1980.

When you wake up with the line ‘another one bites the dust’ on repeat in your head, well, it does sound just a little threatening and makes you wonder what the day may have in store for you!

Written by bassist John Deacon, this appeared on Queen’s 1980 album The Game, their eighth studio album. It is well known that the bass line was inspired by Chic’s 1979 hit Good Times, a fact that never really bothered Chic bassist Bernard Edwards until it was claimed that Chic had copied the riff from Queen, despite their hit being released a year earlier.

It is said that Queen were reluctant to release this as a single but after a gig in Los Angeles, the band were visited backstage by Michael Jackson and his brothers who were all adamant that it was a great track and they should release it. So they did.

There’s a rumour that if you play the record backwards, the line ‘another one bites the dust’ sounds like ‘decide to smoke marijuana’. I can’t see it myself, has anybody actually tried it? Consequently this made it one of many targets for the Christian evangelists in the early eighties, who claimed that rock songs held subliminal messages. Of course, Queen’s record label denied any such messages appeared on the record.

On its release this became a global top ten hit, including reaching number one in Canada, Israel, Spain and the US – where it proved to be a breakthrough hit for them. Here in the UK it spent ten weeks on the chart and peaked at number seven.