// 003 // FIRST STEPS // SOMEBODY TO LOVE // QUEEN

So far, even though I had liked The Beatles, and a few other bands or albums along the way, I hadn't found my first musical love, so to speak.  That would arrive at our house in a C90 with a hand written inlay card (musical piracy was rife in our house right from the beginning, it would seem) that I would listen to hundreds of times, introduce me to a band that I would seek out all their back catalogue, try to decipher the meaning of lyrics of,  buy the t-shirt, etc etc

The album was Queen's Greatest Hits and hearing it, I fell in love.  I know that pretty much each one of those songs is kind of dulled by over familiarity now (there are even aliens on the dark side of the moon who can sing the ENTIRE of Bohemian Rhapsody) but hearing them for the first time was a revelation.  So I saved my pocket money and went out to buy as many other Queen albums as I could, bought biographies, videos, hats, anything I could with the word Queen on it.

The mid-80's were when Queen suddenly went huge, but two things always made me sad.  One was that I missed their career defining performance at Live Aid due to being at a Scout camp (We didn't even have a VHS recorder at the time, as I recall) and that every album they made after that was not as good as the ones that came before.  I know The Works had some good songs on it, and It's A Kind Of Magic was a tune, but the glories of Night at the Opera and News of the World were long gone.

Still, I had all the albums to listen to at length, and the track that always stands out, even now after all these years is Somebody to Love.  It sums up what Queen were about - being overblown, preposterous, heart-felt, and just a little bit ridiculous - after all this is a band that once had a song called "The Fairy Fellers Master Stroke" - and it's worth a sing-along every now and then, just for old time's sake