Queen Trivia Quiz: The Red Special and Live Aid

Brian May and Roger Taylor were playing in a London band called Smile when their singer left in 1970, and the replacement they took on was a graphic design graduate from Ealing Art College named Farrokh Bulsara, who had been following the group around offering unsolicited advice. He renamed himself Freddie Mercury and renamed the band Queen. John Deacon, an electronics student, auditioned in early 1971 and became the fourth member. The line-up never changed again.

Queen album sleeves through the 1970s carried a short printed note stating that no synthesisers had been used. The claim was defensive, because the sounds listeners assumed were keyboards were mostly Brian May's guitar, multitracked and processed until it behaved like an orchestra or a brass section. The instrument doing it was the Red Special, built by May and his father Harold between 1963 and 1964, its neck carved from an old fireplace mantel, with motorcycle valve springs in the tremolo and a knitting needle tip on its arm. May plays it with a sixpence coin in place of a plectrum. The note disappeared once the band brought a synthesiser into the sessions for The Game in 1980.

Bohemian Rhapsody was recorded for A Night at the Opera in 1975 and runs close to six minutes across a ballad, an operatic middle section and a hard rock ending, with nothing repeating the way a chorus does. The overdubs for the middle section took weeks, with May, Mercury and Taylor singing the same lines over and over to build the choir, and the tape was worked so heavily that it began to wear thin. EMI wanted it shortened for radio. Mercury handed a copy to broadcaster Kenny Everett instead, who played it on Capital Radio repeatedly across one weekend, and the single went to number one in Britain for nine weeks. It returned to number one there sixteen years later, after Mercury's death.

Credit inside the band was spread wider than the frontman suggests. John Deacon, the quietest of the four, wrote I Want to Break Free and Another One Bites the Dust, the second of which became their best selling single. Roger Taylor wrote Radio Ga Ga and sang lead on his own I'm in Love with My Car.

Brian May wrote We Will Rock You around a stomp and clap pattern the band multitracked in a converted church in north London so that it would sound like a crowd, then built it so an audience could perform the whole thing without instruments. Mercury wrote We Are the Champions to sit beside it on the same record. The Live Aid set at Wembley Stadium on 13 July 1985 ran about twenty minutes and is the performance most often cited. Queen had rehearsed properly, cut every song to its recognisable parts, and shaped the set around what a stadium could sing back. The call and response Mercury conducted with seventy thousand people has been imitated ever since. Under Pressure, written and recorded with David Bowie in Montreux four years earlier, was not in that set.

Mercury died on 24 November 1991 of bronchial pneumonia resulting from AIDS, one day after a public statement confirming his diagnosis. Brian May abandoned a doctorate in astrophysics at Imperial College when the first album took off, returned to the work more than thirty years later and submitted a thesis on interplanetary dust in 2007. Bohemian Rhapsody, the biographical film released in 2018, took more than nine hundred million dollars worldwide and won Rami Malek an Academy Award, while drawing criticism for rearranging the band's chronology. Answers are printed below.

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