Queen have just posted Episode 18 of their 50-part YouTube series, The Greatest, as they celebrate their 50th anniversary.
In the new clip, the band discusses "cracking America" and the success of their 1980 classic, "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," which Freddie Mercury wrote in about 10 minutes while sitting in his bathtub.
Brian May said, “We’d heard that there was this great studio called Musicland in Munich, Germany, and we heard there’s this great engineer called Mack, 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. You know: ‘What you got?’ ‘Well I dunno, I’ve got this?’”
Roger Taylor added, “The first thing we did was 'Crazy Little Thing,' and Fred did write the song in the bath in about 10 minutes.”
May also said, “It’s Freddie’s tribute to Elvis. In a way, he was very fond of Elvis, and of Cliff [Richard], I have to say. Yeah, Freddie wrote it very quickly and rushed in and put it down with the boys. By the time I got there, it was almost done. And I think the sounds that Mack managed to get, these very elemental, real, very real sounds, ambient sounds in the studio had a big contribution to make. It does sound very authentic, everything about it is sort of like original rock and roll sounding.”
"Crazy Little Thing Called Love" was the band's first number-one song in America, and was released just ahead of the album The Game.
Taylor said, “We were still making the record. And somebody came up and said ‘Oh it’s gone to number-one in America’, and we were going, ‘Yeah! More drinks!’”
[Source: Classic Hits Today]