March 22nd, 1984, in these days – Queen Story!London, UK – Queen video “I Want To Break Free” The video for this song parodies a popular British television soap, Coronation Street. The opening sequence features all the band members in drag (Mercury as a housewife, Deacon as grandmother, Taylor as a schoolgirl, and May as a housewife). This confused many people who didn’t catch the reference. Brian May was asked in an interview with Q magazine March 2011 whether each band member’s character in the video was an accurate reflection of their personalities?

He replied: “Of Course! Everybody thinks that was Freddie’s idea because it looks like something that he would love to do but it actually came from Roger’s girlfriend at the time, strangely enough. It was her idea to pastiche the Coronation Street women.”Location Docklands Limehouse StudioDirected by David Mallet, with hundreds of fan club members dressed as miners as film extrasFreddie Mercury was all set to shave off his trademark mustache, but director David Mallet put a stop to it: “I said

, ‘No, the one thing you musn’t do, the funny thing is that your mustache is there and you’re in drag!’ To this day, when he comes around the corner with that hoover I laugh.” In this video Mercury is surrounded by the Royal Ballet in a nod to the French ballet L’Après-midi d’un faune and its clean-shaven Russian star Vaslav Nijinsky. This song became an anthem for the ANC in South Africa in the late ’80s when Nelson Mandela was still in jail and the white government’s apartheid policies were still in place