Queen is a British rock band originally consisting of 4 members: Freddie Mercury, Brian May, John Deacon, and Roger Taylor.

The band officially formed in the early 1970s after May and Taylor’s former band Smile split after having released an album and single. Freddie replaced Tim Staffell as vocalist, and John Deacon joined in February of 1971, playing bass for the band that Freddie renamed “Queen.” Queen was formed in London.

Queen’s first self titled album was released in 1973 and received little attention from the general public. They shortly followed it with a second album which still lacked much interest from music fans all over Britain. Despite this, the band began developing a huge following in Japan and witnessed their popularity for themselves when they visited the country, mainly in 1975, to promote their fourth and most famous album “A Night at the Opera”, featuring the epic Bohemian Rhapsody.

Queen’s popularity grew strongly throughout the 70s as they released album after album. Fans continued to worship the band right through the 80s and into the early 90s before Mercury’s death On 24 November 1991. The official cause of death was bronchial pneumonia resulting from AIDS.

Over the course of their 30 year career, the band did sound tracks for two films (Flash Gordon and Highlander), released a string of live and studio albums, and became idols to many people across the world.

In recent times (this written in August 2006), remaining members Brian May and Roger Taylor (John Deacon no longer wishes to be a part of Queen on stage) have toured with Free and Bad Company’s Paul Rodgers as collaboration Queen + Paul Rodgers. At this moment the band is writing for a new album with Paul Rodgers. Queen has toured extensively over the past 18 months with Rodgers, with DVD and CD releases from the tour available.

This will be their second post-Freddie recording - “Made in Heaven”, released in 1995, saw the surviving band members in the studio completing or reworking unused vocals, unreleased variations of Freddie solo material (a “Queen” version of “I Was Born To Love You” for example), and tracks where Brian and Roger added lyrics to flesh out a song (“Mother Love”). The upcoming recordings with Rodgers will likely include the one or two songs written by the group while on tour. Queen With Paul Rodgers recently released a track entitled “Say It’s Not True” as a free download on World AIDS Day.