This 2003 Rock Hit Was Made to Spoof Queen, and Now I Can’t Unhear It

The best kinds of musical Easter eggs hide in plain sight like an optical illusion—an auditory illusion, if you will. The only problem with these interesting tidbits and hidden gems is that once you hear a song one way, it’s hard to hear it the old way. In some cases, that never happens. And after reading about how Franz Ferdinand wrote their breakout 2003 hit to imitate Queen, well, I have a feeling I’m in one of those “never happens” cases.

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This Early 2000s Banger Started As a Queen Spoof

If you were a contemporary rock ‘n’ roll fan in the early 2000s, then there’s a good chance you listened to “Take Me Out” by Franz Ferdinand at least one thousand times (and that’s a low estimate). The 2003 single from the Scottish rock ‘n’ rollers’ eponymous debut became a hit in their native U.K. and on genre-specific charts in the States. As someone who regularly watched music video compilations on VH1, I can say the trippy, half-animated music video took up much of my mental headspace that year.

Two decades later, the band revealed that the song that took the indie rock world by storm was originally a parody of Queen. Moreover, the entire idea came from an article about sports rock, or rock ‘n’ roll played at sports games. “Bob Hardy, our bass player, had read an article about ‘sports rock,’” frontman Alex Kapranos told The Guardian in 2022. “We thought it would be funny to spoof the sounds you got on Queen records or the beginning of ‘Eye of the Tiger’. The first time we played the whole song in the rehearsal room, I joked, ‘This would sound really good on the radio.’”

Jokes aside, Kapranos was right. “Take Me Out” peaked at No. 2 on the U.S. Alternative Airplay charts and No. 4 on the U.K. Rock & Metal Charts. “Take Me Out” has a multi-platinum certification in the U.K., U.S., Spain, New Zealand, and Canada. If Franz Ferdinand had any lingering doubts that their debut single would sell, those fears were likely dissolved by the second or third platinum certification.

I’ll Never Hear “Take Me Out” the Same Way Again

In hindsight, it’s easy to connect Franz Ferdinand’s 2003 hit, “Take Me Out”, to arena rock like Queen and Survivor, which often utilized short bursts of rhythm to increase intensity and power. If you really use your imagination, it’s also pretty easy to hear an entire stadium chanting the signature guitar riff. Although that riff is significantly more complex than, say, The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army”, so there’s a good chance those chants would end up a drunken, slurry descending line. Still, it’d be fun.

Speaking of that guitar riff, another morsel of information that you won’t be able to unhear: according to producer Tore Johansson, he had initial qualms about “Take Me Out” specifically because of that riff. “It sounded like a bagpipe melody,” he told The Guardian.

And you know what? He’s right.

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