Great Characters Homage to Queen Limited Edition 1975

In the rich history of rock music, few names have shone out as consistently as that of Queen. With a career spanning over five decades, the band is one of the world’s most successful of all time. During this period, Queen came to embody the power of musical creativity and most of their songs topped the charts for weeks on end. They created their own musical universe, made up of a combination of hard rock, glam rock, pop, funk and opera, shattering the boundaries between the genres. Montblanc dedicates its Great Characters Homage to Queen Limited Edition 1975 to these icons of rock music, inspired by the album A Night At The Opera. Black and white. No other colour combination describes such stark contrast and no other could better symbolise the extent of Queen’s musical universe. For a time, The Black and the White was even pencilled in as the title of their second studio album and was the motto for Mercury’s spectacular birthday party eleven years later. The Limited Edition 1975 also appears in this contrasting guise. The band’s fourth studio album, however, surpassed everything that had gone before and is considered the most elaborately produced album of the 20th century. The four artists who performed on it have gone down in history: Freddy Mercury, the charismatic front man with a vocal range spanning several octaves and featuring a rich vibrato; Brian May, the virtuoso guitarist and his unmistakable electric guitar sound; John Deacon, the highly creative bass player; and Roger Taylor, the rhythmic heart of the band. As a nod to these four exceptional musicians, their stylised portraits are immortalised on the black cap of the writing instrument, based on the artwork of the iconic Queen II and Hot Space covers. The album A Night at the Opera – and, in particular, its centrepiece Bohemian Rhapsody – exemplifies Freddie Mercury’s dream of creating a record of epic proportions. The single’s six-minute, extravagant arrangement combines piano ballads, opera and rock, interspersed with layer upon layer of operatic, cascading vocals and quirky references to such characters as Galileo or Scaramouche, a figure from the Commedia dell’Arte. Mercury himself, known for his flamboyant stage costumes, would often slip into the guise of another Commedia dell’Arte figure, the Harlequin. His famous tight-fitting unitard with its black-and-white diamond pattern underlined his unconventional stage persona and inspired the rhomboidal design of the barrel. The edition also honours Brian May and his amazing guitar playing, which was so pivotal to the sound of the album, by giving the platinum-coated cone its distinctive look. This is reminiscent of the volume and tone control knobs on May’s famous electric guitar. The cone ring is embossed with the name of the album: A Night at the Opera. The year of its release, 1975, inspired the decision to limit the edition to 1975 fountain pens and 1975 rollerballs. The crown worn by Mercury during the closing rendition of God Save The Queen was the inspiration behind the silhouette of the cap top of the Limited Edition and is, at the same time, a metaphor for the majestic character of the band and its musical legacy. The platinum-coated clip is designed to resemble a microphone stand, in reference to one of the hallmarks of Freddie Mercury’s live performances.