"On paper, Queen probably didn't make sense," the London-based Blake tells Spinner. "They were such an odd collection of people, but there was an incredible chemistry there. If you took one of them out of the loop, it probably wouldn't have worked."

The book draws from past interviews that Blake conducted with May and Taylor for MOJO and Q magazines, as well as new conversations with acquaintances and former associates. Blake says his motivation for writing the book, which began four years ago, was the group's fascinating and unique story. "I wanted to explain more about where they came from, especially Freddie Mercury," he says. "He died young and never discussed his past in interviews. On top of that, nobody had really tackled the Queen story after Mercury's death."

One overlooked aspect of Queen's history was Mercury's first two years in England that Blake researched by interviewing graphic and commercial artists who knew Mercury in the '60s. "I discovered through them that Fred Bulsara (as he was known then) tried to put a group together in 1965/6, printing up posters and auditioning musicians at his college," Blake reveals. "He was very resourceful and ambitious even then, three or four years before supposedly joining his first band in the UK."