Innuendo (song)

"Innuendo" is a song by the British rock band Queen. Written by Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor but credited to Queen, it is the opening track on the album of the same name (1991), and was released in January 1991 by Parlophone as the first single from the album. The single debuted at number one on the UK Singles Chart same month, the band's first number-one hit since "Under Pressure" nearly a decade before, and additionally reached the top ten in ten other countries. It is included on the band's second compilation album Greatest Hits II.

At six-and-a-half minutes, it is one of Queen's epic songs. The song has been described as "reminiscent" of "Bohemian Rhapsody" because it was "harking back to their progressive rock roots". Its verses are in the Phrygian Dominant mode and features a flamenco guitar section performed by Yes guitarist Steve Howe and Brian May, also in that mode, an operatic interlude and sections of hard rock that recall early Queen, in addition to the lyric inspired in part by Mercury's illness; although media stories about his health were being denied strenuously, he was by now seriously ill with AIDS, from which he would die in November 1991, 10 months after the song was released.

The song was accompanied by a music video featuring animated representations of the band on a cinema screen akin to Nineteen Eighty-Four, eerie plasticine figure stop-motion and harrowing imagery. It has been described as one of the band's darkest and most moving works. AllMusic described the song as a "superb epic" which deals with "mankind's inability to live harmoniously".