Playlists

Few artists, if any, have filled the charts with as much sheer bombast as Queen. With around fifty entries in the UK top 40 spread across four decades, their empire of pomp has won over audiences - and continues to do so - with an overbearing style that is often far more overblown than brilliant.

Their grip on the collective imagination, however, shows no sign of loosening. More than thirty years after his death, fans remain more convinced than ever of the absolute, indeed objective, superiority of Freddie Mercury over any other singer in history. Quite a few place Brian May's bombastic, over-the-top style on the Olympus of rock guitar playing. Grating hits like "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions" have, thanks to their hammering triumphalism, become fixtures of the worst kind of sports-arena repertoire, while the synth/disco excursions - "Another One Bites The Dust" and "I Want to Break Free", for instance - which wrong-footed fans at the time, are today regarded by some as among the peaks of that period, in a mix of disillusionment and lack of points of reference. A further boost in popularity came a few years ago thanks to the musical/biopic "Bohemian Rhapsody", which helped canonize the band's saga even among younger audiences.

Between baroque and cabaret

And yet Queen weren't just bluster and crowd-pleasing choruses. On occasion, their constant balancing act between kitsch and cheesiness found genuinely happy equilibriums - if "equilibrium" is even the right word, given the brazenly exaggerated nature of many of these visionary flights of fancy.

This, then, is the territory covered by this playlist, which surveys the English band's entire career, including a few solo excursions. The connecting thread is the more prog-pop side of their output, the one that finds them as original, over-the-top interpreters of a playful, exaggerated strand of music - part glam, part Beatles-esque - which also encompasses 10cc and City Boy, Electric Light Orchestra, Pilot, Jet, Be Bop Deluxe, across the ocean Sparks, and in Japan the Sadistic Mika Band. A territory made up of rollercoaster pop structures, dazzling about-turns (hence the term "flash rock", a recurring feature of the early 1970s), and flirtations with kitsch forever poised between irony and excess.

In this compilation, vaudeville meets operetta and playful, retro granny music in the style of Paul McCartney, crossing paths with overflowing hard-rock jolts: a whirlwind of styles and inventions that doesn't lack the grandiosity of the most well-worn classics, but pairs it with a more playful, imaginatively contradictory flair. It's an eclectic mix that tempers the pomposity without denying it, combining it with a "lopsided" attitude to create a formula that could prove interesting even to those who, without being die-hard fans of the band, know how to appreciate unconventional pop structures.

Tricks, harpsichords and wonders

In this context, Mercury's voice - always theatrical but rarely convincing on an emotional level - finds an effective dimension of its own: the artifice is plain to see, and it is the soul of the party, so much so that he manages to lend meaning and presence to every line drenched in emphasis. Similarly, Brian May's perpetually doubled guitar lines heighten the spectacular character of the songs, pushing artifice to the foreground and giving shape to a meticulously constructed structure. When it isn't deployed in its most swaggering, circus-like guise, the piano contributes to the classical-leaning side of things, made even more blatant by the addition of the harpsichord, as in "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke". Synthesizers, on the other hand, are almost entirely absent: for much of their 1970s output, the band made a point of proudly refusing to use electronic keyboards - "No synthesizers!" read the sleeve of some of their best-selling albums - while the tracks selected from "The Game", "Flash Gordon", "The Miracle" and "Innuendo" bear witness to the change of course at the start of the 1980s.

Another key element is their harmonic inventiveness, with elaborate cadences and unexpected key changes. The tritone leap in "Bohemian Rhapsody" was recently the subject of an in-depth analysis by YouTuber David Bennett, but tracks like "Killer Queen" and "The Millionaire Waltz" also put on full display the whole repertoire of post-Beatles trickery, made up of secondary dominants, chromatic descents and strategically placed sevenths. "The Miracle", too, with its barrage of subliminal modulations and a verse built on a scheme of just three lines, is a clear example of this.

Between flashes of brilliance and tomfoolery

Many of the selected tracks, as you may notice, bear Freddie Mercury's signature. The author of the dreadful "We Are The Champions" was, of the four members of Queen, the songwriter most in tune with the spirit of this playlist: gifted with a theatrical, ambitious sensibility, he knew how to blend grandiose elements with melodies that went well beyond the usual sports-arena anthems. "We Are The Champions" itself, however booming and overblown to the point of being hard to stomach for some, shows off - thanks to its clever, effective key changes - all the frontman's skill in handling showy transitions. A look at his solo career confirms this vocation: "Barcelona", the musical kaleidoscope made together with soprano Montserrat Caballé, is a fusion of operatic drama and symphonic pop, while the lush "Mr. Bad Guy" plays on the contrast between glossy keyboards and orchestral flourishes.

In short: amid anthems, marches, choirs and other chart-topping clutter, Queen really did produce a few gems. When Mercury puts his showmanship at the service of a theatricality that doesn't necessarily demand applause, when May sets aside the parade-ground pyrotechnics to chase after more crooked lines, something happens. Even in some of their most famous songs, beneath the exaggerated surface lies a surreal, oblique streak that deserves attention. Listening to these tracks today, one after another, is like opening a trunk full of theatrical costumes: however unlikely, gaudy or tacky they may seem, it's hard to remain indifferent to the charm of their witty lack of restraint.

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15/02/2026