The Queen Track Freddie Mercury Wrote in Just 10 Minutes

Perhaps understandably for a song that runs to almost six minutes, incorporates multiple musical genres, and features no less than 160 layers of overdubbed vocals, Queen’s "Bohemian Rhapsody" took a full three weeks to record (with an entire week alone set aside for recording the central operatic interlude). 

At one point during the songwriting process, in fact, the band’s legendary frontman Freddie Mercury claimed to have enough material for three separate songs, but opted instead to bundle them all up into a single, rule-shattering epic. 

At the other end of Queen’s songwriting scale, however, is a song that is arguably no less famous and no less celebrated. Far from taking weeks of studio time and bashing away at the piano to put together, though, Mercury claimed to have written it in just 10 minutes. 

How Freddie Mercury Wrote “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”

It was 1979, and the band was working on the songs that would eventually feature on their eighth studio album, The Game, which would be released the following year. 

They were in Germany, where Mercury, installed in a luxury hotel, was quietly noodling around on the guitar—not his usual chosen instrument by any means. Using only the handful of chords he was familiar with, he began to riff a new rockabilly-style song, intended in part to be a musical tribute to the likes of Elvis Presley, who was one of his idols, and British rock and roll royalty Sir Cliff Richard. The song he came up with would go on to become “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”—and it would take Mercury just ten minutes to write. 

“‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ took me five or ten minutes,” Mercury later admitted in an interview with British music periodical Melody Maker in 1981. “I did that on the guitar, which I can’t play for nuts—and in one way it was quite a good thing because I was restricted, knowing only a few chords. It’s a good discipline because I simply had to write within a small framework.” 

A Song That Came Together in the Bathtub

Having apparently started the song on the guitar, Mercury retreated somewhere more comfortable to finish the lyrics. Fellow bandmate Roger Taylor, Queen’s drummer, later explained that Mercury wrote the remainder of the song in the bathtub while they were staying at the luxurious Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich, Germany. 

The band’s road crew leader at the time, Peter Hince, however, recalls things slightly differently. Speaking of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” Hince told Mojo magazine, “The original idea for the song came to him while he was in the bath. He emerged, wrapped in a towel. I handed him the guitar, and he worked out the chords there and then.” 

Whether the guitar-noodling came first and the bathtub lyrics second, or vice versa, the song was definitely completed almost entirely in a matter of minutes. 

That quick pace continued. Recorded in July of 1979, the song was released in the UK that October and went on to become the band’s first chart-topper in the United States in December of the same year. It has remained one of Queen’s most popular songs and a firm fan favorite ever since.  

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