Queen of Hearts

Album: Battering Ram (2015)
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Songfacts®:

  • The titular Queen in this song refers to the tyrannical playing card monarch in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, who played croquet with flamingos and later orders 'off with her head.'

    However the lyrics reference Through the Looking-Glass' Red Queen, who is a chess piece. Though in Lewis Carroll's stories they are two different characters, in the 1951 animated film Alice in Wonderland, the Queen of Hearts delivers several of the Red Queen's statements.

    Saxon vocalist Biff Byford said: "With 'Queen of Hearts', I wanted to write something around Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland, and it's about the chess game that happens in the story. I wanted it to have prog-feeling in the way of its ambiance and mood."

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