In a London studio in the autumn of 1977, four men were trying to make a record with fewer layers than anything they had done in years. Queen had built their name on stacked harmonies and ornate arrangements, but now they wanted songs a crowd could stamp through. The result appeared on 28 October 1977: News of the World, Queen's sixth studio album, released in Britain by EMI Records.
Punk pushes Queen to basics
The shift was deliberate. Punk rock had turned the music scene upside down, and Queen could hear it. Freddie Mercury, the band's frontman, said the Queen style with its multitracked harmonies had run its course and the group wanted to move in another direction. Brian May, the guitarist, explained that after A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races the group wanted to get back to basics.
They worked fast, finishing the album in about two months, whereas the previous album A Day at the Races had taken five months to record. Mike Stone produced it with the band and also engineered the sessions. All four members wrote songs, with Roger Taylor and John Deacon contributing two each. The sound leaned hard on rock riffs and big, simple choruses, a direct answer to the sneer of bands like the Sex Pistols. The sessions were not without friction. At Wessex, Queen found themselves sharing studio space with the Sex Pistols, who were recording Never Mind the Bollocks. Sid Vicious wandered in and asked Mercury whether he had managed to bring ballet to the masses; Mercury shot back, calling him "Simon Ferocious" and adding, "We're trying, dear."
We Will Rock You and its B-side
The clearest example came from May. He wrote We Will Rock You as a bare, anthemic track designed to pull audiences into the show. It became the B-side of We Are the Champions, and the single reached number two in Britain and number four in the United States. The two songs worked as a pair: one built for stomping, the other for a victory singalong.
Not everything was new. Sheer Heart Attack had been started years earlier, during the sessions for the album of the same name, and on the finished version Roger Taylor sang lead and played rhythm guitar and bass. Sleeping on the Sidewalk was cut in a single take apart from the vocal, a looseness the band would once have polished away. Other songs showed how far the band could stretch without losing the album's directness. John Deacon wrote Spread Your Wings, and the video for it was shot in Roger Taylor's garden in freezing weather. Brian May played a copy of his Red Special guitar because of the cold. Fight from the Inside, written and sung by Taylor, featured a riff that Slash later named one of his favourites.
The cover matched the mood. American science-fiction artist Frank Kelly Freas reworked an illustration he had made for a magazine in 1953, replacing a dead man in a giant robot's hand with the four members of Queen. It was a strange, comic image, far from the glamour of earlier sleeves, and it suited an album that refused to sound precious. The album also carried quieter moments. My Melancholy Blues was a blues piece with no backing vocals and no guitars. It's Late, written by May, used a tapping technique that gave the track a restless, searching feel. These songs sat alongside the arena anthems and showed that the stripped-back approach did not mean a loss of range.
The gamble paid off. News of the World climbed to number four on the UK Albums Chart and number three on the US Top Albums chart. Queen had stepped into a rougher, more direct sound without losing their audience. The album's two most famous tracks would go on to echo through stadiums for decades, but the story starts here, in a studio where four musicians decided to strip the paint off their own music.