Fact #117297

The Story of Bohemian Rhapsody
by Johnny Black

In the early weeks of 1975, Queen was a band with a serious problem. Their 1974 single Killer Queen had vaulted them to No2 in the UK charts and made the US Top 20. Great things were expected of the follow-up, Now I’m Here, but it stalled at UK No11, and sank without trace in America. They desperately needed a sure-fire blast to re-establish them at the top of the charts.

Anyone who observes the rock business over a period of years knows that, although the formula for massive chart success can’t be rigidly defined, it doesn’t usually involve six minute long mock operas about suicidal murderers tormented by demons.

Queen mainman Freddie Mercury, having written and recorded just such a song, Bohemian Rhapsody, found himself in a quandary. The band’s bass player, their manager, their record company and even their influential deejay buddy all reckoned that releasing it as a single would be a disaster. Against all those odds, Mercury adored it, and was sure it was a hit.

Like much about Bohemian Rhapsody, the song’s origins remain shrouded in mystery. Mercury never publicly explained its bizarre lyrics, avoiding the issue with comments such as, “People should just listen to it, think about it and then make up their own minds as to what it says to them.”

A rudimentary version was first played to Queen’s producer, Roy Thomas Baker, in the spring of 1975. “I went to Freddie’s house one day, and he said he’d written this new song, and sat at the piano and sang me bits of Bohemian Rhapsody. Then he said, ‘And this is where the opera section comes.’ And, of course, I just laughed. It was the funniest remark I’d ever heard in my life.”

Subsequently, recalls drummer Roger Taylor, a fuller version of the song was, “presented to us as scribbled blocks of harmony on the back of a telephone book”.

In the summer of that year, during sessions for the album A Night At The Opera, Bohemian Rhapsody was painstakingly pieced together in various studios in London and Wales. “The backing track was done with just piano, bass and drums,” says guitarist Brian May, “with a few spaces for other things to go in, like the tic-tic-tic on the hi-hat to keep the time.”

May remembers how, once the backing track was laid down, Mercury added a guide vocal. “He would go, ‘Bum bum bum bmmm … that’s what happens here.’ He knew exactly what he was doing all along. It was Freddie’s baby. He had it in his head. We just helped him bring it to life.”

Sessions for the song lasted nearly three weeks - the opera section alone requiring seven days. According to Baker, Mercury had originally told him that the opera section would last just 30 seconds, but then, "He'd walk in and say, 'We'll just stick some 'Galileos' in here!’ It got longer and longer, and we kept adding blank tape. Every day we'd think we were done, and then Freddie would come in say 'I've added a few more 'Galileos' here, dear.’"

In a punishing schedule, Queen harmonised their ‘Galileos' and ‘Figaros’ continually for ten to twelve hours each day. “Fred was living in this fantasy world where it was all Bismillah and Beelzebub,” reckons Taylor. “Terribly gothic – but never meant to be entirely serious.”

Accusations of bombast and pretension have often been aimed at Queen but, according to Baker, the band could always see the funny side of Bo Rhap. “We were all in hysterics while it was being recorded,” he insists.

Amusing though it undoubtedly was, May points out that the song’s multi-tracked parts – a staggering 180 vocal overdubs alone - stretched the limits of mid-70s studio technology to breaking point. “Because Bohemian Rhapsody was done on 16-track, we had to do a lot of bouncing as we went along. The tape got very thin. The legendary story, that people think we made up, is true. We held the tape up to the light one day – we’d been wondering where all the top end was going – and what we discovered was virtually a transparent piece of tape. All the oxide had been rubbed off. It was time to hurriedly make a copy and get on with it.”

When the six-minute track was finally completed to Mercury’s satisfaction, he hit his first stumbling block when he played it to personal manager Pete Brown.“I tried to make Freddie see that they were quite mad, proposing Bohemian Rhapsody as their next single. I personally thought it spelt the kiss of death and, actually, John Deacon (Queen bassist) privately agreed with me.”

EMI Records agreed with both of them, insisting that the track must undergo substantial edits before it could be released as a single. But, as SARM East Studio tape operator Gary Langhan recalls, Mercury, May and Taylor were unshakeable. “They just dug in their heels. There was a touch of arrogance, I suppose, but it was more like sheer belief in the number, and their attitude was, ‘Well, if it’s twice the usual time slot allocated to each record on radio, they’ll just have to play one less record…”

When the track was tried out on Queen-friendly Capitol Radio deejay Kenny Everett, he loved it but his initial reaction was that it could never be a single. Nevertheless, he could see some cachet in being the first UK deejay to air Queen’s newest track. “He asked if he could play it,” says Baker, “and we told him he couldn’t, half-joking and winking at him.”

Everett got the message. “I played it that weekend, twice on the Saturday, twice on the Sunday, and on Monday I had more calls for Bohemian Rhapsody than for any other record throughout the full week. I knew then that it was going to be a monster.”
Armed with clear evidence of radio’s willingness to play it, and an audience demanding to hear it, Queen now had the leverage to make EMI release the track in its full, bizarre splendour.

Released on October 31st 1975, Bohemian Rhapsody entered the UK chart the following week at No. 47, but it was by no means universally acclaimed. Melody Maker critic Allan Jones heard only a “superficially impressive pastiche” of operatic styles, and BBC radio deejay John Peel, previously a Queen supporter, reckoned they’d gone too far.

Three weeks later, however, it was at No1, where it took up residence for an incredible nine weeks, helped by a ground-breaking promo, often credited with ushering in the video age. Unlike the song, though, the quickly-produced low-budget video was a last-minute compromise. “We only did it because we had to play in Liverpool and couldn’t do Top Of The Pops,” admits Taylor. “Suddenly we realised we could be seen in Australia, when we were still in our British bedsits. That’s when we realised what possibilities there were.”

Despite its British success, Queen found themselves jumping through all the same hoops again to achieve a US release, finally convincing Elektra to abandon the rule book when it started selling considerable quantities on import. In July 1976, it peaked at No9, giving them their first US Top 10 entry.

Bohemian Rhapsody also won Freddie Mercury his second Ivor Novello songwriting Award, and on 18th October 1977, the British Phonographic Industry bestowed upon it the Britannia Award for 'Best British Pop Single Of The Last 25 Years' (jointly with Procol Harum's equally mystifying A Whiter Shade Of Pale).

The story didn’t end there though, because Bo Rhap returned to No1 in the UK during December 1991, a month after Mercury’s death, going on to reach No2 in the US the following February.

But the enigma remains - what was the song about? Mercury died without explaining it and, although there have been suggestions that it contained veiled references to personal traumas, only Kenny Everett (also now dead) ever claimed to have got the word straight from the horse’s mouth, saying, “Freddie told me that Bohemian Rhapsody was just 'random, rhyming nonsense'!”

Johnny Black
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BRIAN MAY OF QUEEN DISCUSSES BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY… with Johnny Black

HOW DID YOU FIRST HEAR BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY?
It was Freddie banging away on the piano and doing little bits which seemed to have big gaps in them, so the first curiousity was ‘Why are all these gaps in there?’ And he said, ‘Oh, that’s where the operatic bits are going to go.’ So we all raised our eyebrows and though, ‘Hmmm … OK.’

HAD IT BEEN PLAYED TO ROY THOMAS BAKER FIRST?
If he wants to think that, that’s fine. Roy’s a good friend. I don’t have a very clear recollection but normally we’d talk about songs long before they got to the studio.

ROGER TAYLOR HAS A STORY ABOUT IT BEING PRESENTED TO THE BAND ON THE BACK OF A TELEPHONE BOOK…
Freddie used to write all his stuff on pads of paper from his dad’s work – they looked like telephone directories. He would work out the harmonies on his piano at home, then write them down but it wasn’t in standard musical notation, it wasn’t ‘the dots’, but it was As and Bs and C Sharps, and the block vertically would like four or eight parts or however many, and they would be the parts we were going to sing. It was kind of a group shorthand way of doing things.

If you were trying to read them, you’d get confused because the top line was always at the bottom, and the bass notes at the top. It was kind of upside down from the way you’d expect. I think it was just the way he saw the piano.

SO WHAT WERE YOUR FIRST THOUGHTS ON HEARING IT?
Nothing with Queen was ever designed as a single. Everything was brought in as something to experiment on and hopefully break new ground and eventually be part of the whole concept of an album, part of a whole entertainment, which is always how we viewed our albums.

We’re debating perhaps taking all the greatest hits albums off the market, so people can get into the original albums, because that’s where we feel the songs work best. We never intended to be a singles band. That happened by accident. Bohemian Rhapsody, for example, makes so much more sense in context on the album A Night At The Opera. It was never conceived to be a single.

People say Bohemian Rhapsody was a revolutionary departure for us, but I heard it more as an extension of what we’d already been doing. If you listen to Queen II, there’s a track on there called My Fairy King, which has a lot of complexity, not too dissimilar from Bohemian Rhapsody. All the groundwork was laid out in Queen II. That album was a big step for us, into the world using the studio as a canvas rather than just a means to record some songs. We moved away from that in the Sheer Heart Attack album, which was done in a different spirit, meant to be absorbed in an instant, at face value.

But on A Night At The Opera we went back to the feelings that we had on Queen II which was that we were creating something, as if on a piece of canvas, and it would grow every time you listened to it. You should be able to listen again and again and keep finding new things. So that multi-level complexity was already going on.

WHAT WAS THE ATMOSPHERE IN THE STUDIO WHEN YOU RECORDED BO RHAP? IT IS SAID YOU FOUND THE SONG AMUSING…
Well, we find everything amusing. We never liked to take ourselves too seriously, that’s an important factor in being a member of Queen. You’d get shot down immediately if you did. Very often, the agenda of the songwriter was not brought up. That was a sort of unwritten law. We wouldn’t ask each other what a particular song was about. You would accept the song and get on with the craftsmanship side of making the record.

Usually the lyrics would come from the person who had the original idea, in this case, Freddie, but the arrangement would be up for grabs. With Bohemian Rhapsody, Freddie obviously had a lot of it in his head. He knew exactly how he wanted it to be.

We became like a sausage machine. We got very good at doing harmonies very quickly and accurately. We would multi-track each line in unison, probably three times, then move on to the next part. Then we’d be running out of tracks, so we’d have to bounce it down. The whole technique of doing that was great fun. You’d build up these huge blocks of choral harmonies, and it’s a great joy to listen back to that stuff and realize that your ideas have worked.

WHAT DO YOU FEEL WAS YOUR OWN MAJOR CONTRIBUTION TO THE SONG?
Freddie had an open mind as regards the solo, and I said I wouldn’t just repeat the verse melody, I wanted to do it as a counter tune. Actually, I had the tune going round in my head long before I recorded it. I didn’t write it down or prepare it, but it had been in my head for a long time once we started working on the song.

So I asked Freddie for that particular chord sequence to do the solo on because I could hear it in my head. All my best work is like that. If I just go in and let my fingers fall where they will, I always feel it’s boring. I like to hear something in my head, and then find it on the guitar. The best stuff comes to me when I’m not even touching a guitar.

That’s the regular solo. When it gets to the bit where people do the head-banging, that was Freddie’s idea. He had that in his head already, and he sang the lines to me, and it blends in with the piano line, and I had my own way of playing the lines, but Freddie did have it in mind as the climax of the song.

I also contributed the orchestral-sounding stuff. The idea of making my guitar sound like an orchestra had also begun on Queen II. At the end of Rhapsody when it’s all coming down, and it’s like little string parts. It’s a subliminal orchestra, if you like. But really, you’re talking about something that came out of Freddie’s head. It was Freddie’s dream, or nightmare.

AND WHEN IT WAS FINISHED, DID YOU THINK YOU HAD A HIT SINGLE?
We faced a lot of opposition to have it released in its entirety as a single. John Deacon’s take on it was that it should be edited down, to just the verses and choruses, the rest of us felt it was so different that it was a chance worth taking. That if it did become a hit, we’d really have achieved something.

WHAT WAS KENNY EVERETT’S PART IN ALL OF THIS?
By the time Kenny heard it, we’d decided it was the single. Before the tracks were completely finished, we were having a playback and Kenny came down and raved about the album and the single. He said ‘I’m gonna play it.’ And we said, ‘Well, it’s not finished.’ He said, ‘I don’t care, I’m going to play it anyway.’ Now we kind of thought he was joking, but he walked out with the tape without anyone realizing.

That night, after the party, having tried not to drink too much, I was back in the studio, trying to finish off bits of The Prophet Song, I worked til four or five in the morning, then went to bed. Next thing I know, I’m woken up by the sound of the track I’ve just been working on before I went to bed. I thought I’d gone completely mad. Actually, Kenny was playing it on the radio, which was blaring out in my upstairs neighbour’s house. I thought I was going mad. It was horrible, as if the song was haunting me, because obviously, as far as I was concerned, it couldn’t be on the radio because no-one had it. I think he played Bohemian Rhapsody three times that day, so he was very instrumental in helping get it out as a single.

AND FREDDIE NEVER SAID WHAT IT WAS ABOUT?
Freddie was quite clever from this point of view, that he never claimed his songs meant anything, and that’s quite a good standpoint. To me it’s a much better way to present your art than someone like Paul Simon who goes to great length to explain his songs, and then ruins it for a lot of people. Freddie always said, ‘No, it’s disposable, take it or leave it, here today and gone tomorrow.’

My own theory is that there’s a lot of him in there. That’s the case with most songwriters, consciously or unconsciously, there has to be a lot of the writer in there. If you’re going to write something decent, it’s impossible not to let it come from inside. Freddie was a very complex person, with a lot of stuff concealed, flippant and funny on the surface, but under that there was a lot of insecurities, real problems in squaring up his life with his childhood and his background.

BISMILLAH – IS THAT A REAL WORD?
I understand it’s an Arabic expletive. Freddie, with his family background in Persia and being born in Zanzibar, would have known what it meant. Somebody wrote to me once and asked ‘Who is this Miss Miller that Freddie keeps going on about?’

HOW SIGNIFICANT WAS THE VIDEO IN MAKING IT A HIT?
Very. It was a wonderful vehicle for sending the song around the world much faster than we could possibly do it on a tour. People saw it in Japan and Australia and, strangely enough, not in the States. There weren’t outlets for video in the States. Video really took off in the rest of the world first.

We made it partly because we were touring and it would be hard to get on Top Of The Pops, but also we realised we’d look very odd trying to mime such a hugely complex thing on podiums in the Top Of The Pops studio. It really needed to be presented in some other way. It was a shoestring production, £5000 budget, rigged up very Heath Robinson. We hung up a sheet and a spotlight for the silhouette at the beginning, then set some lights up above our heads to reproduce the image from the cover of Queen II. We filmed the heavy bit in the middle live at our rehearsal one day while we were on tour.