Queen – We Will Rock You
About The Song
Queen guitarist Brian May wrote this. He claimed the idea for the song came in a dream. He told Mojo magazine October 2008 that he wanted to “create a song that the audience could participate in.” In the Days of Our Lives documentary, Brian remembered a gig where the crowd chanted the Liverpool Football Club anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at the band as they left the stage. “I went to bed thinking, ‘What could you ask them to do?’ They’re all squeezed in there, but they can clap their hands, they can stamp their feet, and they can sing,” he noted. “In the morning I woke up and had the idea in my head for ‘We Will Rock You.”
“We Will Rock You” was released as a double A-side single with “We Are The Champions.” Since the single’s release, the band has almost always used “Rock You” and “Champions” as a back-to-back encore, with “Champions” closing the show and segueing into a tape playing Queen’s version of “God Save The Queen.”
A funny story emerged from the sessions surrounding “We Will Rock You.” The punk band Sex Pistols were recording at Wessex studios around the same time, and bassist Sid Vicious drunkenly interrupted the Queen sessions to berate Mercury and ask if he’d “brought ballet to the masses” yet, as he’d been quoted as wanting to do in an earlier NME interview.
“I called him, I dunno, Simon Ferocious or something, and just pushed him out. I think… yeah, I think we passed that test” noted Freddie with a wink in one interview, whilst drummer Taylor noted in the Days of our Lives documentary that Vicious was “a moron… an idiot!”
Perhaps this all explains the lyrics to ‘We Will Rock You’?
Incidentally, it was Queen who accidentally gave the Sex Pistols their big break – they pulled out of an appearance on the Grundy TV show, so label EMI sent the Sex Pistols on in their place in what turned out to be the infamous “filth and the fury” interview.
Rolling Stone ranked it number 330 of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” in 2004, and it placed at number 146 on the Songs of the Century list in 2001. In 2009, “We Will Rock You” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
