Watch Queen Rehearse "We Are the Champions" In the Studio

A vintage eight-minute clip of Queen rehearsing and recording their classic song, “We Are the Champions,” during the studio sessions for 1977’s News of the World has surfaced. 

At the top of the clip, singer Freddie Mercury can been seen answering a journalist’s question about whether the enjoys working in the studio:

“Yes,” Mercury responds. “You can get sick of it though. Especially now. [So] we’ve decided that on our albums we wouldn’t spend as much time as we’ve done in the past… Especially with News of the World, I think we actually did decide before we went in [that] it was going to be a short album as far as Queen standards are concerned.

“We had something like a week-and-a-half, two weeks to actually write all the material. And it was nice. We didn’t fall into this thing of it being overripe before we actually recorded it.”

Richard Bienstock

Rich is the co-author of the best-selling Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion. He is also a recording and performing musician, and a former editor of Guitar World magazine and executive editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine. He has authored several additional books, among them Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the companion to the documentary of the same name.