Funny to think that when they came along in the summer of 1973, at first glance Queen seemed like the latest Glam group off the production line. I even bought their debut album. These days I never listen to them.

They seem to have evolved into one of those ghastly heritage acts adored by people who don’t really have an interest in music but love to sing along when they hear a familiar tune from the past, usually with the wrong lyrics: the David Brents of Britain.

I don’t mean that in a sneeringly superior way: there’s a proper place for Coldplay and James Blunt and that place is somewhere near Heston or Newport Pagnell services when you’re hogging the middle lane at 69mph in your Corolla listening to Absolute Radio and The Stereophonics seem a bit too edgy.

Anyway, Queen.

Listening back to that debut album, which was not a success at all, Queen combined the bombastic pomp of prog, the power of metal and the camp glamour of Glam, making them the missing link between Led Zeppelin and The Sweet.

Yet they were not quite noodly enough for proper prog (no drum solos or synths), not primal enough for proper metal (too many effects on May’s riffs), and not catchy or frivolous enough for Glam (too muso, too many sword-and-sorcery lyrics).

I suppose the part that appealed to me was that, with my musical tastes deemed inferior to the album-loving elders around me, they seemed like an acceptable “album” version of all those singles bands like Sweet, Slade and Mud I loved.

They did broadly the same thing, but with longer and more “progressive” songs, and without the lipstick, make-up and cross-dressing – ironic, in view of that later Queen video where they were doing household chores in drag.

Anyway, a decade before Live Aid made them national treasures and Freddie’s awful death elevated him to sainthood, this was Queen.