FEATURE:
Is This Just Fantasy?
Fifty Years Since Queen Started Recording Bohemian Rhapsody
__________
I will look more deeply at the song…
IN THIS PHOTO: (L-R) Brian May, John Deacon (standing), Roger Taylor and Freddie Mercury at Les Ambassadeurs where they were presented with silver, gold and platinum discs for sales in excess of one million of Bohemian Rhapsody, which was number one for nine weeks, on 8th September, 1976 in London/PHOTO CREDIT: Anwar Hussein/Getty Images
in a minute. Queen started recording Bohemian Rhapsody on 24th August, 1975, at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, Wales. The recording process took about three weeks. It is almost fifty years since the band recorded one of the best songs ever created. An epic multi-suite work of genius that the world had seen nothing like. Released as a single on 31st October, 1975, Bohemian Rhapsody reached number one in the U.K. and other countries around the world. You can read more about the track here. As it is almost fifty years since Queen started work on Bohemian Rhapsody, I want to mark its anniversary. The first single from the band’s fourth studio album, A Night at the Opera, I want to delve into the story of this classic song. A Night at the Opera was released on 28th November, 1975. Even though nothing on the album quite matches Bohemian Rhapsody, it does contain another Queen gem: John Deacon’s You’re My Best Friend. I want to start with this article from last year. An ambitious and rule-breaking song that smashed records and continues to stun listeners, this amazing work from Freddie Mercury will never be equalled in terms of its idiosyncrasy and ambition. There have been songs since that tried to match the scale and shape of Bohemian Rhapsody. However, you can never better the original:
“Queen guitarist Brian May remembers the brilliant singer and songwriter giving them the first glimpse in the early 70s of the masterpiece he had at one time called “The Cowboy Song,” perhaps because of the line “Mama… just killed a man.”
“I remember Freddie coming in with loads of bits of paper from his dad’s work, like Post-it notes, and pounding on the piano,” May said in 2008. “He played the piano like most people play the drums. And this song he had was full of gaps where he explained that something operatic would happen here and so on. He’d worked out the harmonies in his head.”
Mercury told bandmates that he believed he had enough material for about three songs but was thinking about blending all the lyrics into one long extravaganza. The final six-minute iconic mini rock opera became the band’s defining song, and eventually provided the title of the hit 2019 biopic starring Rami Malek as Mercury.
The recording of Bohemian Rhapsody
Queen first properly rehearsed “Bohemian Rhapsody” at Ridge Farm Studio, in Surrey, in mid-1975, and then spent three weeks honing the song at Penrhos Court in Herefordshire. By the summer they were ready to record it; taping began on August 24, 1975 at the famous Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, Wales. It was a moment that May described as “just the biggest thrill.”
The innovative song began with the famous a cappella intro (“Is this the real life?/Is this just fantasy?”) before embracing everything from glam-metal rock to opera. A week was devoted to the opera section, for which Mercury had methodically written out all the harmony parts. For the grand chorale, the group layered 160 tracks of vocal overdubs (using 24-track analogue recording), with Mercury singing the middle register, May the low register, and drummer Roger Taylor the high register (John Deacon was on bass guitar but did not sing). Mercury performed with real verve, overdubbing his voice until it sounded like a chorus, with the words “mamma mia”, “Galileo” and “Figaro” bouncing up and down the octaves. “We ran the tape through so many times it kept wearing out,” May said. “Once we held the tape up to the light and we could see straight through it, the music had practically vanished. Every time Fred decided to add a few more ‘Galileo’s we lost something, too.”
The references in Bohemian Rhapsody
Mercury had supposedly written “Galileo” into the lyrics in honor of May, who had a passionate interest in astronomy and would later go on to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” brims with imaginative language and is a testament to Mercury’s talents as a songwriter. Scaramouche was a buffoonish character in 16th-century commedia dell’arte shows; “Bismillah”, which is taken from the Quran, means “in the name of Allah”; Beelzebub is an archaic name for the devil.
“Freddie was a very complex person; flippant and funny on the surface, but he concealed insecurities and problems in squaring up his life with his childhood,” said May. “He never explained the lyrics, but I think he put a lot of himself into that song.”
The legacy of the song
Mercury’s ambitious song, which earned him an Ivor Novello Award for songwriting, quickly became a highlight of Queen’s live show after being unveiled on the A Night At The Opera Tour of 1975 (the closing night of which is captured on their A Night At The Odeon DVD, the deluxe box set of which features the band’s very first live performance of the song, recorded during the soundcheck).
“Bohemian Rhapsody” opened their celebrated Live Aid set in July 1985 and it has remained remarkably popular. In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame, and Mercury’s vocal performance was named by the readers of Rolling Stone magazine as the best in rock history. “Bohemian Rhapsody” is the third best-selling single of all-time in the UK and, in December 2018, “Bo Rhap” – as it is affectionately known among Queen fans – was officially proclaimed the world’s most-streamed song of the 20th Century, passing 1.6 billion listens globally across all major streaming services, and surpassing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” A mere seven months later, on July 21, 2019, the video surpassed one billion streams on YouTube. In 2021, it was certified diamond by the RIAA.
“It is one of those songs which has such a fantasy feel about it,” Mercury said. “I think people should just listen to it, think about it, and then make up their own minds as to what it says to them”.
The penultimate feature is from Dig! that was published in 2020. They wrote how Bohemian Rhapsody changed things. In terms of what Rock and Roll could be. It was this unique song that seemingly came out of nowhere. People knew how good Queen were, though few could see this Freddie Mercury-penned symphony coming! I wonder what people will write about Bohemian Rhapsody closer to its single release on 31st October:
“The penultimate song of A Night At The Opera is a microcosm of the album itself in the same way A Day In The Life is for Sgt Pepper, combining almost every genre imaginable. As May correctly states, A Night At The Opera is meant to be listened to as a whole album, a sensory overload of suitably royal proportions, with Bohemian Rhapsody as “the jewel in that crown”. Following that, the guitarist’s instrumental arrangement of God Save The Queen is a perfect end to a perfect record.
“The biggest single of the century”
Bohemian Rhapsody was nearly not the album’s lead single. Being six minutes long and containing a potentially uncommercial operatic section, it was a gamble and feared unlikely to be played on radio. At many suggestions, the song was cut down, but its composer led the band’s staunch position of all or nothing. No one doubted it was extraordinary; apparently their manager played the tape to his other super-talented, super-extravagant client Elton John, whose response was, “Are you fucking mad?”
After Mercury slipped a copy to Kenny Everett, the oddball DJ played it 14 times over one weekend on his Capital Radio show and the decision was set. Released on the last day of October, Bohemian Rhapsody became Queen’s first UK No.1 single, spending nine weeks at the summit before being displaced by ABBA’s Mamma Mia. Despite being a member of perhaps the only group to provide more karaoke classics than Queen, Björn Ulvaeus hailed the Queen effort as “the biggest single of the century”.
These days, a song of that magnitude requires an equally sizeable music video. But in 1975, such a thing didn’t really exist. Only movie-star crossovers could provide any form of video accompaniment to their music if they featured it in a motion picture (see Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and The Beatles). For standard artists, the only real exposure other than touring was to go on Top Of The Pops, where you would comically mime to your own music as if it were live, with the result usually called a “pop promo”. But to avoid the hassle of actually appearing on Top Of The Pops, a Bohemian Rhapsody video was made to be used instead, freeing Queen to go on tour. The equally sensational and iconic clip was essentially made up as they went along. It also brought the cover of the band’s second album, Queen II, to life, with silhouette figures giving the perfect tone to accompany such a melancholy lyric.
“It’s very self-explanatory”
It’s a lyric which tells a remarkable story, but what about? Well, on the surface, the lament of a poor boy who throws it all away by shooting a man. A potential spanner in the works is the operatic section: will you do the fandango? Um, not sure, really. Bohemian Rhapsody is best summed up by drummer Taylor, who believes “It’s very self-explanatory, there’s just a bit of nonsense in the middle.”
The song’s deeper meaning, however, is a lot more difficult to make out. Common thought is that Mercury wrestled with his demons and put his thoughts into an abstract story. We all know his troubled relationship with his sexuality, and the back and forth cries in the song suggest we are looking at the intense throes of one – or possibly multiple – relationships. What was the exact meaning? “I don’t think we will ever know,” says guitarist May. Poetry does not need a discernible source to be validated, and as Rami Malek, as Freddie Mercury, so eloquently puts it in Bohemian Rhapsody, it is simply “an epic poem”.
A lasting legacy
So why else are the song and album so critically well-revered? Essentially, because Queen were pushing boundaries in the studio. As Roy Thomas Baker said, creating such a spectacular album in the mid-70s “wasn’t easy… then eventually technology caught up with us”. The motivation for this is obvious, according to May, nothing, “The Beatles were our Bible.”
It’s appropriate then that the legacy of Bohemian Rhapsody matches that of any Fab Four hit. Queen’s first UK No.1 hit helped catapult them to national stardom and set in motion the outstanding catalogue of work to follow. The song was released again following Mercury’s death, in 1991, 16 years after its initial outing, and once more topped the UK charts.
The list of accolades garnered by Bohemian Rhapsody is endless. In 2002, it was named by The Guinness Book Of Records as the top British single of all time; two years later it was inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame. The song regularly comes near – and often tops – relevant newspaper, magazine and television polls, and, in 2012, readers of Rolling Stone magazine voted Mercury’s vocal performance on the song as the greatest in rock history.
According to the Official UK Charts, as of June 2018, Bohemian Rhapsody is the UK’s third biggest-selling single of all time, with over 2.5 million sales. Globally, it has sold over six million. In December of that year, shortly after the Mercury biopic was release, it was officially named the world’s most-streamed song from the 20th century, surpassing 1.6 billion streams globally across all major streaming services.
To help get a full sense of the standing of Freddie Mercury and his creation in not just rock-music history but in the very fabric of British culture, look no further than The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert For AIDS Awareness that took place at Wembley Stadium on Easter Monday, 20 April 1992. For an audience of 72,000, titans including Metallica, Def Leppard, U2, Roger Daltrey, Robert Plant, David Bowie and George Michael covered Queen hit after Queen hit”.
I am going to wrap up soon. However, before coming to that, TIME ran a feature in 2015 highlighting how critics were somewhat mixed regarding Bohemian Rhapsody. Such a challenging and unusual song, you can understand why some were a bit flummoxed or taken aback. However, it is impossible to deny the brilliance of Bohemian Rhapsody. How could anyone dislike or feel anything other than awe when reviewing this song?! It is a masterpiece. From an album called A Night at the Opera, there is something distinctly operatic about the album’s penultimate song:
“The critics never saw it coming.
“Unfortunately,” TIME opined, “Queen’s lyrics are not the stuff of sonnets.” The New York Times, reviewing a 1978 appearance at Madison Square Garden came down equally hard: “Lyrically, Queen’s songs manage to be pretentious and irrelevant. Musically, for all the virtuosity—though it was cheating a bit to turn over the complex middle portion of their ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to a taped version, with empty stage and flashing lights—the songs still sound mostly pretty empty, all flash and calculation.”
Rolling Stone didn’t mention the song in its review of the album A Night at the Opera (“The Prophet’s Song” got top billing as the best track) but later referred to the song as a “brazen hodgepodge.”
But that skepticism is long gone. Rolling Stone eventually put “Bohemian Rhapsody” on its list of the 500 greatest songs ever, and it also has pride of place on TIME’s own list of the greatest songs since 1923”.
I can’t recall when I first heard Bohemian Rhapsody. Maybe when I was a child. It must have been almost alien when I was that age! However, in years since, I have come to respect the sheer guts of the song. To release something so long as a single in 1975 was a commercial risk. Nearly six minutes long, that might not seem unusual today. However, back then, this was a gamble. Despite some critical contrasts, in years since, Bohemian Rhapsody is listed among the greatest songs ever. In terms of its legacy, this section from a Wikipedia article puts it into perspective:
“The song has won numerous awards and has been covered and parodied by many artists. At the 19th Annual Grammy Awards in February 1977, "Bohemian Rhapsody" received two Grammy Award nominations for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus and Best Arrangement for Voices. In October 1977, only two years after its release, the British Phonographic Industry named "Bohemian Rhapsody" as the best British single of the period 1952–77. It is a regular entry in greatest-songs polls, and it was named by the Guinness Book of Records in 2002 as the top British single of all time. The song is also listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. As of 2004, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is the second most-played song on British radio, in clubs and on jukeboxes collectively, after Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale". On 30 September 2007 for BBC Radio 1's 40th birthday, it was revealed on The Radio 1 Chart Show that "Bohemian Rhapsody" had been the most played song since Radio 1's launch.
In December 2018, "Bohemian Rhapsody" officially became the most-streamed song from the 20th century, surpassing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine". "Bohemian Rhapsody" also became the most-streamed classic rock song of all time. The number of downloads of the song and original video exceeded 1.6 billion downloads across global on-demand streaming services. The video surpassed one billion views on YouTube in July 2019, making it the oldest music video to reach one billion on the platform, and the first pre-1990s song to reach that figure”.
On 24th August, 1975, Queen started recording Bohemian Rhapsody. Did the band know what it would end up like and how the song would take on a life of its own?! It still sounds so exciting and grand fifty years later. You do not get songs like this today! Often topping polls of the best songs of all time, Bohemian Rhapsody deserves…
EVERY plaudit it gets.