deceive me (nevermore, nevermore)
You send me to the path of nevermore
When you say you didn't love me anymore (aahhh, aahhh)
Ahhh, nevermore
Nevermore

Queen - A Kind of Magic (Highlander Version)

"A Kind of Magic" was originally written by Taylor before Mercury took it over, added the bassline, some connectors and re-arranged the structure. Regardless, it was still credited to Taylor. The new version was featured on the album, released as a single and included their auxiliary live musician, Spike Edney, playing some keyboards. An alternate version plays during the credits of Highlander. Mercury changed the lyrics while Roger was over in LA for a week.

Queen - 'Breakthru'

"Breakthru" was released in June 1989 from the album The Miracle. The single reached #7 in the UK but was not released in the United States.

The song begins with 30 seconds of slow vocal harmony, which was apparently written by Freddie Mercury, and then abruptly changes to a fast-paced rocker, that was mostly written by Roger Taylor. The intro was originally meant for a different song which ended up never being released, "A New Life Is Born". Some copies of it have leaked to the internet.

On the Queen for an Hour interview conducted in 1989, Mercury said that this was a great example of two separate bits coming together to make a final track. He commented on how the band had about 30 tracks to work with and only completed a handful, working on all of them at least somewhat.

The video of the song shows the members of the band performing the song on a train, named "The Miracle Express". The video also features Taylor's girlfriend Debbie. It was filmed on the preserved Nene Valley Railway, near Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, England using the steam locomotive 3822 borrowed from the Didcot Railway Centre in Oxfordshire.

Queen + Paul Rogers - 'Hammer To Fall/ I Want It All' (Live In Ukraine)

Queen and Paul Rogers perform 'Hammer To Fall/ I Want It All'. Taken from Queen + Paul Rogers: Live In Ukraine.

Queen - 'Bohemian Rhapsody'

"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the band's 1975 album A Night at the Opera. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is in the style of a stream-of-consciousness nightmare that has unusual song structure, especially for popular music. The song has no chorus, instead consisting of seemingly disjointed sections including operatic segments, an a cappella passage, and a heavy rock solo.

When it was released as a single, "Bohemian Rhapsody" became an unlikely commercial success, staying at the top of the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks. It has become one of the UK's best ever selling singles (with sales of 2,176,000), bettered only by Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and Elton John's "Candle In The Wind 1997".

The single was accompanied by a promotional video; considered groundbreaking, it helped establish the visual language of the modern music video. Although critical reaction was initially mixed, especially in America, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is often considered to be Queen's magnum opus and one of their all-time greatest songs. In 2004 Rolling Stone magazine ranked "Bohemian Rhapsody" at number 163 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

You can read more about Bohemian Rhapsoday here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_rhapsody

Queen - 'Save Me' (Live At The Bowl)

Queen perform 'Save Me' live. Taken from 'Queen On Fire: Live at the Bowl'.

Queen + Paul Rogers: Live In Ukraine

When it comes to taking on logic-defying challenges, Queen have never fought shy: think Hyde Park, Latin America, Live. Here’s the case in point: just weeks ahead of the start of the band’s 2008 Queen + Paul Rodgers' The Cosmos Rocks tour the band were approached to help Ukraine’s AntiAids Foundation reach out to the youth of the country with the message 'Don’t Let Aids Ruin Your Life'. Despite the difficulties involved, Queen + Paul Rodgers made it to Freedom Square for the night of September 12, 2008. Over 350,000 Ukrainians came to see them play and more than 10million homes watched the show live on television. In all, more than 20 million took part in what the band recall as "an unforgettable experience... one of those rare things in life you know you will never forget. A meeting in Music, but also a coming together to fight a common enemy..."