We Will Rock You - History

History

This song and its well-known partner "We Are the Champions" were written in response to an event occurring in the 1977 British Tour. The band had played a gig at Stafford's Bingley Hall, and, says Brian May:

'We did an encore and then went off, and instead of just keeping clapping, they sang "You'll Never Walk Alone" to us, and we were just completely knocked out and taken aback – it was quite an emotional experience really, and I think these chant things are in some way connected with that.'

One version was used as the opening track on their 1977 album News of the World. This version consists of a stomp-stomp-clap-pause beat, and a power chorus, being somewhat of an anthem. The stamping effects were created by the band overdubbing the sounds of themselves stomping and clapping many times and adding delay effects to create a sound like many people were participating. The durations of the delays were in the ratios of prime numbers, a technique now known as non-harmonic reverberation. A tape loop is used to repeat the last phrase of the guitar solo three times as opposed to Brian May playing it three separate times on the recording.

When performed live, this version is usually followed by "We Are the Champions", another of the album's hits, as they were designed to run together. The songs are often paired on the radio and at sporting events, where they are frequently played. They were the last two songs Queen performed at Live Aid in 1985. The songs are also paired back to back on the album, and they are still played together to this day on American classic rock radio stations.

Queen also performed "We Will Rock You" in another arrangement (known as the "fast version"), which featured a faster tempo and a full guitar, bass and drums backing track throughout. The band would often open their live sets in the late 1970s and early 1980s with this version, as captured on their 1979 Live Killers double album, on Queen Rock Montreal (2007), and on the Queen on Fire - Live at the Bowl album released in 2004.

The "fast version" is available in a studio performance. In 1977, it was recorded for John Peel's show on BBC Radio 1. This version is on the 1992 Italian bootleg CD "Queen – We Will Rock You" (On Stage CD 12018). It is part of a longer cut that starts out with the slow version. In 2002, the fast version was officially released on a promo single distributed by the tabloid The Sun. The "fast" BBC studio version can also be found on The Best of King Biscuit Live Volume 4 and online at Wolfgang's Vault. Between the two versions, there is a brief cut of a female voice discussing Brahmanism, used in a BBC Radio documentary. The "stomp, stomp, clap" sounds were later reused in the Queen + Paul Rodgers song "Still Burnin'".