Mojo - The Music Magazine

If there's one track that represents the uniqueness of MOJO cover star Freddie Mercury it is Bohemian Rhapsody: Number 1 for nine weeks over the cusp of Christmas, 1975-76, and the track that confirmed Queen's unrivalled flamboyance and musical ambition.

"At the time Freddie was hitting some kind of creative peak where he was absolutely flying," recalls Queen drummer Roger Taylor, casting his mind back to the period that begat the band's most epic and enduring tune. "He liked a lot of different music but all of it was quite dramatic. When it came to Bohemian Rhapsody, Freddie presented the whole song to us in the form of scribbled blocks of harmonies on the back of a sort of telephone book. It was in four different sections that we recorded separately. We knew it was a sort of jigsaw that was very difficult to piece together, especially the operatic section. We knew where all the little bits fitted but there were lots of gaps that needed to be filled in later. Basically, Freddie had the whole song mapped out in his head."

Such was the track's complexity that it was assembled at six different studios - beginning with rehearsals in Hertfordshire and culminating in a stint at London's Wessex Studios where the band and producer Roy Thomas Baker wrestled with the problem of fitting 120-odd backing vocals (undertaken by Mercury, May and Taylor) onto the 24 tracks available.

"Those backing vocals took a week to record," continues Taylor. "And that was working solidly every day with the three of us singing the parts."

This spirit of intense endeavour and attention to detail echoed throughout Queen's fourth album, A Night At The Opera. Taylor cites "trying to recreate horn parts with our mouths or tap dancing on the desk" on Seaside Rendezvous as further examples of the band's eccentric spirit of adventure. The band themselves were also aware that, for all its neo-operatic pyrotechnics, Bohemian Rhapsody was central to the album's impact.

"We knew it was the magnum opus of the album," confirms Taylor. "It was a long track but I knew very early on it was the single."

Clocking in at five minutes and 55 seconds, Bohemian Rhapsody is essentially a chorus-free rock song in four movements: the introductory section defined by Freddie's questioning vocal ("Is this the real life? / Is this just fantasy?"); the confessional section ("Mama, just killed a man") which leads into Brian May's guitar solo and the neo-operatic cavalcade of gothic characters (Scaramouche, Galileo, Beelzebub with a few "bismillah"s, "mama mia"s and a swift "Figaro" thrown in for good measure). The riff-filled hard rock section (the virtues of which were so memorably extolled in the car scene in Wayne's World); the closing section which leads to the protagonist's insistence that "nothing really matters to me" and which draws the track to a resigned close.

The sheer drama evoked by Mercury's florid lyricism has down the years led to speculation about the track's meaning. Some have viewed it as a statement concerning the singer's sexuality (largely by casting his former lover Mary Austin in the role of 'Mama'); others have suggested it relates to a Faustian pact with the devil.

"Don't ask me to explain what it's about because I haven't got a f**king clue!" laughs Taylor. "It's really more the vibe of it and the remorse in the song that works. Then it gets terribly gothic. But Fred was living in this sort of fantasy world. Nothing to do with Tolkien, but there's a painting called The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke that he used [as inspiration for a song of the same name on Queen II] and which sums up what was in Freddie's head at the time. It was all Beelzebub and Bismillah. Very dramatic."

Initial support for the idea of Bohemian Rhapsody being released as a single came from an unlikely source. Radio DJ/comedian Kenny Everett championed Queen on his show on London's Capital Radio and played a rough mix of the track before it was even completed.

"That kind of thing would be unthinkable now," says Taylor. "But we were great friends with Kenny at this time. He'd been a fan since Killer Queen [released October, 1974]. We'd scheduled a play-through of the album before it was finished for him to hear. Kenney just said, 'Please, please, please can I take this tape away and play it?' We let him and he ended up playing [Bohemian Rhapsody] on the radio before we'd really finished it. The listeners loved it so he played it a lot and he was instrumental in breaking the record."

Released on October 10, 1975, Bohemian Rhapsody began its climb to the top of the UK charts becoming an unlikely Christmas Number 1 but not before assorted parties at the band's label had voiced their concerns at the length of the track.

"Our America record company [Elektra] tried to edit it but it didn't work," says Taylor. "The final version was very long and people convinced themselves that it was seven minutes long when it isn't even six minutes long. In the end though, there was just one version of the track and it was the length that we wanted it to be. To be honest, though, we were too arrogant to really be told what to do in the first place."

The melodrama that defined Bohemian Rhapsody was further enhanced by its accompanying video, directed by Bruce Gowers (more recently known for his work on American Idol).

"The main reason we made the video was because we were on tour and we couldn't do Top Of The Pops, which was all-conquering at the time," explains Roger Taylor. "We were sitting there trying to work out how we appeared on the show when we were actually appearing in Liverpool. Our management company had an outside broadcast unit that used to do sports stuff for ITV, so we thought, Why don't we film this rehearsal? On the last day before we packed the trucks we filmed us doing the song in Elstree. I remember hitting the gong at the end of it, getting all greased up for it and then having to clean the grease off to get on the bus and start the UK tour. Five days later it was on the telly. Then, we suddenly realised that we could be seen in Australia and around the world when we were in our bedsits."

If the video for Bohemian Rhapsody is now viewed as a pioneering moment in music television, the track itself has also continued to resonate down the years, not least in December 1991 when - twinned with These Are The Days Of Our Lives - it topped the singles charts once again in the wake of Mercury's tragic death.

"I do think it's a great piece of work," concludes Roger. "And, like I said, the song really was Freddie's creature."

By Phil Alexander