Queen – I Want to Break Free

The story

Queen in drag, doing housework. According to Brian May, the idea came from Roger Taylor's girlfriend at the time. Director David Mallet, who also made Bohemian Rhapsody and Radio Ga Ga, turned it into a send-up of the British TV soap Coronation Street. Freddie Mercury pushes a Hoover as a glamorous housewife. Brian May is a groggy, dowdy mum in bunny slippers. John Deacon, who wrote the song, glares as the grandmother. Roger Taylor plays a schoolgirl. Freddie wanted to shave his mustache for the part. Mallet talked him out of it.

Then it gets weird. Freddie turns up clean-shaven with the Royal Ballet, a nod to Nijinsky in L'après-midi d'un faune, in a segment choreographed by Wayne Eagling, who organized the rehearsals without telling his bosses and got in trouble for it. There are miners in a coal shaft too, lit by their helmet lamps. They shot it at Limehouse Studios in London in spring 1984, with the opening street scenes filmed in Leeds.

Britain got the joke. The song hit number three in the UK and number one in the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and South Africa. America didn't. MTV banned the clip, the single stalled at 45 on the Hot 100, and May said later that the band lost America over it. Meanwhile the song took on a life of its own, becoming an ANC anthem in South Africa in the late '80s while Nelson Mandela was still in prison. A joke about vacuuming turned into a freedom song. That's range.