Greatest Hits (1981)

Greatest Hits is a compilation album by the British rock band Queen, released worldwide on 26 October 1981. The album consisted of Queen's biggest hits since their first chart appearance in 1974 with "Seven Seas of Rhye", up to their 1980 hit "Flash" (although in some countries, "Under Pressure", the band's 1981 UK number one single with David Bowie, was also included). There was no universal track listing or cover art for the album, and each territory's tracks were dependent on what singles had been released there and which were successful. In 1992, a new American version of the album with a revised track listing was released alongside a new companion album, Classic Queen, following the band's rekindled popularity in the nation.

Greatest Hits is the band's best-selling album to date, with total sales of over 25 million copies, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time. It spent four weeks at number one in the UK Albums Chart, and sold consistently well throughout the 1980s, becoming the fourth-biggest selling album of the decade. As of October 2026, Greatest Hits has spent 1,226 weeks on the UK Albums Chart and has been certified 23× platinum with sales of over seven million copies, making it the best-selling album of all time in the UK.

Greatest Hits peaked at number eight on the Billboard 200 in November 2020, the second-slowest ascent to the top ten of the US album chart in history. Among the longest charting albums in the US, as of October 2026, it has spent 722 weeks on the Billboard 200 and has been certified 9× platinum in the US. It has also been certified 15× platinum in Australia, 10× platinum in New Zealand, and 3× platinum in Canada. Following the release of the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018, it re-entered the charts worldwide.

Release

There was no universal track listing or cover art for the Greatest Hits album, and each territory's tracks were dependent on what singles were released there and what tracks charted. In some territories, despite the band's popularity, not enough songs were issued as singles to fill a compilation album, and a few album tracks were used as filler. Some examples of these were "Sweet Lady" and "Love of My Life", neither of which was released as a single in any country but appear on some regions' 1981 Hits release. In the UK, the album was limited to the Queen singles that had reached the top 20 in the UK singles chart up to that point, plus "We Will Rock You", which had been the B-side of "We Are the Champions".

The US ended up with its original mono edit of Queen's first single release, "Keep Yourself Alive", originally released in 1973 and re-released in the US in 1975, following the success of "Bohemian Rhapsody". The US version also added "Under Pressure", Queen's collaboration with David Bowie, which was released the same week as Greatest Hits and subsequently topped the UK singles chart and reached the top ten in many charts around the world. The song was not included on the European versions of Greatest Hits – according to Queen's manager Jim Beach, this was because the longer manufacturing time required to press records in Europe meant that several hundred thousand copies of the album had already been pressed up before the song had been recorded.

In Argentina and Brazil, the LP edition included the same track listing as the UK Greatest Hits, minus "Seven Seas of Rhye" and including "Love of My Life" (Live Killers version). The CD version is the same as the British version.