10 Greatest Queen Songs
3. Innuendo
Only the band’s third UK number one, Innuendo feels like something of a forgotten classic. It’s less iconic than Bohemian Rhapsody, too long and weird for nightclubs and too unwieldy to sing in sports arenas. Despite being a big hit, it isn’t included on the soundtrack album for Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody and it hasn’t ingrained itself into our shared cultural identity, like so many of the band's other hits.
Nonetheless, it remains a late period masterpiece for Mr. Mercury. Six and a half minutes of progressive rock with a flamenco interlude and a lyric about humankind’s basic inability to live in peace alongside one another. We’re a long way from Fat Bottomed Girls.
”You can be anything to want to be/just turn yourself into anything that you think you can ever be,” Freddie sings on the bridge. It was a lesson a buck-toothed immigrant kid, raised in the dreary suburbs, had already taught himself. The iconic, flamboyant Freddie Mercury might have been his own greatest creation.