News of the World (1977)

The album whose sales cracked the American market wide open, helped in no small part by “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions” becoming stadium staples almost overnight.

The case is dominated by the promotional cardboard issued for the release: a large die-cut standee shaped after the album’s giant robot — the artwork itself a nod to Frank Kelly Freas’s cover for the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, a copy of which sits in the case alongside it — plus a separate green-and-gold “News of the World” cardboard promotional box. Between the US and UK campaigns, record shops received different versions of this point-of-sale material, and both are represented here, together with pressings of the LP gathered from around the world and a promotional photo of Freddie from the album sessions, signed in biro backstage at Madison Square Garden in 1980, during the band’s US tour.

Alongside it sits an acetate carrying a different mix of “Spread Your Wings,” recorded for a BBC session — a small but genuine variant of a song that, unusually for Queen, was written and sung by John Deacon rather than Freddie or Brian.

A separate article on the site covers Roger Taylor presenting this same album in Italy in 1977 — well worth reading alongside this piece.

This piece is part of “Keep On Rockin’ — the 2019 Exhibition.” See the full exhibition here.

A separate, fully three-dimensional robot figure — used for the same UK in-store promotion — holds another example of the rare promo-only box, distinct from the die-cut cardboard standee shown here.