When Freddie Bulsara arrived in England in 1964, fleeing with his family from a bloody revolution on the streets of his homeland Zanzibar, he already knew that he wanted to be a rock star. But before that dream could become a reality, there were three specific people he needed to meet. Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon; the other three components in what became Queen. The name is now writ large in rock legend, but its members spent their early career mired in legal troubles, critical hostility and financial hardship.
In the early 1970s, with their preening singer and arch conceptualiser now renamed Freddie Mercury, the group projected an image that was at once regal, mystical and exotic. Yet behind the black eyeliner and billows of dry ice, Queen were four sharply contrasting individuals whose dogged struggle to win success was every bit as dramatic as the ogre battles and fairy king fantasias that populated their early music.
Queen in the Seventies is an up-close examination of the band's now critically adored first ten years, the decade when they forged their unique vision, beat off the critics and became, after many epic tantrums and much violent throwing of crockery, champions of the world.
James Griffiths spent five years as a music writer for the national Guardian newspaper in the UK. He is the author of Squeeze – The Pop Music Played (Orchard Abbott Publications, 2021), and has a YouTube channel (tinyurl.com/griffyj) dedicated to music and record collecting. He has also worked as a TV scriptwriter and was a member of the writing team for the CBBC reboot of the cartoon series Danger Mouse in 2015. He now lives in Lancaster, UK, with a small group of fellow humans and animals, but tragically, he still doesn't know any members of Queen.