Queen on the set of ‘Radio Ga Ga’ promo video, directed by David Mallet and shot over a three day period in November of 1983 @ Shepperton Studios in London.

The video for the track has since become a firm favourite among both casual and diehard fans alike, and was one of the most expensive Queen ever made. At a cost of more than £110,000, the epic piece was shot by David Mallet and paid homage to Fritz Lang’s 1926 expressionist masterpiece Metropolis.

Roger Taylor penned this fantastic song as a commentary on television overtaking radio’s popularity and how one would listen to radio in the past for a favourite comedy, drama, or science fiction programme. It also addressed the advent of the music video and MTV, which was then competing with radio as an important medium for promoting records.

At the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards the video for “Radio Ga Ga” would receive a Best Art Direction nomination. Roger Taylor was quoted:

“That’s part of what the song’s about, really. The fact that they [music videos] seem to be taking over almost from the aural side, the visual side seems to be almost more important.”

Originally, this was “Radio Ca-Ca,” which was something Roger Taylor’s son Felix exclaimed one day in trying to say the radio was bad (“radio, CACA!). The phrase stuck with Taylor and inspired the anti-commercial radio themes in the lyrics. Of course, the band changed Ca-Ca to Ga Ga but if you listen carefully, you can still here the Ca-Ca