How did the band Queen get their name?
My son asked me how the band Queen got their name recently, and I didn’t know the answer. I asked a friend that is a Queen fan, and she didn’t know either. So I decided to try and find the answer. After reading a lot of different sites, I have listed the most plausible answers I encountered.
It was stated that there was a BBC video documentary broadcast shortly after Freddie Mercury’s death, and that in this documentary Freddie said they took on the name Queen because it was “Very pompus, very grand”.
A number of websites also cite that the band found the name Queen to be “regal, universal, simple and humorous in a risqué way.”
The Queenzone.com website has what seems to be interviews (or perhaps the video documentary) transcribed and for the year 1970 it includes a quote attributed to Freddie - “It’s just a name, but it’s very regal, and it sounds splendid. It’s a strong name, very universal and immediate. It had a lot of visual potential and was open to all sorts of interpretations. I was certainly aware of the gay connotations, but that was just one facet of it.”
To me these answers are all alike, and are probably based on interviews given where the answers were similar if not the same.
February 26th, 2008 at 11:01 am
Hi,
I was on the ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ in Liverpool recently and the tour guide told us that Queen got their name from a building in Liverpool city centre, cant remember the name of it but it was near Matthew street…
Not sure how much truth is in it but thats what he told us!