“Saviour of the Universe”: how the nerdiness of Queen defined the band

I can imagine that, for some, the Queen jukebox musical ‘We Will Rock You’ was an unforgivable sellout move. The moment when the band became the brand, peddling shlocky sci-fi, panto-level jokes and characters called things like Scaramouche, Galileo Figaro and the Killer Queen. I think it’s fair to say that the people scandalised by this move absolutely don’t understand Queen and never did. Not only because any band that had Freddie Mercury up front has a theatrical side, but any band with Brian May on lead guitar has an unfathomably nerdy side.

May is a man with a doctorate in astrophysics who built his own guitar with his father out of an old mahogany mantelpiece. He is someone who has rooms in his many houses dedicated to his collection of Star Wars merchandise. For the record, I do not say this with an ounce of judgment in my veins; I say that Brian May is a nerd because it takes one to know one. However, that nerdiness goes far beyond one band member and is present in the band’s very DNA.

In fact, the original idea for We Will Rock You was a straightforward biographical story of Freddie Mercury. Something that the band were unsure about doing until the musical’s book author, Ben Elton, pitched a sci-fi, comic book story about rebel kids in a dystopian future London striking back against ‘the man’ with the power of rock ‘n’ roll. Not only because it appealed to May and drummer Roger Taylor’s more whimsical, offbeat side but also because it showed that Elton actually understood the band he was dealing with.

It shouldn’t be a secret to anyone, really. Some of the band’s most beloved work comes from their soundtrack work on legendarily camp space opera throwback Flash Gordon. Perhaps he also knew the band well enough to know that they had not one but two songs about battling mythical creatures; thus, the more out-there the story was, the better. The first Queen II’s side two opener, ‘Ogre Battle’, is a prog metal track straight out of the Led Zeppelin playbook of skyscraping riffs combined with Tolkien-esque lyrics.

The second came six years later with The Game’s ‘Dragon Attack’, a track that seems much more straightforward on the surface but has a hidden depth that ‘Ogre Battle’ does not. A funk-infused May effort, the song uses the titular ‘Dragon Attack’ as a metaphor for the issues with drug addiction plaguing various members of the band. Thanks to the help of new producer Reinhold Mack, they were also able to put the track together in a whole new way compared to what they were used to.

May talked about this in an interview for the Queen Studio Collection Vinyl Box Set’s accompanying book, where he went into how the band embraced their creativity with new studio techniques. He said, “We thought there was only one way of doing things, like doing backing tracks: We would just do it until we got it right. If there were some bits where it speeded up or slowed down, then we would do it again until it was right.”

Adding: “We had done some of our old backing tracks so many times, they were too stiff. Mack’s first contribution was to say, ‘Well, you don’t have to do that. I can drop the whole thing in. If it breaks down after half a minute, then we can edit in and carry on if you just play along with the tempo.’ We laughed and said, ‘Don’t be silly. You can’t do that.’ But in fact, you can.”

Trust a band with a passion for sci-fi and space exploration to go where no band has before and make some of the most expansive, exciting and influential music of their whole career.