Killer Queen
by Queen
- 116
- BPM
- G minor
- Key
- 6A
- Camelot
- 57
- Danceability
- 34
- Acousticness
"Killer Queen" reached number two in the United Kingdom in 1974 and gave Queen their first US hit, climbing to number twelve on the Billboard Hot 100. It came out as a double A-side with "Flick of the Wrist" in the UK, the US and Canada, where it reached number 15 on the RPM 100 chart. Several versions of "Flick of the Wrist" were used across releases. In 1986 the song came back as the B-side to "Who Wants to Live Forever".
Freddie Mercury wrote it for the band's third album, Sheer Heart Attack. He said he wrote the lyrics before the music, the reverse of his usual habit. The subject was a high-class call girl, and the first verse quotes a phrase falsely attributed to Marie Antoinette. Part of the recording was done at Rockfield Studios in Wales, which the first two albums had not used. Brian May remembered lying sick in his room there, recovering from hepatitis and an operation for stomach problems, hearing Mercury play it and feeling sad that he could not join in. When he got well, the band had left a space for him, and he recorded the multitracked guitar solo that uses the bell effect.
Live, the band played it in a medley between 1974 and 1981.
Killer Queen runs at 116 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.07 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 517 ms. It is in G minor, Camelot 6A, which shares its notes with Bb major and mixes cleanly with C minor and D minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.