“I thought it up… It’s just a name, but it’s very regal, obviously, and it sounds splendid. It’s a strong name, universal and immediate. It had a lot of visual potential and was open to all sorts of interpretations. I was certainly aware of the gay connotations, but that was just one facet of it.” – Freddie Mercury
The story of how Queen acquired its name has often been accompanied with this quote from Melody Maker. In early discussions about forming a band, Roger Taylor reported proposed The Rich Kids, while Brian May suggested Grand Dance. Freddie Mercury, however, wanted Queen, insisting on its grandeur and theatrical resonance. Roger Taylor’s mother, Win Hitchens, later recalled Freddie’s excitement in the kitchen of her Truro home, where he repeatedly emphasised how “regal” the word sounded.
For Taylor, the name reflected the social world the band inhabited in Kensington, among an eccentric circle in which, as he later put it, “a lot of them were gay or pretended to be.” Neither he nor May initially liked the name, but both soon grew into its possibilities. By July 1973, Freddie himself was articulating the band’s conceptual identity. Speaking to Melody Maker, he described Queen as “regal and majestic,” adding that glamour formed an intrinsic part of their artistic mission. The goal was to shock, and “to be outrageous instantly”.
The explanation of Queen as a deliberately constructed regal persona is convincing in itself. Yet, another remark, attributed to the band’s early producer John Anthony, introduces a more visual dimension to Freddie’s thinking. Anthony recalled Freddie showing him pictures of Queen Magazine (the stylish publication that later evolved into Harpers & Queen): “This is what we are about,” Freddie allegedly said. “But it’s not just the name, it’s the pictures, the articles, the whole thing.”
Could the band’s name have been influenced by a fashion magazine?
It was a pure coincidence. I had been conducting photographic research on Norman Parkinson’s fashion photography in Queen Magazine for the Terence Pepper archive for months up until that point. The idea of Queen as a name and a concept had been so clearly established, was there any chance that Mercury was inspired by the very magazine I had been researching?
Then I came across the cover of the magazine dated 12-25 November 1969, featuring a black and white photograph of a silver serpent bracelet on an arm, next to a bare breast.
For any Queen follower, the image is familiar. The serpent bangle is extremely Mercury-coded, but it’s also extremely reminiscent of Mick Rock’s so-called “naked” photoshoot of Queen.
The serpent bracelet became one of Mercury’s most recognisable accessories, wearing it in the videos for Bohemian Rhapsody and Somebody to Love. Decades later, in 2023, the piece sold at auction for £550,000.
It’s impossible to prove a direct line of influence. Yet moments like this suggest that even the most familiar origin stories can be re-evaluated when viewed through new material evidence. Perhaps that’s the impulse behind Visions of Rhye: to reopen the imaginative landscape around Freddie Mercury’s work in order tointerrogate the estbalished narratives, and to find the inspirations that have somehow slipped from view.
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