In a rare instance, he composed the tune on guitar, which he “couldn’t play for nuts … I couldn’t work through too many chords and, because of that restriction, I wrote a good song, I think.” In 1981, Mercury told Melody Maker magazine that he needed only “five or 10 minutes” to write “Crazy” in a bathtub in Munich. The song was “Freddie’s tribute to Elvis,” May told U.K. “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” was a departure from the band’s trademark swagger, a rockabilly-style number in which Mercury crooned over an acoustic guitar. 4-peaking “We Will Rock You”/”We Are the Champions” and the positively baroque “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which hit No. The British quartet - Freddie Mercury, then 33 Brian May, 32 Roger Taylor, 30 and John Deacon, 28 - claimed hit albums in the 1970s with a blend of bold arena rock anthems, including 1978’s No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 single, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” which crowned the chart on Feb.
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Watch every episode in ‘The Greatest’ series at Queen’s official YouTube channel.QUEEN CHANNELED ELVIS PRESLEY to earn its first No.
Not least because it gave the band an opportunity to let loose – a sentiment shared by every crowd and evident here, in this rare clip from the Friday concert at London’s Wembley Stadium in 1986…
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Roger Taylor: “We were still making the record, we hadn’t even nearly finished the album, and we were going out in Munich and somebody came up and said ‘oh it’s gone to number one in America’, and we were going ‘yeah! More drinks!’”Īs well as topping the US charts, the song also held the top spot in Australia for a staggering seven weeks, and reached number 2 in the UK.įreddie Mercury often jokingly referred to the simplicity of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” being due to the fact he only knew how to play three chords, and while he played the acoustic guitar on the studio recording, Brian May switched his famous Red Special for a Fender guitar to secure that authentic rockabilly style.Īs well as being a smash hit on the charts, it also became a raucous staple of the live show. May continues: “That was the first number one across the board in America, Billboard, Cashbox and Record World I think.” It does sound very authentic, everything about it is sort of like original rock and roll sounding.” And I think the sounds that Mack managed to get, these very elemental, real, very real sounds, ambient sounds in the studio had a big contribution to make. By the time I got there it was almost done. Yeah, Freddie wrote it very quickly and rushed in and put it down with the boys. Roger Taylor: “The first thing we did was Crazy Little Thing, and Fred did write the song in the bath in about ten minutes.”īrian May: “It’s Freddie’s tribute to Elvis, in a way, he was very fond of Elvis, and of Cliff I have to say, also. You know ‘what you got?’ ‘Well I dunno, I’ve got this?’”
Brian May: “We’d heard that there was this great studio called Musicland in Munich, and we heard there’s this great engineer called Mack, and we got into this rather, kind of indulgent way of just bowling into the studio with no ideas, or very few ideas, and just doing it from scratch.