The song that the Queen wrote to make the audience sing

In 1977, the year in which punk rock exploded, i Queen they replied with “News of the world” (Read the review here), an album full of short and incisive songs, none shorter or incisive, like the one that opens the tracklist of the disc, “We will rock you”.

In an interview from 2023 with Total Guitar, the guitarist of
Queen Brian May
author of
“We will rock you”
told how it was written and recorded. “The song was born one night in Bingley Hall in the Midlands. We were a group that was going quite well, we had a good following and we had this trend for which people insisted on singing our songs. I think it irritated us a lot!”.

As a question about why the band did not like that the fan sang the songs with them, May replied: “Because we thought: ‘People, listen. We are working hard, so listen!’ But they were unstoppable that evening in particular, they sang every word of each song, which was rather a novelty in those days. Singing? Anyway, that evening at the Bingley Hall we got out of the stage and we all looked at each other, because all that song of the audience was really extreme. ”

Suddenly May had an lighting and changed his mind and way of thinking about it, so he gave a suggestion to
Freddie Mercury
. “I said to Freddie: ‘Maybe, instead of fighting this, we should encourage it. Maybe we should take advantage of this kind of energy.’ We all agreed that it was something really interesting to experiment: let the public be an integral part of the show.”

That decision led to thinking about
“We will rock you”
.
Brian May
He explained: “I thought: what can you ask the audience to do if it’s all crammed? They can’t do much if you don’t beat your feet and hands, but they can also sing. And if they can sing, what would they sing? With this, I could hear it in my head: ‘We will, we will rock you!’ I hoped that he would have taken hold. Various main delays to make her play mighty, but without echo.

May did not hide that he had doubts anyway on that song. “I was very nervous about it, because it seemed perhaps a little too simplistic. And I was not sure that it would play like a real song. But as soon as I heard Freddie sing it, I started to have more confidence, because it seemed like a kind of agitator. It seemed that he wanted to encourage the audience to do certain things. So it was all aimed at involving the audience. He was aimed at the situation live. And in some way he worked.”

Initially, Brian May’s belief on this song was not shared by the band’s drummer,
Roger Taylor
. “I remember that Roger had serious doubts about it. He certainly didn’t want to put it at the beginning of the album. He said: ‘No radio station will ever broadcast it! It doesn’t look like a rock song.’ But I fought on this point. So they were at the beginning of the album, and that was the individual: the two traces together. The audience, but it was not so that the rock ‘n’ roll worked in those days.

May also adopted a non -orthodox approach with his guitar solo in
“We will rock you”
. “I don’t think it was planned. I just wanted to unleash me! But I also wanted to overcome that limit, because everyone puts the guitar solos in the middle of the song, and I didn’t want to do it. I wanted this song to be connected with the audience, this would then bring me to the stage, so the guitar solo would have been the culmination of the song. It was quite unusual at the time, in reality I don’t think of another song.