"My god, we were such impatient boys." How a David Bowie screw-up and some dramatic miming on British TV helped Queen secure their first hit single

Queen's 1974 started in an inauspicious manner. In retrospect, flying to the other side of the world to play for a festival crowd who had absolutely no idea who they were may have been a touch over-ambitious, and the audience at Sunbury Rock Festival on January 27 weren't shy about making their disinterest and hostility to the quartet crystal clear: "Go back to Pommyland, ya poofters!" was one of the more politely-phrased requests from the unimpressed Melbourne crowd.

As ever, Queen styled it out - "When Queen come back to Australia we will be the biggest band in the world," Freddie Mercury declared boldly at the close of the band's late evening set - but this was hardly the profile boost management had envisaged when signing the quartet up for the 20,000 mile round trip.

Better news awaited Mercury, May, Deacon and Taylor on home soil. The group were voted runners-up to Golden Earring in the Most Promising New Act category of NME magazine's annual Readers' Poll, and took the bronze medal in the Best New Band vote in Sounds. And further good fortune lay ahead, with arguably the biggest break of their career to date.

Exactly why David Bowie's team failed to meet the deadline to send a promo video for Rebel Rebel, the lead single from the singer's forthcoming eighth album Diamond Dogs, to the production team of the BBC's popular weekly music show Top Of The Pops is unclear, but without it, there was a yawning gap in the February 21 show's running order.

On February 18, Ronnie Fowler, the head of promotion at EMI Records, received a phone call from Top Of The Pops producer Robin Nash explaining his predicament. Nash explained that he needed a replacement act at short notice, and wondered if Fowler could help. Queen's most vocal champion at EMI, Fowler suggested the young Londoners for the slot, neglecting to mention the minor detail that there currently was no new Queen single on EMI's release schedule. Nash bit.

According to Queen biographer Mark Blake's 2010 book Is This The Real Life? Freddie Mercury was initially reluctant to grasp the opportunity - "Freddie said, 'I'm not doing Top Of The Pops. It's rubbish'," EMI radio plugger Eric Hall remembered - but was persuaded by his bandmates, mindful that appearing on the show would be a golden opportunity to promote their forthcoming Queen II album. EMI swiftly announced that the record would be introduced by the release of it's dramatic closing track, Mercury's Seven Seas of Rhye.

Filming for the BBC's flagship music show proved to be a distinctly underwhelming experience.

"We were on with nobody because it was in the [BBC] weather studio," Roger Taylor recalled in an interview with Record Collector magazine. "I think there was a strike, Bowie cancelled, and we got his slot. It was a tiny studio and they shot it with no audience."

Taylor knew, however, that, even miming, the flamboyant band's performance would be the talk of school playgrounds across the UK the following day.

"Who were that lot?" he mimicked. "And who was that bloke prancing in feathers? That was the whole point of Top Of The Pops: to make a splash and get people talking, hopefully with good music behind it. People used to dress up."

Asked by Record Collector if the band pre-planned what to wear on the show, Taylor replied, "We always said we'd wear black, or white, or both. No colours. We. thought colours were uncool."

Two days after the performance was broadcast, Seven Seas Of Rhye was pressed onto vinyl, and rush released. The single entered the UK charts at number 45 on March 9, the week after Queen kicked off their British headline tour for Queen II. On April 14, the single peaked at number 10, and Queen were officially on the record-buying public's radar. Their next single, Killer Queen / Flick Of The Wrist would reach number two, as would its parent album, Sheer Heart Attack.

“It’s incredible how much happened to Queen in 1974,” Brian May later remembered in MOJO magazine. “When I see the footage of us from those shows now, I see so much confidence and adrenaline and I think, My God, we were such impatient boys.”