Queen Built a Hit Song Out of Audience Participation With This 1977 Track

Queen always approached their music from angles that the typical rock band never would have imagined. That’s part of the reason why what they did also tended to be a bit more on the unique side than the output of their peers.

In 1977, they scored a massive hit with a song that was inspired by crowd participation. And they made sure that the track they created would get the audience involved as well.

A Fearless Band

Queen’s ascension in the rock and roll world was as sudden as it was unlikely. The four-piece didn’t exactly come with an imposing pedigree when they formed. But each of their four members could write, they formed gorgeous vocal harmonies, and, in Freddie Mercury, they boasted a lead singer of unfathomable talent and boundless charisma.

More than anything else, though, Queen held firm to what they believed when it came to their music. That confidence held forth even when it meant defying record company bigwigs. Consider that their career-changing hit, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, only happened because the band stuck to their guns and insisted upon recording and foregrounding the unusual song.

After that success, they were going to follow whatever whims might come to them, no matter how unusual. Their next somewhat off-kilter move came when they decided to put the audience in the driver’s seat.

The Crowd Goes Wild

Queen was touring behind their 1976 album A Day At The Races when they played a show in Stafford. At the end of the show, the band sat back in their dressing room and marveled to hear the crowd, as if at a soccer game, singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” as a kind of tribute to the band.

It overwhelmed and inspired them. That’s when the idea started to form for a song that would put audience participation front and center. Brian May, the band’s lead guitarist, began considering how that might work.

He realized that someone at a show could clap their hands and stomp their feet. May constructed a simple rhythm consisting of two foot stomps and a clap of the hands. When the band recorded the song, they mostly kept things unadorned, just the voice and the thundering beat.

“Rock” Show

To render the song more powerful, the band multitracked their own stomps and claps in the studio. It was the same kind of technique that made their vocal harmonies sound like the result of about 50 men singing, instead of just four. And it formed the basis for the immortal “We Will Rock You”.

Brian May wasn’t the only one inspired by that singing audience to write a song. Freddie Mercury took a different strategy with “We Are The Champions”, creating a singalong that could be easily remembered by the thousands of fans in the audience.

The band slotted “We Will Rock You” and “We Are The Champions” back-to-back at the start of their 1977 album News Of The World. Although there’s little separation between the two songs on the LP, they didn’t intend for them to be played as a tandem on radio.

But that’s just what most DJs did. And, in terms of the enduring popularity of the two songs, that decision probably helped out a great deal. It made for a 1-2 punch that almost insisted upon audience support to make the songs reach their potential, whether those audience members were at a show or perhaps at home or in the car, stomping, clapping, and singing along,

(Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns)

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