QUEEN
Brian May and Roger Taylor help MOJO immerse in Bohemian Rhapsody, history’s most outrageous rock song, 45 years young. The back story! The legacy! Plus their new live album and a photo portfolio by Neal Preston.
A CHOIR OF PHASED VOCALS CASTS A DREAMLIKE spell. An existential question is posed: “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy…?” A delicate piano figure enters stage left, and the tormented, remorseful singer reveals a shocking truth.
But that’s just the beginning of this extraordinary, epic trip. There’s a nervous breakdown painted in operatic colours, juggling references to a 16th century Italian clown, a pioneering astronomer, a traditional dance from the Iberian peninsula, and the central character from Rossini’s The Barber Of Seville. By the end of its near-six-minute span it’s travelled to heaven and hell amid a pile-up of time signatures, unearthly harmonies, melodic wonders, thumping rock drama and the boom of a Rank Organisation gong.
Forty-five years since its release in October 1975, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody is arguably the best-known piece of popular music not recorded by The Beatles. It’s bigger than Queen themselves: the exemplar for rock ambition, encoded with clues about the secret life of its singer.
Yet as late as summer 1975, such a coup would have seemed unlikely. Deep in the hole financially, owing more than £200,000 to their management company Trident, Queen were fighting to free themselves of a deal they’d signed three years earlier with company boss Norman Sheffield. 1974 had seen them bag their biggest hit yet, with the vivid production pop of Killer Queen, as they watched the sales of parent
album Sheer Heart Attack rise accordingly, matching the single at Number 2 in the albums chart. Even so, their bank statements were a depressing sight.
“I think we had 1,500 quid between us,” says Queen drummer Roger Taylor today. “So, yes, we were skint, pretty much. Y’know, we’d sold a lot of records round the world. So, we thought, This can’t be right… Then the boss put in a new swimming pool (laughs). Which he could park his Rolls-Royce by.”
Queen entered sessions for their fourth long-player A Night At The Opera knowing it was make-or-break. “If the album didn’t do well, then we would remain skint,” says guitarist Brian May, “and we probably couldn’t carry on…
“In a strange way, though,” he resumes, brightly, “those brave steps that we took to force our way out of the old management situation were actually stimulating. It was an amazing opportunity to just cut ourselves loose.”
A nine-month-long financial dust-up concluded in a split from Trident and, with the help of Elton John manager John Reid, Queen signed directly to EMI. May remembers Reid telling the group, “‘I will take care of your financial problems and your business structure. You just go in and make the best album you’ve ever made.’”
All Queen needed was the song that would unlock it.
EVEN BEFORE THE FORMATION OF QUEEN IN 1970, the future Freddie Mercury had begun toying with parts of the song that would become Bohemian Rhapsody. The singer’s initial 1969 doodle was named The Cowboy Song, inviting speculation that its murder and retribution lyric was conceived as a Western tale. But Brian May reckons Mercury’s working title was a reference to its melody, not its story.
“That ‘dah-dah-dah-daaa-daaa’,” he sings. “The loping gait of that riff. I think that’s all it is. That’s what Freddie heard as a sort of Western theme, as they disappear into the sunset. I don’t think there was any feeling in his mind that it had anything to do with the Wild West in content.”
Mentally transpose the piano riff to plaintive harmonica or twanging guitar and it’s easy to imagine it as a Morricone motif. But when Mercury first began playing snippets of the song to the band in ’75, the Western title was never mentioned. Among the others, it was simply “Fred’s Thing”.
Roger Taylor remembers his jaw dropping when Mercury sat at the piano and sang his ideas to him: “The first thing he played was the verse: ‘Mama, just killed a man.’ I thought, ‘Oh, that is a fantastic verse.’”
Both the drummer and guitarist agree that from the off Mercury had a very clear vision for the song. “That was typical Freddie,” May says. “It was in his head and it was a question of just clustering round and helping him to bring that vision to life. You’ll find all sorts of bits in Bohemian Rhapsody which we fashioned in the studio. But nevertheless, Freddie had his hand on that tiller, and he knew where he was going from the very beginning.”
More than an ambitiously episodic song, Bohemian Rhapsody was to become a high water mark studio production. The Beatles were five years gone, but their pioneer influence endured as Pink Floyd, ELO, 10cc and Queen all raced to push the hi-fi envelope.
“The Beatles really were our Bible, all along, in so many ways,” says May. “But particularly in studio technique. Of course, we came in more or less where they left off, and we had a lot more toys than they had. More and more tracks you can record on, more and more tricks you can play.”
Sonically, the roots of Bohemian Rhapsody go back to Queen’s eponymous 1973 debut album and the whimsically-titled but aurally-adventurous My Fairy King (skip to 2:12 for early evidence of Mercury’s piano arpeggios). But it was with Queen II, released in March ’74, that the band began to fully test the ever-growing possibilities of the recording studio. It’s here that we find The March Of The Black Queen, another flighty, multi-movement piano creation, and a distinct pre-echo of what was to come.
“Oh, I think it’s the most complicated song we’ve done actually,” marvels Taylor today. “Just ridiculous. Freddie liked songs with lots of different movements in them. I don’t know… what would you call it? Symphonic prog doodah. Songs with knobs on.”
“Freddie didn’t regard himself as a great pianist because he couldn’t do the sort of orthodox things,” says May. “But the stuff that came out of his head on the piano was just amazing. I remember recording bits and pieces from The March Of The Black Queen in my house on a 2-track reel-to-reel recorder that I had. Already he was making something stupendous.”
FOLLOWING IN THE STILL-FRESH AND MUDDY footsteps of Hawkwind and Budgie, in August 1975 Queen traipsed to Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire to begin recording. “I think it was quite cheap,” laughs Roger Taylor. “Which was probably a major factor.”
Having already spent three weeks in pre-production at Ridge Farm in Surrey – and three more in a rented 15th century house, Penrhos Court in Herefordshire – Queen were well-prepared.
“We’d had three albums,” Taylor stresses, “and at that point, y’know, you don’t have a backlog of songs because you’ve been hurling them out at the public. So, we had to rehearse-stroke-write, and really assemble our ideas.”
At Rockfield the band, along with co-producer Roy Thomas Baker, recorded the opening and ending sections of Bohemian Rhapsody as full band takes, with Mercury at the piano. Then, the team had to get inventive. Even with 24 tracks of master tape at their disposal, the backing vocals for these parts had to be recorded even before there was a lead vocal to follow.
“We had more tracks than The Beatles had,” May points out. “But, of course, it’s not enough when you’re trying to do the complex things that we were trying to do. You had to basically use the tracks as best you could and then bounce [or mixdown] things together in order to free up tracks. So, you had to do it in a particular order for manoeuvring space.”
Moving back to London and booking into Scorpio Sound, a facility based in the Euston Tower high-rise near Regent’s Park, Baker and Queen pushed the very limits of 24-track recording with the operatic middle passage of Bohemian Rhapsody. What was originally intended to be a 30-second segue very quickly expanded. Baker had to keep splicing in extra lengths of tape as Mercury added Scaramouches and Galileos.
There followed days upon days of Mercury, May and Taylor (bassist John Deacon being the only nonsinger) overdubbing and bouncing an estimated 180 layers of harmonies, singing for up to 12 hours a day. Sounds punishing?
“Yeah – fun though,” says May. “We were just boys, and it wasn’t too physically tiring, really. It was really interesting all the way along the line. And we were always pushing things a little further. ‘Can we put a few more harmonies on here? Can we
double and quadruple it up? Can we use three of one person and three of another?’ There was a lot of experimentation.”
“It was a lot of slog actually,” demurs Taylor. “Then the studio broke down. I just remember sitting around, bored shitless, waiting for the tape machines to work properly.”
More worryingly, the master tape wore so thin it became translucent. “Pretty scary actually,” May notes. “We did hold the tape up to the light and you could see through it. That was when alarm bells rang loudly. We were gradually losing what we were recording…”
When it came to mixing Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen and Baker were similarly cutting-edge, attempting to use an early form of console automation. “It was rubbish,” complains Taylor. “Literally an oscilloscope with a little round screen and green dots that used to move up and down. I don’t remember it working very well.”
To balance the third and concluding section of Bohemian Rhapsody, the team resorted to the manual, all-hands-on-desk approach. Taylor remembers, “We used to get six of us – the engineer, Roy Baker, and all four of the band – and we’d be working the faders and the tape machines, if you wanted to get tape phasing.”
Ultimately, getting the six-minute track to the finish line involved a final mixing desk performance in itself. “It wasn’t foreign to us to be clustered around that last bit of Bohemian Rhapsody just pushing faders up,” says May. “It was definitely a performance, ’cos you’d look across and go, ‘Did you go too far there, Freddie?’ ‘Oh yeah I may have done (laughs).’”
The three parts of the extravagant track were finally cut together at Sarm East Studio on Brick Lane, where Queen stood back to absorb their completed work. “We were very proud of it,” Taylor says. “I didn’t have a clue what people would make of it. Didn’t have a clue.”
Not all of the members of Queen agreed that Bohemian Rhapsody should be released, unedited, as the band’s next single. Brian May recalls that John Deacon had his doubts.
“I remember John saying, very seriously, ‘I’m sure this could be a hit, but it does need to be simplified and it needs a nice simple title.’ So, I think he wanted to call it Mama. Now, I could be wrong, and John, don’t shoot me if you read this. But that’s what I remember. He said, ‘Let’s cut it down and it’ll play nicely on the radio and people can get into it. They can have the long version on the album.’
“It’s not a silly thought, y’know,” adds May. “And in a different situation that might have been necessary. That might have been the only way it’d go on the radio. Luckily for us, we were precocious boys and we said, ‘No, sod it, we’re gonna go for the whole thing.’”
WITHOUT KENNY EVERETT, QUEEN’S PLAN might never have worked. The then-Capital Radio DJ attended a playback soirée the band threw for industr y tastemakers at Roundhouse Studios in Camden. As everyone was chatting afterwards, Everett pilfered the quarter-inch master tape.
“Brian woke up after working all night on The Prophet Song, hearing the unfinished Bohemian Rhapsody on the radio,” chuckles Taylor. “Good old Ken, he played it again and again.”
In truth, Everett became slightly demented about Bohemian Rhapsody, airing the full track more than a dozen times over one weekend. Queen fans rang the station trying to find out the song’s release date, and when the single was issued on the last day of October
1975 it began a slow ascent up the charts – initially unaided by exposure on Top Of The Pops, to which Queen had developed an aversion.
“You had to go in there and sit in their studio and wait and eventually you’d be called up,” May recalls, grimly. “And you’d go up on their little podiums, with kids being shepherded around and around you, and you would mime to your song. It wasn’t a very dignified experience. It wasn’t creatively satisfying. So, we gambled again.”
As the single entered the Top 10, the band headed off the prospect of another performance on a rickety Top Of The Pops stage. Figuring that if Bohemian Rhapsody made Number 1, the BBC would have to play the track somehow, Queen came up with a plan to shoot a video for it, at Elstree Studios on the final day of rehearsals for their upcoming British tour. The clip, referencing the gothic cover art of Queen II and replete with iconic visual FX, was filmed in three or four hours, using a sports outside broadcast unit.
“We lit it ourselves using our stage set,” says Taylor, “and for the side set [we used] just overhead white lights, very simple, to get the shadows on the faces. A guy called Bruce Gowers directed it. We ended very late at night and then drove to Liverpool.”
Eight nights later, Top Of The Pops screened the video for Bohemian Rhapsody for the first time. Queen watched it together in a hotel in Taunton. “We sat there watching this thing,” May reminisces, “and it worked like a dream.”
Roger Taylor remembers exactly where he was when he found out that Queen had scored their first Number 1 with this lengthy and eccentric opus. “We’d played Southampton Gaumont the night before,” he says. “I remember it ’cos my mum was there. I said to her at breakfast, ‘All right, mum, we’re Number 1.’”
BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY STAYED AT NUMBER 1 for nine consecutive weeks. Queen were equally thrilled and concerned by the single’s success.
“It was great, the fact that it was Number 1 for so long,” says Roger Taylor. “But the fear was of boring people. After about four weeks of Top Of The Pops showing this video, they started putting flames over the first bit to make it look different. We were worried that people might get sick of it.”
But people didn’t get sick of Bohemian Rhapsody. It sold over six million copies on 7-inch and returned to Number 1 in the UK following Mercury’s death from AIDS-related bronchopneumonia in 1991. Four-and-a-half decades on from its initial release, it is the most-streamed song from the 20th century, having chalked up over a billion views on YouTube and another billion listens on Spotify. Asked to account for the staggering breadth and endurance of its appeal, Taylor says that, like many operatic librettos, it’s a universal story, dealing in tragedy. “He’s gonna be executed for murder, and he regrets it,” says the drummer. “But in the end he’s philosophical about it, I think.”
Queen’s current singer Adam Lambert first heard the song, aged 10 in 1992, in his native San Diego. Having subsequently spoken to Brian May about the lyric, he reads Bohemian Rhapsody as a veiled commentary on Mercury’s personal life at the time – the narrator obliged to “face the truth” and likely destruction. As Elton John was to discover in 1976, it was easy for a rock star to “throw away” a career – or at least, the more conservative elements of their audience – by coming out as gay.
“Brian said to me,” says Lambert, “‘Freddie wasn’t necessarily super, super upfront and open about his sexuality because it was so taboo. But he talked about it a lot in coded language in these songs.’ Now, having gotten to know the band better and asked a lot of questions, I wonder if some of [Bohemian Rhapsody] was about his identity. Y’know, he’s talking about being who he is and the challenges that he faces.”
“Freddie was getting braver in expressing his inner emotions,” says May. “And, yeah, I think there’s a lot of autobiography in the way Freddie wrote it.”
Meanwhile, as a piece of music, Bohemian Rhapsody was widely admired – perhaps the most ambitious studio pop construction since The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations. High praise came from Brian Wilson himself, who told Sounds magazine in 1976 that it was “the most competitive thing that’s come along in ages”. “That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Taylor tells MOJO today, “but that’s a wonderful comment coming from somebody of that stature.”
Yet the song’s complexities made problems for Queen on-stage – the multi-multi-voiced middle section was impossible to recreate. Famously, they solved the problem by exiting the stage as it played on tape, before returning to slam back in with the outro. “It’s a studio creation,” May avers. “It would’ve been silly for us to try and make that kind of sound on-stage. And we still don’t try.”
These days the old video clip appears on-screen when Queen perform its central operatic passage, as they let Mercury and their younger, recorded selves take over once again. Modern technology has brought another boon: the gong that Taylor would dramatically strike at the track’s close has been sampled.
“We don’t have to cart the bloody thing around any more,” the drummer laughs. “Y’know, for one moment in a song, it’s a very big flight case. That old gong is my garden now.”
A fitting physical monument to Queen’s most monolithic song. There is a corner of Surrey that is, forever, Bohemian Rhapsody.