Welcome back to “Queen The Greatest”,
a journey through some of Queen’s most
extraordinary songs, performances
and achievements.
This week we celebrate what is perhaps
one of Queen’s simplest recordings,
but without question one of their
most remarkable hits…
Crazy Little Thing Called Love.
By 1979, and after seven albums,
the band felt that in order to
stay fresh and feel challenged,
it was time to change the way
they approached their studio recordings…
[Brian May] “We’d heard that there was
this great studio called Musicland in
Munich, and we heard there’s this great
engineer called Mack, and we got into
this rather, kind of indulgent way of
just bowling into the studio with no
ideas, or very few ideas, and just doing
it from scratch.
You know ‘what you got?’
‘Well I dunno, I’ve got this?’”
[Roger Taylor] “The first thing we did was
Crazy Little Thing,
and Fred did write the song
in the bath in about ten minutes.”
[Brian May] “It’s Freddie’s tribute to
Elvis, in a way, he was very fond of
Elvis, and of Cliff I have to say, also.
Yeah, Freddie wrote it very quickly and
rushed in and put it down with the boys.
By the time I got there it was almost done.
And I think the sounds that Mack managed
to get, these very elemental, real, very real
sounds, ambient sounds in the studio had a
big contribution to make.
It does sound very authentic, everything
about it is sort of like original
rock and roll sounding.”
[Brian May] “That was the first number one
across the board in America,
Billboard, Cashbox and Record World
I think.”
[Roger Taylor] “We were still making the
record, we hadn’t even nearly finished the
album, and we were going out in Munich and
somebody came up and said ‘oh it’s gone to
number one in America’, and we were going
‘yeah! More drinks!’”
As well as topping the US charts,
the song also held the top spot in
Australia for a staggering seven weeks,
and reached number 2 in the UK.
Freddie often jokingly referred to the
simplicity of the song being due to
the fact he only knew how to play
three chords, and while he played the
acoustic guitar on the studio recording,
Brian switched his famous Red Special for
a Fender guitar to secure that authentic
rockabilly style.
As well as being a smash hit on
the charts, it also became a raucous
staple of the live show.
Not least because it gave the band an
opportunity to let loose –
a sentiment shared by every crowd and
evident here, in this rare clip from the
Friday concert at Wembley Stadium in 1986…