Queen‘s beloved 1979 hit, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” off their eighth studio album, The Game, became a number 1 hit 46 years ago.
The track, written by Queen’s frontman and vocalist, the lateFreddie Mercury, secured the number one spot on Billboard’s Top 100 on March 8, 1980.
In a 1984 interview,Mercury, who died in 1991 at the age of 45, shared that the idea for the song came to him while he was taking a bath. He recalled asking his manager, Paul Prenter, to hand him an acoustic guitar to bring the song to fruition while he remained in the bathtub.
“I was in a bath and then suddenly I had an idea, I called up Paul, and I said just get me in with a guitar, just an acoustic just in the bath,” said Mercury in the 1984 interview. “And I was just in the bath, because I was restricted in the bath, I could only play three chords. So I was limited, and I came up with ‘Crazy Little Thing.'”
In a 2011 interview with Absolute Radio, Queen’s guitarist,Brian May, said Mercury was inspired by the music of Elvis Presley while writing “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”
“It’s Freddie’s tribute to Elvis in a way. He was very fond of Elvis,” explained May in the Absolute Radio interview.
He also noted that “Freddie wrote it very quickly” and went to the studio to record most of it with his Queen bandmates, which included Roger Taylor and John Deacon.
“By the time I got in there, it was almost done,” recalled May.
He also attributed the song’s authentic sound to the band’s producer and engineer, Reinhold Mack.
“I think the sounds that Mack managed to get, these very elemental, very real sounds, real ambient sounds, had a real big contribution to make. It does sound very authentic. Everything about it is very original rock-and-roll. Very ’70s,” said the musician, now 78, in the 2011 interview.