One of rock’s most celebrated collaborations is suddenly back on the charts more than four decades after it was recorded.
Queen and David Bowie’s 1981 hit “Under Pressure” has re-entered Billboard’s Hard Rock Streaming Songs chart this week, landing at No. 24.
It’s the latest sign of remarkable staying power for a song that brought together two of rock’s biggest acts for a collaboration that came together almost entirely by chance.
“Under Pressure” has now spent 210 weeks on the Hard Rock Streaming Songs chart, according to Billboard, and has climbed as high as No. 9. All told, across every Billboard chart, “Under Pressure” has spent a whopping 300 weeks on one chart or another.
The renewed success comes 45 years after Queen and Bowie created the song during an impromptu recording session in Switzerland and more than a decade after Rolling Stone readers voted it the Greatest Duet of All Time.
Released in October 1981, “Under Pressure” became a major international hit, reaching No. 1 in the United Kingdom.
Its original performance in the United States, however, was considerably more modest.
In “The Billboard Book of Number One Hits,” music historian Fred Bronson notes that Queen had already scored two U.S. No. 1 singles with “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “Another One Bites the Dust” by the time the band joined forces with Bowie.
But despite the star power behind “Under Pressure,” Bronson writes that the single “ran out of steam at number 29” in the United States.
That makes the song’s decades-long afterlife particularly remarkable.
“Under Pressure” has grown far beyond its original U.S. chart peak, becoming one of the most recognizable recordings in both Queen and Bowie’s catalogs.
Rolling Stone readers eventually voted “Under Pressure” the Greatest Duet of All Time, placing the collaboration at No. 1 in a poll celebrating music’s most memorable pairings.
The publication recalled that Bowie originally went to Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland, intending to contribute vocals to a different Queen song, “Cool Cat.” That collaboration didn’t work out, but Bowie and the four members of Queen began jamming together instead.
Within hours, they had “Under Pressure.”
The song’s famously spontaneous creation has become nearly as legendary as the recording itself.
Rolling Stone also included “Under Pressure” on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, describing it as an “epic anthem of resistance” that grew from an impromptu jam.
Queen guitarist Brian May recalled the unusual process, explaining that the musicians entered the studio without predetermined vocal parts.
“Everybody just goes in there with no ideas, no notes,” May told Rolling Stone, explaining that they later assembled the different pieces they had created.
Bowie similarly remembered just how quickly everything happened. In a Q&A on his website in 2004, he was asked about the story behind “Under Pressure,” something even Bowie marvels at:
The song was written from the ground up on the night I visited their studio. I believe the riff had already been written by Freddie and the others so then we jointly put together the different chord sections to make it a cohesive piece of music. Then Freddie and I came up with our individual top line melodies. So when you hear Freddie sing, that’s what he wrote and when you hear me sing, that was mine. Then we worked on the lyrics together. I still cannot believe that we had the whole thing written and recorded in one evening flat. Quite a feat for what is actually a fairly complicated song.
One part of the recording would become particularly famous: its instantly recognizable bass line. Yet one thing Queen and Bowie never managed to do was perform their famous collaboration together live.
Rolling Stone noted that even at 1985’s Live Aid, where both acts appeared on the same historic bill and Bowie’s set immediately followed Queen’s, they did not join forces for “Under Pressure.”
The song nevertheless continued to grow in stature long after its original release.
Now, 45 years after Queen and Bowie happened to find themselves in the same Swiss studio, the collaboration once voted the greatest duet of all time is back on a Billboard chart once again.
Related: 1975 Rock Epic, Revived 17 Years Later, Just Named the Greatest No. 2 Hit of All Time by Billboard