Queen released News of the World in the UK on October 28, 1977. Their sixth studio album opened with Brian May’s “We Will Rock You” and Freddie Mercury’s “We Are the Champions,” placing two invitations to sing together at the front of the record. The first gave listeners a rhythm they could make with their own bodies. The second gave them a chorus to claim as their own.
The approach reflected a broader change in how Queen were recording. Working with engineer Mike Stone at London’s Basing Street and Wessex studios between July and September, they completed the album in roughly ten weeks. After the elaborate arrangements of A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, they wanted more space in the music. “We couldn’t reinvent ourselves as a punk band, but we wanted it a little more simple,” Roger Taylor recalled in Queen’s official album notes.
Their audiences had helped point the way. In a 2010 interview with Fresh Air, May described reassessing the relationship between performers and fans after a concert where the crowd sang along throughout. Queen had initially wanted people to listen closely. The enthusiasm in front of them suggested another possibility: write something that made participation part of the arrangement. May considered what people packed into a standing audience could actually do. Stamping, clapping and chanting supplied his answer.
Making that idea sound enormous required careful studio work. The group stamped on boards and recorded repeated layers of percussion. May added delays of different lengths to suggest people standing at different distances from the listener. The result created the impression of a crowd without burying the pulse in a wash of reverberation. He also held the guitar solo until the ending, letting Mercury’s voice and the shared rhythm establish the song before the instrument took over.
That economy left room for very different personalities elsewhere on the album. All four members contributed songs, and Taylor’s “Sheer Heart Attack” followed the opening anthems with a much more frantic attack. He played bass and rhythm guitar as well as drums on the recording. John Deacon’s “Spread Your Wings” moved toward a more melodic, reflective mood, giving Mercury a different kind of vocal to inhabit. The simpler production didn’t require the writers to settle on one style.
May’s “All Dead, All Dead” made the contrast especially clear. He sang the lead himself, drawing on the death of his childhood cat. Its grief was intimate, a considerable distance from the collective confidence of the opening tracks. Mercury found another quieter setting in the closing “My Melancholy Blues,” built around his piano and voice with bass and drums. The album that began by asking a crowd to join in ended with a much smaller ensemble.
Taylor also helped determine how the record would look. After seeing Frank Kelly Freas’s robot illustration on a 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, he proposed adapting it for the sleeve. Freas reworked the image to include the four musicians, while the gatefold showed the robot reaching into an auditorium. Queen’s change in musical scale still came wrapped in an unmistakably theatrical image.
The opening pair proved especially durable onstage. On July 13, 1985, Queen finished their main Live Aid set at Wembley Stadium with “We Will Rock You” followed by “We Are the Champions.” Songs conceived around the connection with their own audience became the closing sequence of their performance before a stadium assembled for an entire bill of artists.
