Queen - Crazy Little Thing Called Love

What this video is

Released as Queen's final single of the 1970s, 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love' arrived at a pivotal cultural juncture — the twilight of the album-rock era before MTV's 1981 launch transformed visual promotion. Written by Freddie Mercury as an homage to Elvis Presley and the rockabilly idiom, the song and its video consciously looked backward to 1950s Americana at a moment when British punk and new wave were…

Why it matters

A landmark artifact of the rockabilly revival within British arena rock, this video illustrates how Queen synthesised 1950s rock-and-roll iconography — leather jackets, pompadours, stripped-back instrumentation — into a late-1970s stadium context. Its stripped-down aesthetic contrasts sharply with…

The director

Denis deVallance (also credited as Dennis De Vallance) was a British music video and promotional film director active in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He is documented as the director of Queen's 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love' (1979), one of the prominent…