The one genre Freddie Mercury wanted to leave behind: “No barriers”
The idea of Queen being set in one style never appealed to Freddie Mercury when he first started making music.
He had a keen ear for what he wanted to hear, and even if he spent his days working away at songs that had no business being on the charts, he was always happy to make them if they ended up sounding good. Nothing was really off the table when he worked with Queen, but he felt that some labels didn’t exactly fit what they were trying to do after too many years in the studio.
By looking through every one of their albums, you can see Mercury genuinely evolving as a songwriter on each track. The first Queen record does have a lot of muscle to it and probably sounds the closest to heavy metal of any of their albums, but at the same time, there’s the prog rock affair going on in Queen II that threw everyone for a loop right after the band released their debut.
They still had a lot of fury behind them, but Mercury would always sprinkle in his natural charisma over everything they did. Not many people expected songs like ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’ from the same band that made ‘Keep Yourself Alive’, but given his personality every single time he gave an interview, Mercury needed to let that cheesiness out in any way that he could. But by the time of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, something had started to shift a little bit in the Queen camp.
And it wasn’t just because they were broke, either. The band did have a lot of trouble paying the bills after being in business with the wrong people, but after making their definitive six-minute statement, Mercury felt that there was a point where they stopped being a rock and roll band and turned into something entirely different. They could do anything, and Mercury didn’t want to find himself shackled to the same ho-hum genre that some of their contemporaries belonged in.
They had crossed a threshold, and you can hear Mercury’s enthusiasm through the music half the time, eventually saying, “I just like to think that we’ve come through rock ‘n’ roll, call it what you like, and there are no barriers: it’s open. Especially now when everybody’s putting their feelers out and they want to infiltrate new territories. This is what I’ve been trying to do for years.” And ever since that record, they would prove exactly why they were one of the biggest bands in the world.
Every one of their albums from then on was a new adventure, and even if they did have a lot of connective tissue, they didn’t have that many rules. The writer of the song was still the boss of whatever they were working on at any given time, but when you look at Jazz compared to News of the World and then put both of them up against The Game, they are all totally different directions because of what the band wanted to do.
Was some of that made to profit from some trends? Absolutely, but that was never the point, either. Mercury did genuinely have a love of dance music when they were making records like Hot Space, and even if the end result wasn’t the best thing that they had ever made or anything, they were still looking to make songs that were incredible, regardless of whether the public liked it or not.
So, really, the idea of them trying out new things and not caring what other people think may be one of the most rock and roll moves that they ever made. They didn’t bother making the same kind of record all the time because it would be boring, and the most that they could hope for was songs that happened to resonate with a lot of people. And thankfully for them, there were more than enough people out there for them to sing along with.
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