The Closest Queen Ever Came to Progressive Rock

There is a question that divides fans and that almost nobody dares answer fully: was Queen a progressive rock band?

The easy answer is no. Queen was a rock band, one of the biggest and most popular in history, a master of the stadium anthem and the unforgettable hook. Prog, by contrast, was the territory of hermetic virtuosos, twenty-minute suites, concept albums about invented mythologies. Queen wanted you to sing along; prog did not always want you to understand it. They are, on the face of it, two different worlds.

But the easy answer hides a more interesting truth. Because Queen, throughout its entire career, flirted with prog's ambition without ever fully giving in. And there was one moment —just one, at the end of the road, when they already knew time was running out— when they came closer than ever. That moment has a name: "Innuendo", from 1991. And its story is so revealing that the genre's most important specialist magazine used it, years later, as the main exhibit for Queen deserving, after all, a place in the progressive conversation.

This is the account of that approach. And at the end, the question stays open for you.

Queen and prog: a lifelong flirtation

To understand why "Innuendo" matters, you first have to see that it did not come from nowhere. From the beginning Queen had a progressive streak they never quite developed fully, but which kept surfacing.

Their early records, in the early seventies, were full of structural ambition: songs that changed section, lyrics of fantasy and mythology, vocal arrangements of an almost choral complexity. And then, of course, there is the elephant in the room: "Bohemian Rhapsody", from 1975. Almost six minutes with no repeated chorus, built as a piece in movements —an almost a cappella intro, a piano ballad, a delirious operatic section, a hard rock explosion, a reflective coda. That structure, that will to put a fake opera inside a rock song without asking permission, is pure progressive DNA. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is what happens when a pop band catches prog's ambition.

But "Bohemian Rhapsody", for all its genius, was still pop underneath: it wanted to be catchy, it wanted you to sing it, and it succeeded. Queen took structure and ambition from prog, but always put them at the service of immediacy. They loved the hook too much to surrender to abstraction. That is why the fairest label for Queen was never "progressive rock band" but something like rock with progressive elements, or art rock: rock with aspirations to high art, but which never gave up on conquering a mass audience. If you want the full yardstick this is measured by, it is in What Progressive Rock Is (and Isn't).

Until the end came. And at the end, something changed.

"Innuendo": a return to ambition, when there was nothing left to lose

In 1989, Queen began work on what would turn out to be the last album released during Freddie Mercury's lifetime. Mercury was ill —the world did not yet know, but the band did— and that awareness of running out of time permeates the whole record. Perhaps because of it, or perhaps because when there is nothing left to lose you dare more, on the title track Queen returned to the most adventurous and outsized music they had made since their beginnings.

"Innuendo" was born the way the best of Queen usually is: from a jam. In the spring of 1989, in Montreux, Switzerland, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon were playing a rhythm together. Mercury heard it from upstairs, came down, and turned that rhythm into a song, creating the melody and starting the lyric. The four of them polished it, and Taylor took over the text, which ended up partly a homage to Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" —hence that epic, ceremonial, almost oriental march holding the song up, and a direct debt to seventies hard rock.

The result is a six-and-a-half-minute piece, the longest song Queen ever released as a single, exceeding "Bohemian Rhapsody" by thirty-five seconds. And it went straight to number one in the United Kingdom, the band's first in nearly a decade. But what makes it progressive is not its length: it is everything happening inside it.

Why "Innuendo" is so progressive

Here is the heart of the matter. "Innuendo" gathers, in a single piece, almost every marker of progressive rock that Queen normally only hinted at.

It is a multi-part epic, a work in movements. Like prog's great suites, the song is not organised in verse-chorus but in contrasting sections that follow one another: the heavy, sombre march of the opening, anchored in ghostly synthesisers and guitar; a flamenco interlude; an operatic section evoking the Queen of "Bohemian Rhapsody"; stretches of heavy metal; and that luminous central part —"You can be anything you want to be"— with a sophisticated orchestration created by Mercury and producer David Richards. It is an architecture, not a song. Exactly what prog does.

It plays with metre, like real prog. And here is the technical detail that gives it away. "Innuendo"'s bridge section is in 3/4, not rock's standard 4/4. The end of the flamenco guitar part is built on a 5/4 base but moves in 6/4. These irregular, shifting metres —the rhythmic terrain that defines King Crimson or Yes— are precisely what separates prog from conventional rock. Mercury had a weakness for triple metres, and in "Innuendo" that fondness becomes structure.

And the definitive proof: they called in a musician from Yes. This is the gesture that seals the kinship, and its story is delicious. In the summer of 1990, Steve Howe —guitarist of Yes, one of the quintessential prog bands— was passing through Montreux. He happened to run into a former Queen guitar tech, who told him to drop by the studio, that the lads would love to see him. Howe went. And in time he realised it smelled like a set-up: when he arrived, the studio was already prepared for him.

They played him the work in progress and saved "Innuendo" for last. "They put it on and I was absolutely blown away," Howe would recall. Then they asked him to play on the title track. Howe, by his own account, politely suggested they had lost their minds —it seemed like too much. It took the combined weight of Mercury, May and Taylor to convince him. They asked for "some crazy Spanish guitar flying around over the top. Improvise!" Play like Paco de Lucía, they told him; just run around and go nuts.

Howe spent a couple of hours wrestling with the piece —"I thought I'd bitten off more than I could chew," he confessed— having to learn the structure, work out the chord roots, know where to land if he launched into a dizzying run. But by the afternoon, it worked. That intricate flamenco interlude, around the three-minute mark, is Steve Howe of Yes improvising inside a Queen song. Brian May admitted he called Howe in to play exactly what he himself acknowledged he could not.

Stop for a second on what that means. When Queen wanted to take "Innuendo" to its most ambitious point, they did not turn to a rock guitarist: they turned to the guitarist of one of progressive rock's founding bands. They deliberately sought prog's texture, and went to the source to find it.

The verdict of those who know

This is not just a fan's impression. In 2012, Prog magazine —the world's reference publication on progressive rock— devoted an article to arguing that Queen should be considered a prog band. And its main exhibit, the prosecution's evidence number one, was precisely the album "Innuendo" and Steve Howe's appearance on its title track. Howe himself and Dream Theater's Mike Portnoy helped make the case.

Howe, looking back, said something that illuminates the whole question: "That wildness and craziness that Queen had was a facade. It was a facade for the intelligence, the talent, the ability and the rehearsal. These guys knew the game." That is to say: beneath the appearance of an extravagant, pop stadium band there was enormous musical sophistication —the same that animates prog. The difference was that Queen hid it behind the spectacle, while prog displayed it as a banner.

So, the open question

This is where I hand the question back to you, because it has no single answer and that is its charm.

"Innuendo" has prog's structure in movements, its irregular metres, its outsized ambition, its epic length, and even a musician from Yes playing on it. By almost every technical criterion, it is a progressive rock song. And yet it is still Queen: it still has that vocation for communicable grandeur, that will to move you directly, which the purest prog sometimes disdained. It is not part of a unified concept album. It does not demand the intellectual effort King Crimson requires. It still wants to hit you in the chest immediately.

Is it progressive rock, then? Or is it rock in prog's clothing, a pop band leaning one last time, and with all its strength, into territory it always circled without inhabiting? Is gathering the genre's technical traits enough to belong to it, or is prog also an attitude, a way of relating to the listener that Queen never fully adopted? It is the same border we walk, case by case, in Is This Progressive Rock?.

Perhaps the most honest answer is that "Innuendo" is exactly what its story suggests: the moment a band that always flirted with prog's grandeur came closer to it than ever, pushed by the certainty that this was its last great gesture. Not a prog band. Not a non-prog band. A lifelong flirtation that, at the end, almost became a romance.

We leave it there, at the "almost". And we ask you, who know the songs: which do you think was Queen's most progressive moment? "Innuendo"? "Bohemian Rhapsody"? Some forgotten corner of their early records? The conversation is yours.