The first biography of the legendary British band to focus on their formative years. it highlights the desperately urgent days of pre-stardom, when the Queen quartet played with bands like The Reaction, The Opposition, 1984 and Sour Milk Sea. Author Mark Hodkinson has interviewed over 60 friends and colleagues of Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon and pieced together a fascinating web of stories that for the first time tell the story of the emergent Queen. From the tiny downbeat village of Oadby in Leicestershire, where John Deacon grew up to the exotic splendour of Zanzibar, where Faroukh Bulsara was born, Hodkinson offers a new and enticing version of Queen. In tracing these unpublished stories he also examines the Queen era before and immediately after stardom. This is the first genuine account of Queen's rise to stardom, as told by those who knew the band and watched from the front row. Illustrated with many previously unseen early photographs of the four members of Queen.