QUEEN TRIVIA
Trivia
On 17 April 1975 more than 3,000 young fans were waiting at Haneda Airport when Queen arrived for their first tour of Japan. According to the band's site the four were visibly overwhelmed, and the frenzy, which came to be called Queen Mania, returned with every Japanese tour after it. Roger Taylor recalls in the official series Queen The Greatest that they knew there was demand for them, but only realised at the airport that the welcome was on another scale altogether. Kaz Utsunomiya, a long-standing friend of the band, said anyone at the airport that day would have thought it was the Beatles all over again.
In Japan, 17 April is Queen Day. In 2015, forty years after the band's first visit, the day they first landed at Haneda Airport was officially recognised as Queen Day in Japan, and an anniversary event was held that day in the airport's international passenger terminal. According to Universal Music Japan, the day is certified and registered by the Japan Anniversary Association.
Queen's first concert in Japan was at the Nippon Budokan on 19 April 1975. In September 2016, when they returned there as Queen + Adam Lambert for the first time since 1985, the last of the three nights, on the 23rd, was Queen's twentieth Budokan show counting from that first one. When the extra night was announced, Roger Taylor said they were honoured to play a third show at the very first venue they had played in Japan, and that things had come full circle.
"Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)", on A Day at the Races in 1976, was written by Brian May as a tribute to the Japanese fans, out of the bond formed on the band's first visit, and its two choruses are sung in Japanese. Because it was released as a single only in Japan, it appears only on the Japanese edition of the 1981 Greatest Hits, just as "Love of My Life" appears only on the South American one.
Kaoruko Togo, the former editor of Music Life, has written that she heard about "Teo Torriatte" before it was recorded. Covering the free concert in London's Hyde Park on 18 September 1976, she asked about the next album, and Roger Taylor told her it was still a secret but that it would include a song with Japanese in it. Neither its title nor its sound was known then; it turned out to be "Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)" on A Day at the Races, released in Japan the following year.
Queen's first live album, Live Killers, was recorded on their European tour between January and March 1979, but its cover photograph was taken in Japan. According to the band's site, Koh Hasebe shot it during the Japanese tour that April: the band at the end of the night, almost in silhouette against the huge lighting rig known as the Pizza Oven as it came down towards the stage.
Queen's 1982 Japanese tour ran to six shows in five cities and ended with an open-air concert at Seibu Lions Stadium on 3 November, which was filmed and released in Japan only as the video Live in Japan. After playing Sapporo on 29 October on that tour, Queen did not return to the city until 10 February 2024, 42 years later, when Queen + Adam Lambert played the Sapporo Dome with GLAY, a band from Hokkaido, as special guests.
Jewels, a compilation released only in Japan in 2004, gathered Queen songs used in the television drama Pride and sold more than a million copies. On that year's sales Queen were named international Artist of the Year at the 19th Japan Gold Disc Awards. Together with its follow-up, Jewels II, it sold more than 1.6 million, and in 2014 the two were released digitally for the first time to mark the band's return to Japan.
The film Bohemian Rhapsody opened on 438 screens in Japan on 9 November 2018. It passed 10 billion yen at the Japanese box office on 22 January 2019, its 75th day, and by 17 February had taken 11.66 billion yen, overtaking Star Wars: The Force Awakens (11.63 billion) to become the 21st highest-grossing film ever in Japan. According to Universal Music Japan, its Japanese takings were second only to those in the United States.
On 31 December 2023 Queen + Adam Lambert appeared in a special slot on the 74th Kohaku Uta Gassen, NHK's year-end music show, and performed "Don't Stop Me Now". The performance went out at about 9.50 in the evening, and the following week downloads of the song reached 9,266 per cent of the week before.
Freddie Mercury came up with the name. When Smile lost their singer he was already sharing a flat with Brian May and Roger Taylor, and he talked them into dropping the old name and starting again as a completely new band. According to Rolling Stone, the shortlist also included Build Your Own Boat, the Grand Dance and the Rich Kids, but none of them fitted the band Freddie described to Melody Maker, one that was to be "regal and majestic", the way Queen did.
According to the band's own live archive, the first show under the name Queen took place on 27 June 1970 at the City Hall in Truro, in Cornwall, where Roger Taylor grew up. The bass player had yet to settle: Mike Grose played the first three shows and Barry Mitchell the next eleven. The BBC likewise names Grose, alongside Freddie Mercury, Taylor and Brian May, as one of the four who formed Queen in 1970.
John Deacon's page on the band's site recalls that he saw Queen in October 1970 and was not much impressed: they were dressed in black under dim lights, and all he could make out were four shadowy figures. Introduced to Brian May and Roger Taylor early the next year, he auditioned days later in a lecture hall at Imperial College, bringing his own home-adapted amplifier, later known as the Deacy Amp and used by May as well. He became the fourth member on 1 March 1971, aged 19, and on the first album the band credited him as Deacon John, swapping the names round for a more intriguing ring. The press material for the 2024 release Queen I gives the month he joined as July 1971.
Before they had a record deal, Queen helped break in a studio. When De Lane Lea opened a new complex in Wembley in 1971 and needed a band to test its mixing desks and the sound of its rooms, Brian May and Roger Taylor volunteered Queen, and for their time there between November 1971 and January 1972 the band were rewarded with a five-song demo made by the studio's chief engineer. When they later recorded the debut album at Trident, they insisted on keeping the De Lane Lea recording of "The Night Comes Down", and slipped the multitrack tape in under a box freshly labelled Trident.
Jac Holzman, who founded Elektra Records, the label that signed Queen in America, saw them play the Marquee club in London on 9 April 1973. Roger Taylor's diary entry for the night, reproduced in the 2024 Queen I box set, records that the show went down very well and that Holzman liked it, and Holzman told his staff in a memo that he had seen "the future of pop music" in a band called Queen.
The first time Queen's music was broadcast anywhere was on BBC radio. In February 1973, five months before the debut album came out, they recorded a session for John Peel's BBC Radio 1 programme Sounds of the Seventies, taking in backing tracks and adding new vocals and overdubs. More BBC sessions followed, the last of them recorded on 28 October 1977, the day News of the World was released in Britain, and the sessions were collected on Queen on Air in 2016.
Queen's first hit came about because David Bowie could not make it. Just before their Rainbow Theatre show in London in March 1974, a slot on BBC television's Top of the Pops that Bowie had to give up went to Queen, who played their new single, "Seven Seas of Rhye". The performance took the song into the Top 10, and their second album, Queen II, went on to reach No. 5 in Britain.
By Brian May's own account, the guitar figure that closes "We Will Rock You" was played only once. Talking for the official series Queen The Greatest, he said he wanted the song to break the rules, with the solo arriving out of nowhere at the end instead of in the middle. He felt his way through a single take, liked a phrase he had stumbled on by accident when he listened back, and had the tape copied, the phrase cut out and three versions of it joined with sticky tape. That splice is how the record ends.
On their first South American tour, which began on 28 February 1981, Queen played football stadiums in Argentina and Brazil. According to the band's site, they were greeted at Buenos Aires airport by their own music over the public address system, and on the express orders of Argentina's President they were allowed to skip the lengthy arrival formalities.
Live Aid, held in London and Philadelphia on 13 July 1985 to raise money for the famine in Ethiopia, was put to Queen by its organiser, Bob Geldof, at the BPI Awards, and Brian May admits they doubted he could ever pull it off. Every act had twenty minutes, and Roger Taylor felt they had to play songs that people would recognise wherever they were watching. Queen played for 21 minutes at Wembley Stadium in front of a worldwide audience estimated at 1.9 billion.
The Magic Tour of 1986 was Queen's last with Freddie Mercury. Their show in Budapest on 27 July was the first stadium concert by a major rock band in the Eastern Bloc, and the Hungarian state film company shot it using nearly every 35mm television camera available in the country, seventeen in all. The tour ended at Knebworth Park on 9 August, which turned out to be Freddie's last concert with the band.
Freddie Mercury, who had studied design at Ealing College of Art, drew the Queen crest that appears on the back of the first album. According to Rolling Stone it is built on the four members' star signs: two lions for the Leos, John Deacon and Roger Taylor, a crab for Brian May's Cancer and two fairies for Freddie's Virgo, all overshadowed by a large phoenix borrowed from the crest of the school Freddie attended as a boy. The crest was later updated, coloured and placed at the centre of the cover of A Night at the Opera.
Smile, the band Queen grew out of, was formed in 1968 by Brian May, then a physics student at Imperial College, and Tim Staffell, a student at Ealing College of Art. A notice they put up at Imperial College asking for a drummer brought in Roger Taylor, who was studying to become a dentist. According to Ultimate Classic Rock, Staffell designed the band's logo, a wide grin of lips and teeth, a few years before the Rolling Stones adopted their famous lips. Staffell's interview published by Universal Music Japan dates the formation of Smile to October 1968.
The guitar Brian May has played on every Queen album, the Red Special, is one he built with his father as a teenager. In 1963, aged 16, he badly wanted a proper electric guitar the family could not afford, so he and his father, an electronics engineer, began making one in the workshop his father had set up at home. It took two years, all with hand tools: the neck came from an old fireplace, the fret markers were carved from old mother-of-pearl buttons, and the tremolo arm was a bicycle saddlebag holder tipped with the end of one of his mother's knitting needles.
Queen have been named international Artist of the Year at the Japan Gold Disc Awards, run by the Recording Industry Association of Japan, four times: first at the 19th, on 2004 sales, and then three years running, from the 33rd to the 35th, after the film Bohemian Rhapsody came out. According to Oricon, the year that won them the 34th saw them sell 462,485 albums, 102,234 music videos and 602,513 downloads in Japan.