Innuendo by Queen
Innuendo is the fourteenth studio album by British rock band Queen. Released in February 1991, it was the final studio album to be released in Freddie Mercury's lifetime and is the last to be composed entirely of new material. It reached No. 1 on the United Kingdom album charts (two weeks) as well as in the Netherlands (four weeks), Germany (six weeks), Switzerland (eight weeks) and Italy (three weeks). The album was released in the United States one day after its UK release. It would be the first Queen album to go gold in the US upon its release since The Works in 1984. The album was recorded from early 1989 to late 1990. In the spring of 1987, Mercury was diagnosed as being HIV positive and by 1990 this had developed into AIDS, although he was keeping his illness a secret and denied countless media reports that he was seriously ill. The band and producers were aiming for a November or December release date in order to catch the crucial Christmas market, but Mercury's declining health meant that the release of the album did not take place until February 1991. Stylistically, Innuendo is in some sense a return to Queen's roots, with its harder rock sound, complex musical composition (title track), psychedelic effects ("I'm Going Slightly Mad"), and strong vocals from Mercury ranging over four octaves. Mercury died ten months after its release. Current estimates at the worldwide sales of the album stand at around 11 million copies. The album cover was designed by Queen and Malcolm Gray. The booklets and single covers from the album are by Grandville, or are inspired by his illustrations. Innuendo was voted the 94th greatest album of all time in a national 2006 BBC poll.
<i>Innuendo</i>, Queen’s last album with Freddie Mercury, is a testament to the themes and values the band members had been writing about since the beginning: persistence (“Headlong”), melodrama (“I’m Going Slightly Mad”) and the radiant present (“These Are the Days of Our Lives”). While it’s easy to let Mercury’s death overshadow the music, it’s more interesting to consider that the album came out in 1991—the same year as both Nirvana’s <i>Nevermind</i> and Metallica’s <i>Metallica</i> (aka the Black Album). The tides were shifting; the guard was changing. If there’d ever been a band like Queen before, they were mostly gone by now, and the ones that would pick up where they left off—The Killers, Panic! At the Disco, and Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl’s new band, Foo Fighters—were yet to come. <i>Innuendo</i>’s title track called back to the sweep and theatricality of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. But in a way, the album’s emotional centrepiece was—and would invariably be—“The Show Must Go On”, not only because it captured the band’s sense of persistence, but because it spoke most directly to Mercury’s death. He’d never been forthcoming about personal stuff, even with his bandmates, and in general, Mercury seemed to find frailty annoying—whether it was his own or anyone else’s. Brian May remembers bringing him the song with a trace of apology, because he worried the vocal line might be too demanding; Mercury responded by taking a drink of vodka neat and doing it in a few takes. <i>Innuendo</i> is the sound of the end of an era, and the closing of one of rock’s most spectacular and triumphant ongoing shows.
