Since their 1973 debut album, Queen’s ambitious template had included bombastic classical references, falsetto freak-outs, and pagan mysticism. But at the beginning of 1975, they were, to be truthful, just another heavy rock act.
They were more interesting than most – largely thanks to their OTT frontman Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar to Indian parents) and Brian May’s explosive way with a guitar – but the band weren’t going anywhere, really.
And that’s when Bohemian Rhapsody happened!
The song used six studios and every mixing-desk trick available to layer instruments and 120 backing vocals, creating an audacious barrage of sound in a quasi-symphonic piece that even included bits of real opera.
And little prepared the public for either the single or the album it came from (A Night At The Opera).
The track was nearly six minutes long, and EMI was reluctant to release it until a tape was ‘leaked’ to London DJ Kenny Everett, who played it several times in its entirety. Subsequent demand tipped the record company’s hand, and it stayed at #1 in the UK for nine weeks.
It was also one of the first records to use a specially-made video. Bohemian Rhapsody went on to sell into the seven-figure bracket, and so it was that on album number four, Queen were well and truly launched into rock’s stratosphere.
Brian May had been developing what would become the “Queen guitar sound” since age 16, when he custom-built his own guitar from an old mahogany fireplace. He played with an old sixpence that would subsequently earn him untold millions.
The newspapers used the word “gaunt” until even the thickest hetero Queen fan started to twig that something was rotten in the state of Freddie.
At Mercury’s cremation, the exit music was D’Amor sull’ali rosee from Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore, sung by his old mucker Monserrat Caballe. None of your rock music.
Queen soldiered on. They recorded the Made In Heaven album with Mercury’s ghost and played “The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert” at Wembley on 20 April 1992.
The concert was televised to over 1.2 billion viewers worldwide and raised over £20,000,000 for AIDS charities.
It would be crazy to say that we didn’t appreciate how good Freddie Mercury was until George Michael and Lisa Stansfield attempted to fill his boots on These Are The Days Of Our Lives. But it was clear that Taylor, Brian May and John Deacon were just a bunch of brilliant songwriters and musicians without him.
For some, Queen came to represent the worst of credit-card rock excess in the 80s. It was the decade of Live Aid, the event where Queen proved a stadium needs a stadium rock act. Sadly, it was also the decade of AIDS.
In 1981, Freddie Mercury celebrated his 35th birthday in typically Mercurial style by flying some mates over to New York (his favourite city) on Concorde and partying for five days, during which they necked £30,000 worth of vintage champagne and Freddie ended up splayed on a bed of gladioli.
Untimely death lent his life a retrospective air of tragedy, of grand opera. In Lesley-Ann Jones’s posthumous biography, Paul Gambaccini recounts the night he realised Freddie Mercury was going to die.
It was 1984, and they were in London (gay) nightclub Heaven. Gambaccini asked the singer if he had tempered his promiscuous lifestyle since AIDS went overground. “Darling,” he replied. “My attitude is, fuck it.”
At the end of 2004, May and Taylor announced that they would reunite and return to touring in 2005 with Paul Rodgers (founder and former lead singer of Free and Bad Company).
The lineup endured until 2009. By 2013, the band were touring with vocalist Adam Lambert, whom they met via the US TV show American Idol.
Queen defined post-Beatles British rock, for better or for worse. More importantly, Freddie Mercury rewrote the job description for “frontman” and lived out every single one of his fantasies on behalf of Queen fans everywhere.
Freddie Mercury (Farrokh Bulsara)
Vocals, piano
Brian May
Guitar, vocals
John Deacon
Bass, vocals
Roger Meddows Taylor
Drums, vocals
And that’s when Bohemian Rhapsody happened!
Sadly, on 24 November 1991, the big disease with the little name took the queen out of Queen.
Untimely death lent his life a retrospective air of tragedy, of grand opera. In Lesley-Ann Jones’s posthumous biography, Paul Gambaccini recounts the night he realised Freddie Mercury was going to die.
