Queen
6
"The 50 Best British Albums Ever" in 2004, and number 11 in Rolling Stone's "The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time" as featured in their Mexican edition in 2004. It was also featured as one of Rolling Stone's "500 greatest albums of all time" in 2003. A Night at the Opera is the third and final Queen album to be featured in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. The album also featured the hit single "Bohemian Rhapsody" which was number one in the UK for nine weeks, and is Britain’s third-best-selling single of all time; beaten only by Band Aid's Do They Know it's Christmas? and Elton John's Candle in the Wind 1997—making it the best selling commercial single in the UK. It also reached number nine in the United States (a 1992 re-release reached number two). It is the only single ever to sell a million copies on two separate
occasions, and became the Christmas number one twice in the UK; the only single ever to do so. (Amongst all these other distinctions, it was also the longest song ever to be pressed for a conventional 7" 45-RPM format; at 6 and a half minutes, the grooves were so close together that after repeated plays, especially on jukeboxes, the grooves were worn out and started skipping. In Asia, it became a party game in the fledgeling "karaoke" movement to know when the record would skip and sing along to it accordingly.) Bohemian Rhapsody has been voted numerous times the greatest song of all time. The band decided to make a video to go with the single; the result is generally considered to have been the first "true" music video ever produced. (Although other bands, including The Beatles, had made short promotional films or videos of songs prior to this, generally those were specifically made to be aired on specific television shows). "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the first to be available to any TV station willing to play it, for promotional purposes. The second single from the album, "You're My Best Friend", the second song composed by John Deacon, and his first single, peaked at number sixteen in the United States and went on to become a worldwide Top Ten hit. By 1976, Queen were back in the studio recording A Day at the Races, which may be seen by some as a companion album to A Night at the Opera. It again borrowed the name of a Marx Brothers movie, and
Continued success (1976–1979)