by Mark Blake
As a studio apprentice at Decca Records, Baker had helped record the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, an ensemble known for their performances of Gilbert and Sullivan’s light operas. It was an experience he wanted to draw on for the recording of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. ‘Queen came up with so many ideas,’ he said, ‘but my job was to organise those ideas in order to make them work.’ He had also adopted another mantra: ‘Ideas weren’t problems. They were challenges. I’d never say, “That’s not possible.”’
Baker’s never-say-die attitude was a godsend. By now, Queen’s working practices were well established. Each band member would write alone before bringing their song ideas to the others for suggestions, improvements, rejection even. It could be, said Roger Taylor, ‘a lonely process’. During the making of A Night at the Opera, the drawbacks of this method would become apparent. On some occasions, band members would end up working in pairs, sometimes even in different studios. ‘You lose a bit of the group feeling,’ May told Melody Maker in 1975. ‘I can point to things on this album that suffered from not having us all there at one time and because there was too much responsibility on one.’
Therefore, when Mercury descended on Rockfield’s Studio 1 with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, his bandmates had no idea what to expect. Freddie had written down his ideas for the song in the notebooks his father Bomi used for his accountancy work. ‘It wasn’t standard musical notation,’ recalled Brian May. ‘But As and Bs and Cs in blocks, like buses zooming all over bits of paper. He seemed to have the whole thing worked out in his head.’
The finished article would find room for a cappella vocals, tender balladry, scything heavy metal and an operatic mid-section that would take supposedly 180 overdubs. The basic backing track was recorded at Rockfield, with, as Taylor recalled, ‘Freddie conducting’. The first section, after the a capella intro, was straightforward enough, comprising just piano, bass, guitars and drums. Once completed, Baker left a thirty-second strip of tape on the reel for later use on what was already being called ‘the opera section’, unaware of just how involved that section would become, before the group recorded the song’s closing, heavy rock coda, with May playing a Mercury-written riff in E-flat; a difficult key for any guitarist. But, in keeping with Baker’s mantra: it wasn’t a problem, it was a challenge …
‘We were all a bit mystified about how he was going to link these pieces,’ admitted May. In 1969, Freddie had co-opted The Beatles’ instrumental breakdown from ‘A Day in the Life’ to link his different ideas for ‘The Cowboy Song’. This time, he’d written his own pseudo-operatic midsection (‘mock opera’ he said), with lyrics name-checking the seventeenth-century Italian comedy mainstay Scaramouche, the Spanish and Portugese folk dance the fandango, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, and Rossini and Mozart’s operatic character Figaro. For added multiculturalism, he threw in the Arabic noun bismillah, commonly used in Islamic prayer. It was the first time Mercury had explicitly referenced his ethnic background in a song for Queen. Interviewed in 1996, Queen PR Tony Brainsby claimed that ‘Freddie avoided at all costs mentioning Zanzibar. He just didn’t think it fitted the image.’ Not that his bandmates were ever privy to what he was singing about. ‘We didn’t speak to each other about lyrics,’ admitted May. ‘We were too embarrassed to talk about the words.’ To this day, no one connected with the band has ever revealed where the song’s title came from.
In the pre-digital age, Queen had just twenty-four analogue tracks to work with. However, to complicate the process, they then had to record the backing vocals before the lead vocal. ‘That wasn’t a regular way of doing things,’ admits Baker. ‘But we wouldn’t have had enough tracks left for the rich backing vocals if we hadn’t gone down this route.’ The process became even more involved when, as Roger Taylor explained, ‘Freddie started adding more and more “Galileos”.’
‘Every time Freddie added another “Galileo” I would add another piece of tape to the reel,’ said Baker. In the meantime, Baker’s endless loops of tape had begun to resemble ‘a zebra crossing whizzing by’. After numerous playbacks, it sounded as if the song was gradually fading away. What happened next has passed into Queen mythology, like the origins of Freddie’s sawn-off mic stand.
The exacting process of recording one vocal harmony at a time had required, in the parlance of studio engineers, ‘bouncing’ each harmony on to another track, and so on. Brian May explains: ‘The original tape had actually worn thin. People think it’s this legendary story, but you could hold the tape up to the light and see through it. Every time the tape went through the heads, more of the oxide was worn off.’ The tape was hurriedly transferred, but as May wistfully recalled later, ‘Every time Freddie added another “Galileo” we lost something.’
Queen rolled out of Rockfield in September. The studio’s traffic of loud rock bands continued, as ex-Hawkwind bassist Lemmy rolled in with his new group Motörhead. While the Queen album was far from complete, the band had found a potential name for it. According to Roy Thomas Baker, after a particularly tense day at Rockfield, the producer had persuaded the group to relax at his rented house nearby. Baker had one of the first video players, and over a few drinks, the group watched the 1935 Marx Brothers comedy movie A Night at the Opera. Considering the epic ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘the title seemed terribly apt’.
Back in London, Queen began a marathon spree of overdubbing at Sarm East and Scorpio Studios. Sarm’s assistant engineer Gary Langan (who, with Gary Lyons, would also help engineer part of the album) had first met Queen during Sheer Heart Attack. Working on A Night at the Opera was an even greater eye-opener. Sarm East was a tiny studio at the bottom end of Brick Lane in London’s East End. Day after day, the studio would be filled with an assortment of roadies, while Mercury, Baker and Mike Stone (Langan: ‘Rag, Tag and Bobtail’) would take up residence at the Trident-B console (later sold at an inflated price as ‘the board used to mix “Bohemian Rhapsody”’).
‘Freddie would only leave when Brian moved in,’ says Langan now. ‘For the rest of the time, he’d be sat there, for hours on end, drumming his painted fingernails on the desk, in his black satin trousers with the top button undone.’ Langan was taken aback by how Mercury dressed up even for a working session at the studio. Others also recall that Freddie’s hairbrush took up its place on the mixing desk in front of him.
Gary encountered the same level of perfectionism when May arrived at Sarm. ‘People talk about Michael Jackson spending two weeks on getting a drum track, but I can tell tales of Brian May spending a week on a guitar solo,’ he insists. Langan was also intrigued by the band’s dynamic. ‘For me, any band is made up of different chemical elements. In Queen, there was Roger Taylor, who was very much this wild child, and at the other end there was Mister Methodical Brian May. ‘I’d offer to make tea or coffee, and I’d go round the room taking orders from Freddie, Roger, Mike and whatever other hangers-on were there, and then I’d ask Brian what he wanted. Then there’d be this pause and then he’d ask, “How many teas are you making? How many coffees? … Two? …Three? Is it easier for you to make another coffee or another tea?” You could spend ten minutes just doing this. He was trying to make it easier for me, but in the end I’d be like, “Brian! Just tell me what you want!”’
It wasn’t until every section of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was spliced together that anyone, even Mercury, realised quite what they’d created. For Gary Langan, hearing the song in its six-minute entirety was ‘a red letter day – my jaw was on my chest’. But it left others perplexed. Ian Hunter had quit Mott The Hoople, and was about to co-opt most of Queen into playing on his next solo album, when he dropped by the studio.
‘They unleashed it on us in four huge speakers,’ he recalls. ‘I couldn’t make head nor tail of all that pomp and circumstance. It was like being run over by a truck. Fred said, “What did you think?” I didn’t have the faintest idea. He was like, “Did you not hear the third harmony in the second verse? There’s a slight variation there.�
�� I just looked at him aghast and said, “Give me a break.” He just didn’t realise. He’d been in the studio three days solid.’
Unflinching, Mercury announced that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ would be Queen’s next single. He had the rest of the band’s support, or nearly all of them (‘There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit’). Interviewed in the early 1990s, the late Peter Brown claimed that John Deacon was against releasing the song as a single without editing it down. Reportedly, when John Reid played ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to Elton John, the singer’s response was: ‘Are you fucking mad?’
However, for a band, whom Freddie claimed, ‘argued about everything – even the air that we breathe’, Queen presented a united front to EMI. Behind the bravado, they knew they were fighting for survival: they’d been bruised by the Trident deal and another US tour cancellation, and had to make an impact with their next release. ‘Tell me one other group that has done an operatic single?’ Mercury demanded. ‘I can’t think of anybody.’
Roy Thomas Baker defended the choice of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as a single by citing Richard Harris’s ‘MacArthur Park’, a 1968 hit that had tipped seven minutes. But his reasoning cut little ice with EMI: ‘Their comment was that the BBC wouldn’t play a song that long when the current formula was three and a half minutes.’
Paul Watts, general manager of EMI’s international division, was among the doubters. ‘I was expecting something very special,’ he said. ‘So when they played me “Bohemian Rhapsody”, my reaction was: “What the fuck’s this? Are you mad?”’ Watts and Queen’s staunch EMI ally Eric Hall both suggested an edit for radio. Queen flatly refused.
Eric Hall said that he smuggled a copy of the song to Kenny Everett, then a DJ on London’s Capital Radio. Roy Thomas Baker also claims that he invited Everett over to Scorpio Studios on London’s Euston Road to hear the song and solicit his opinion. Everett (who died in 1995) was apparently so impressed he told the band it was a guaranteed hit. He asked for a copy and the group agreed, on the half-hearted proviso that he didn’t play it on his radio show. The following day, Everett played a few seconds of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ before teasingly telling his listeners that he wasn’t allowed to play any more. After playing more snippets, Everett aired the whole song – all 5:55 minutes of it – a total of fourteen times over the weekend.
Ex-1984 guitarist John Garnham first heard ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ on the radio. Like Ian Hunter, he wasn’t sure. ‘I rang up Brian and said, “What have you put out this load of rubbish for?”’ he laughs. ‘That showed my judgement. But then I’d always had this thing in 1984 about playing songs that people could dance to. “Bohemian Rhapsody” seemed more removed from that than even Hendrix and Cream. I just didn’t get it at the time.’
Fans who went to buy the single the next morning were told that it wasn’t out yet. EMI’s hand had been forced. Everett had played the song repeatedly, scuppering the record company’s argument that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was too long for radio. EMI relented and on 31 October, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was released as Queen’s fifth single. It entered the chart at number 47. Ten days later, and with the single rising to number 17 and then 9, Queen realised they couldn’t perform the song live, and approached director Bruce Gowers to shoot a promo that could be sent to Top of the Pops. Gowers had previously directed the film of Queen’s Rainbow gig. In 1975 pop promo budgets normally ran to £600. According to Gowers, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ cost £3,500; excessive for the time, if piddling by today’s standards.
Gowers and his crew arrived at Elstree film studios where Queen were rehearsing for their next tour. The premise of the video was simple: to shoot the band playing live on the soundstage and to bring the cover of Queen II to life, animating the band members’ four heads and capturing Mercury in his Marlene Dietrich pose. While its multi-angle shots and trippy visual effects were pioneering for the time, the shoot took just three hours. ‘We started at seven-thirty,’ said Gowers. ‘Worked until ten-thirty and were in the pub by quarter to eleven.’
Among all the ‘Scaramouches’, the ‘bismillahs’ and ‘Galileos’ one question remained unanswered: What was ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ about? Evasive as ever, Mercury insisted that ‘people should just listen to it, think about it and then decide what it means’. Taylor claimed, ‘It’s obvious what it’s about.’ May had his own take on the song: ‘I don’t think we’ll ever know and if I knew I probably wouldn’t want to tell you anyway. But the great thing about a great song is that you relate it to your own personal experiences in your own life. I think that Freddie was certainly battling with problems in his personal life, which he might have decided to put into the song himself. But I don’t think at that point in time it was the best thing to do so he actually decided to do it later. I think it’s best to leave it with a question mark in the air.’ By late 1975, there were significant changes taking place in Mercury’s personal life, but he had no intention of making them public.
In the meantime, EMI’s head of press and promotions, Martin Nelson had been shepherding Queen to gigs and interviews since Sheer Heart Attack. In November, with the tour about to begin, Nelson was instructed to find a studio where Reid could meet the band and play them the final mix of A Night at the Opera. ‘I managed to get Radio City in Liverpool,’ recalls Martin. ‘We were given an off-air studio, but the studio itself was still being built and no one told me that the equipment had not yet been fully wired up. We all congregated at 11 a.m. John Reid turned up in a Rolls-Royce from London. There were no seats in the studio so we all had to sit on the floor. Then the tape machine was working, but only in mono, so it was just coming out on one speaker. Not the best way to hear your new album back for the first time. John was incensed.’ Nelson escaped the full extent of the manager’s wrath when Reid went outside and saw his car. ‘I was lucky. The studio was in Stanley Street, which could be a bit rough. Someone had stolen John’s hubcaps, so he became distracted by that.’
Queen began their 24-date tour on 14 November with two nights at the Liverpool Empire. In keeping with the grandiosity of their new single, the band’s stage set included more lights, more magnesium flares and more dry ice than before. Taylor’s kit was accessorised by a giant gong (just like John Bonham’s), while his snare drum would be filled with lager to create a fountain of liquid during his solo.
The show would begin with a taped introduction from best pal Kenny Everett (‘Ladies and gentlemen … a night at the opera’) and a recording of the operatic section of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, before the band careened onstage to finish the song, minus the final verse. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ would be reprised after a run of songs including ‘Ogre Battle’, ‘Flick of the Wrist’ and ‘Killer Queen’. Later, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ would be played in one piece, with the band leaving the stage for the taped operatic section (Brian May: ‘It gave us a chance to change the frocks’) and returning for the finale.
This time, Freddie’s stage outfits ran the gamut from the winged Hermes suit and slashed-neck black number, to eye-wateringly tight satin shorts (‘Rude? Meant to be, dear,’ he told a writer from Melody Maker) to a £200 Japanese kimono. Three dates in, at the Coventry Theatre, the kimono’s sash disappeared into the audience, and Pete Brown was dispatched to find a replacement; Mercury had to make do with a silk scarf. As Jonh (sic) Ingham wrote in Sounds: ‘Freddie reacts to his audience like an over-emotional actress – Gloria Swanson, or perhaps Holly Woodlawn playing Bette Davis. At the climax of the second night in Bristol, he paused at the top of the drum stand, looked back over the crowd and with complete, heartfelt emotion, placed his delicate fingers to lips and blew a kiss …’
Queen’s road crew now included Mott The Hoople’s ex-roadie Peter Hince, who had been appointed to look after Mercury and Deacon. Peter soon became au fait with Freddie’s perfectionism. ‘If something wasn’t working, then Freddie would immediately order another new one,’ he recalled. ‘Everything had to be the best, to do the best work.’
; This attention to detail also extended to the employment of a personal masseur named Steven, a moonlighting physiotherapist who had once worked for Rudolf Nureyev. However Queen’s PR Tony Brainsby was no longer required. Brainsby claimed that first hearing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ left him ‘feeling like a father whose wife had just given birth’. He’d looked after the band for three years, but with a change in the management regime, Brainsby’s place would be taken by a PR from John Reid Enterprises, Caroline Boucher. ‘Queen were so easy and pleasant and willing and keen,’ says Caroline now. ‘Elton John was just getting into quite a bad drug phase, so Queen were much simpler to deal with than Elton. But Freddie could have his moments if things weren’t going his way, as he was such a perfectionist.’
On 20 November, Top of the Pops broadcast the promo for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. On a day off between dates in Cardiff and Taunton, Queen and members of their support band Mr Big gathered in a hotel room to watch it on TV. It was the first time any of Queen had seen the finished promo. ‘There was much hilarity,’ remembered Brian May, as the group crowded around the set, watching themselves in action, their four disembodied heads ‘singing’ the operatic section, even the head of John Deacon, the one member of Queen who never sang in the studio, and whose microphone was always turned down onstage.
‘I loved the video. I thought it was wonderful,’ recalls Mr Big’s lead singer Jeff Pain, who performed under the stage name Dicken. In 1977 Mr Big would have a Top 5 hit with the single ‘Romeo’. In 1975, they were being managed by Mott The Hoople’s handler Bob Hirschman and touting their debut album Sweet Silence, a much heavier record than their later hit would suggest. ‘Fred told us how much he liked Sweet Silence, particularly a song of ours called “Zambia”. They used to keep putting the album on when we were travelling in the bus together. I used to feel embarrassed: “No, no, Freddie, please play Sheer Heart Attack …”’
