We Will Rock You
by Queen
- 81
- BPM
- E minor
- Key
- 9A
- Camelot
- 70
- Danceability
- 69
- Acousticness
Brian May wrote "We Will Rock You" after a night at Stafford's Bingley Hall during Queen's A Day at the Races Tour. The band played an encore and went off. Instead of just clapping, the crowd sang "You'll Never Walk Alone" at them. May said they were knocked out by it. He thinks chants like this are connected to that moment.
Apart from the last 30 seconds, which hold a guitar solo by May, the song is built from stomping and clapping alone. The band overdubbed the sound of themselves stomping on the Wessex Studios drum riser and clapping many times, then added delay to make it sound like a crowd. The delay times ran in ratios of prime numbers. The phrase that ends the solo, repeated three times, is a tape loop rather than May playing it that often.
It opened the 1977 album News of the World. That year it was issued with "We Are the Champions" as a worldwide top 10 single, and many radio stations played the two back to back. They were the last two songs Queen performed at Live Aid in 1985.
We Will Rock You runs at 81 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.96 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 741 ms. It is in E minor, Camelot 9A, which shares its notes with G major and mixes cleanly with A minor and B minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.