Revealing yet another side of Queen, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was a note-perfect tribute to the trailblazers that had come before. By Jason Draper
From the moment Queen arrived, they embodied the future of rock music. Making good on the promise of their genre-melding debut album, the group spent the 1970s pushing boundaries in all directions, creating a rarified space that was all their own. When it came to recording their eighth studio album, The Game, at the end of the decade, they not only looked beyond the confines of rock music, but they also glanced backwards, to the music that had once inspired them. What they saw was an opportunity to put their own spin on the vintage rock’n’roll they’d grown up with, courtesy of an irresistible song called ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’.
“It’s Freddie [Mercury]’s tribute to Elvis, in a way,” guitarist Brian May would tell Absolute Radio in 2011. “And I think the sounds that [co-producer Reinhold] Mack managed to get… in the studio had a big contribution to make. It does sound very authentic. Everything about it is original rock’n’roll-sounding.”
“Fred had this knack of knowing a great pop song.”
Inspiration for ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ came to Freddie Mercury in the most unlikely of places. Arriving in Munich following significant delays at Heathrow Airport, the Queen frontman was “languishing in my bath” at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, as he recalled to music journalist Fred Bronson, when the song bubbled up, seemingly out of nowhere.
“He emerged, wrapped in a towel, I handed him the guitar, and he worked out the chords there and then,” Peter Hince, Queen’s head roadie, later told MOJO magazine of Mercury’s rush to capture his idea. “
Fred had this knack of knowing a great pop song.”
Returning to the bathroom, Mercury finished the song in “five or ten minutes”, as he would later tell Melody Maker. Used to writing on the piano – he couldn’t play the guitar “for nuts”, was his candid self-assessment – the singer turned his limitations into an advantage. “It was quite a good thing because I was restricted,” he explained. “I couldn’t work through too many chords, and because of that restriction I wrote a good song, I think.”
“And the next thing,” Hince later recalled in the documentary Queen: Days of Our Lives, “he said, ‘Right, tell them I’m coming over, and we’ve got to go straight into the studio!’”
“It’s not typical of my work.”
Queen had decamped to Germany in search of a fresh start for what would become The Game. “We’d heard that there was this great studio, called Musicland, in Munich. And we heard that there was this great engineer called Mack,” May said in Queen: Days of Our Lives. “And we got into this rather, kind of indulgent way of just bowling into the studio with no ideas – or very few ideas – and just doing it from scratch.”
Racing into Musicland with the framework of ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, Mercury, along with bassist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor, set about finishing the song as quickly as possible. By the time May arrived, the throwback number was almost complete, requiring only a guitar solo to tie everything up.
“We were sitting around talking about what we were going to do with the song, and I said that I thought it needed that period sound – the James Burton [Telecaster] sound,” May later told MusicRadar. “I said to Mack that my guitar was pretty good at making a sound like a Tele, but he just looked at me and said, ‘If you want it to sound like a Telecaster, why don’t you just use a Telecaster?’” Convinced to leave his beloved Red Special – whose versatile tone had defined Queen’s music – in its case, May borrowed Roger Taylor’s 1960s Telecaster and laid down a note-perfect homage to the guitar heroes that had ignited rock’n’roll’s Big Bang.
“The finished version sounded like the bathroom version,” Mercury later said, approvingly. “It’s not typical of my work, but that’s because nothing is typical of my work.”
“We just made a track that we liked.”
Released in the UK on 5 October 1979, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ presented yet another facet of the ever-evolving group. From its rockabilly riffing to its greaser-styled promo video, in which a leather-clad Mercury frolicked with a dance troupe choreographed by Arlene Phillips, it not only had the band’s fanbase sending it to No. 2 in the UK, but it also caught the attention of the preceding generation of rock stars. “I love the music of today,” John Lennon told the Los Angeles Times shortly after the release of The Game. “I started noticing what was happening when Queen did the Elvis-sounding tune. I thought: This is my period again.”
For Queen, a whole new era was dawning. With US DJs spinning import copies of the single ahead of its belated 7 December stateside release, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ eventually gave the group their first No. 1 hit in the States. In between times, Mercury had appeared onstage at the London Coliseum as guest with the Royal Ballet (“They had me practicing at the barre and all that… Trying to do things in a week that they’d been doing for years,” he told The London Evening News); always evolving as a performer, he would soon be seen on stage with a guitar slung over his shoulder for renditions of ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’. “It took sheer guts and bravery,” the self-confessed “limited” guitarist told Circus magazine. “The first couple of nights were nerve-wracking, but it was OK after that.”
With May’s twang-filled guitar work and Mercury’s Elvis-like croon, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ made Queen the unwitting pioneers of a rockabilly revival that would fully ignite in the 1980s, with the success of bands such as The Stray Cats and The Blasters. “There was a movement which we didn’t know anything about in America at that time, to sort of revive rockabilly, and it happened soon after ‘Crazy Little Thing’,” Brian May recalled ten years later. “So, soon after that people were saying, ‘Oh, of course you pioneered this resurgence of rockabilly.’ And we would say, ‘Well, actually, we don’t know anything about it, we just made a track that we liked.’”
Jason Draper