‘We Are the Champions’: How Queen Created the Ultimate Stadium Singalong / Remastered Video
Soundtracking sporting events around the world, ‘We Are the Champions’ found Queen asserting their position at the top of rock’s leaderboard. By Jason Draper
Few songs are as anthemic as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, but if anyone could attempt to match it, Freddie Mercury could. Indeed, when Queen put their most famous song to tape during the sessions for 1974’s A Night at the Opera, he already had a contender in place. “When I was writing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, I had a song called ‘We Are the Champions’, but I just didn’t feel that it fitted at the time,” he would explain to BBC Radio’s Graham Neale. “And I just kept it aside, and it was virtually, I think, about two or three years later that I sort of pulled it out the bag again.” As they were preparing to record their sixth studio album, 1977’s News of the World, Queen were the very definition of champions, and Mercury set out to share that feeling of triumph. “I wanted to write something that everyone could sing along to, like a football chant,” he explained. “And at the same time, I thought it would be nice to have a winning song that’s meant for everybody. We said ‘We’ are the champions, but that doesn’t mean it’s ‘Us’: it’s for everyone.”
“I want to mix it so the guitar is fighting with the vocal”
Brian May would admit to being “shocked” when he first heard what Mercury cheerfully referred to as “the most egotistical and arrogant song” he’d ever written, but his bandmate’s conviction assuaged any concerns. “I remember saying, ‘You can’t do this, Fred. You’ll get killed!” May told MOJO magazine. “He just said, ‘Yes, we can.’”
Channelling Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’, Mercury had set his defiant lyrics – “And bad mistakes/I’ve made a few/I’ve had my share of sand kicked in my face/But I’ve come through” – to a reflective piano part that inspired May to add a mix of ferocious power chords and delicate guitar filigree. After listening back to the guitarist’s lead lines – re-recorded by May on the day the group were due to mix the track – Mercury envisioned a whole new way of creating the song’s roof-raising finale.
“I put in those answering pieces, the lead guitar responses to Freddie’s vocal, particularly at the end,” May told Total Guitar. “And Freddie came back in and said, ‘Oh, I like what you’ve done with the guitar at the end. I want to make sure we mix it so the guitar is fighting with the vocal at every point at the end. It should be a battle!’” Manning the faders himself, Mercury perfectly choreographed a stand-off between vocals and guitar that ensured both parts emerged victorious.
“I can’t believe that someone hasn’t written a new song to overtake it”
Peaking at No.2 in the UK, ‘We Are the Champions’ also scored Queen their biggest US hit to date when it was paired with ‘We Will Rock You’ for a double A-side release. “They just seem to work together,” Roger Taylor later told Billboard. Noting that America’s DJs regularly played both tracks back-to-back on air, he added, “They really sort of seemed to get that.”
Filmed on 6 October 1977, the day before the single’s UK release, the ‘We Are the Champions’ promo video captured what would soon become a regular sight at sports stadiums all over the world, as 1,000 members of the Queen fan club bounced around New London Theatre (now the Gillian Lynne Theatre), on Drury Lane, waving celebratory scarves and banners. “We got them to do it 50 times,” Taylor recalled of the “exhausting” shoot.
Decades on from its release, ‘We Are the Champions’ has become the go-to anthem for sports events of all types, blaring from speakers during everything from World Cup knock-outs to NFL playoffs and beyond. Earning its own laurels, it has also been declared the catchiest song ever written, as determined by a study carried out by a team of researchers from the University of York and London’s Goldsmiths University. Following a series of observations of “over 1,100 occurrences of people singing along” at a range of venues, including the “unique and fertile ground” of nightclubs in northern England, Dr. Alisun Pawley concluded that “Freddie Mercury’s vocal style typifies what we found inspires people to sing along – a full-energy male voice, using a high chest voice and clearly pronounced words”.
“That song was taken up by football fans because it’s a winner’s song,” Mercury succinctly observed. Laying down a challenge to all comers, he added: “I can’t believe that someone hasn’t written a new song to overtake it.”
Jason Draper