(Credits: Far Out / Queen Productions)
Thu 1 January 2026 10:00, UK
It took Queen two records to finally crack the sound they’d stake rock royalty with.
Not that they were a completely different band. Frontman Freddie Mercury’s penchant for highfalutin lyrics still gleams with literate indulgence, proggy expanses shape their rock attack into hefty suits of classical loftiness, and glossy piano glides in with the same melodramatic cascade that would guide their entire output.
While certainly a harder rock outfit on Queen and Queen II, the real crucial pivot lies on the third effort Sheer Heart Attack’s embrace of pop. Placing a lighter, more radio-friendly lens across their anthemic brand of Broadway rock, big ideas and grand concepts were distilled into a chart-pleasing immediacy, launching the band to grade-A, superstardom. When considering Queen’s first ‘classic’ song, it’s Sheer Heart Attack’s lead single that most will plumb for.
Dropped in October 1974 as a double A-side with ‘Flick of the Wrist’, ‘Killer Queen’ established the fundamental Queen template that would carry them through to Mercury’s death in 1991, and the end of the band’s official run. Meticulous harmonies and impeccable arrangements soar across a hectic nod to playwright Noël Coward’s flamboyant poetic wit. Somehow, Queen were able to crush such busyness into a singalong winner destined to ring out of pub jukeboxes up and down the country for the next half-century.
‘Killer Queen’s populist grab is furthered in the coy upending of class tropes. Atypically penning the lyrics first before figuring out the melody, Mercury sketched out a snapshot of a Moët-imbibing courtesan offering universal company across the world’s political elites, from Nikita Khrushchev in the Kremlin quarters to the bedroom of President John F Kennedy. Dropping in Marie Antionette’s apocryphal “Let them eat cake” quip in the first verse, clearly a class clash is happening from both social extremes, the titular killer knowing plenty about the streets as much as the corridors of power.
“It’s about a high-class call girl,” Mercury frankly stated to NME at the time. “I’m trying to say that classy people can be whores as well. That’s what the song is about, though I’d prefer people to put their interpretation upon it – to read into it what they like.”
Queen would have a thorny relationship with class politics. Bolstered by a mix of private and grammar education with prestigious degrees among the four, Queen’s symphonic peacocking radiated gloriously escapist bluster for one half of the rock world, while prancing into the deathly uncool realms of bloated dinosaur rock toward a punk crowd eager to tear the old vanguard down. Such hubris reached its nadir by the decade’s end, when Mercury seriously rubbed the new wavers the wrong way by declaring his ambitions “bring the ballet to the working class” after a performance with the Royal Ballet Gala.
Political consciousness would only grow clumsier, infamously playing Apartheid South Africa’s Sun City resort during the cultural boycott, but such a lack of social proselytising was what made many a rock fan love Queen so much. No punk insurrections against the state or hippy radicalism, just shiny pop numbers about Flash Gordon and riding bicycles, infectiously fun for many while desperately apolitical, whatever your place in the socio-economic order.
Whatever its merits, ‘Killer Queen’ was deemed a gem in Queen’s glittering songbook by guitarist Brian May. “This is a perfect pop record and one of Freddie’s greatest songs,” he told Q in 2008. “It’s beautifully constructed and it’s also got one of the solos I’m most proud of.”
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