Queen Open Up on the Making of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’

T
heir real life was about to slip into fantasy, which was pretty much the plan. At the tail end of the 1960s, Roger Taylor and Freddie Bulsara would lie on the floor together, head to head, getting lost in Electric Ladyland, talking about their future. Maybe they’d share a bottle of wine, nothing stronger. “Fred and I were no good at smoking weed,” Taylor says, more than five decades later. “I used to think my head was on fire at the back. It never did agree.” 

Even before Bulsara joined the band that became Queen and renamed himself Freddie Mercury, he and Taylor shared a velvet-heavy fashion sense, a passion for Jimi Hendrix, and some fat-bottomed ambitions. “We wanted to be the best,” says Taylor. “We both really wanted success.” Queen’s drummer is, at the moment, sitting in a vast living room on his 18th-century estate in the British countryside, amid 48 wooded acres. He might not have made it here without the song we’re here to discuss, the moment Queen reached as far as any band ever dared, then went a bit further, and then added a few more “Galileos” for good measure: “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary. 

The track, first played on U.K. radio in October 1975 and squeezed onto a seven-­inch single at the end of that month, has become the most-streamed song from the 20th century, with more than 2.8 billion plays on Spotify alone. “Incredible,” Brian May says when I visit him the next day. “‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ doesn’t get old, does it? And I suppose that’s the magic for us. We’re lucky that we don’t get old.” He pauses and makes a slight correction. “The music doesn’t seem to get old.”

The statistic leaves little doubt: Queen’s biggest song is on its way to becoming the rock era’s most lasting artifact, Figaro, Beelzebub, and all. “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a five-minute-and-54-second remnant of a brief slice of time when musicians could afford to spend weeks slathering overdubs onto a single track, when engineers made edits with a razor on magnetic tape, when bands raced to push the limits of song structure and recording technology, and maybe when, as Taylor caustically argues, “you actually had to be good at your instrument — that doesn’t seem to be a necessary requisite these days.” Even as Queen labored over “Rhapsody” and the rest of their fourth album, A Night at the Opera, the clock was ticking. Two weeks before the album’s release, the Sex Pistols played their first show in London.

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The song is also, of course, an eternal encapsulation of the brilliance, wit, and pain of its lead voice and composer, Freddie Mercury, who died of complications from AIDS in 1991 when he was just 45. “In certain areas, we feel that we want to go overboard,” he said. “It’s what keeps us going really, darling.… We’re probably the fussiest band in the world.”

Cover image by ©Mick Rock/Estate of Mick Rock. Motion design by Sara K. Afridi. Image within video by Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images; Andrew Putler/Redferns/Getty Images; Watal Asanuma/Shinko Music/Getty Images, 7; © Queen Productions Ltd; Johnny Dewe Mathews/© Queen Productions Ltd

On a pleasant late-spring morning, Taylor’s side doors are flung open to his sprawling garden. Somewhere out there, not quite in sight, is a 20-foot-high fiberglass statue of Mercury that once advertised the We Will Rock You musical. Taylor is positive his late friend would’ve found its new home hilarious. Elsewhere among the greenery is the very same 60-inch gong we hear Taylor strike in the final seconds of “Rhapsody.”  “I remember Led Zeppelin had a gong,” Taylor says with a smirk. “So we had a much bigger gong. Pathetic one-up­manship, really.”

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His formerly blond hair is silver now, cropped short, with a matching beard, and he dresses like a retired mogul these days, in slim khakis and a gray button-down. Nearby is a grand piano, with a piece of paper bearing a scribbled, in-progress chord progression; behind him are books on the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

In 1969, Taylor played drums in a band called Smile alongside May, a brilliant, meticulous, curly-headed fellow Hendrix disciple, while Bulsara sang in the short-lived Ibex. The members of the two groups crammed into a series of London flats together, and all the while, Bulsara was trying to make his way into Smile. He was by no means an obvious choice. “The honest truth,” says Taylor, “is he was not a great singer at the time. He had this very powerful but uncontrolled sort of noise.”

Freddie kept a Hendrix photo on his bedroom mirror, drew pictures of him in his ruffled stage outfits, and saw him in concert at least 14 times. Hendrix was “living out everything I wanted to be,” he’d say later, not mentioning that Jimi was also an exception to rock stardom’s usual whiteness, a barrier he’d break as well. Bulsara was desperate to transform himself in that mold, to erase his recent past as a gawky, shy, bucktoothed kid . He rarely spoke of his highly particular background, a childhood of relative privilege in the British colony of Zanzibar, with Parsi parents who subscribed to the ancient faith of Zoroastrianism. (Like most ancient faiths, it’s never been big on queerness.) He spent ages eight through 16 at an elite boarding school in India, and he and his family fled to the U.K. in 1964 after a revolution in Zanzibar threw off British rule. 

As the Seventies began, Smile singer Tim Staffell quit, and Freddie officially joined the band, rechristening it Queen, to Taylor and May’s initial discomfort. The name was intended “in the regal sense,” Mercury would insist, not always convincingly. But what seems wildly obvious now about his sexuality was often less so in the early days, maybe even to the singer himself. Mercury met Mary Austin, who became his longtime girlfriend, in 1970, and she wasn’t the first woman his bandmates saw him date. At most, May has said, they had a “slight suspicion” about the truth.

By that summer, Freddie found his new last name, inspired by a line about “Mother Mercury” in “My Fairy King,” a song on Queen’s debut LP. “Freddie kind of made himself,” Taylor says. “He just forged this person, Freddie Mercury, out of seeming nowhere.”

The uncanny vocal blend that hit its peak on “Rhapsody” was born in echoey caverns on the coasts of England, during frequent visits to Taylor’s native Cornwall. Even before Staffell’s departure, May, Mercury, and Taylor started to sing in three-part harmony there. “We used to go into the caves and just sing stuff,” May says. “We kind of wallowed in the sound, this beautiful blend of harmonies. ­Particularly Freddie and I, I suppose, shared that passion.”

Queen’s final lineup wouldn’t cement itself until the following year, when bassist John Deacon joined, but they had already discovered the kind of music they wanted to make. “Our vision for Queen,” says May, “was you had this heaviness, this sort of power and exciting structure in the backing track, but above it was all this beautiful melody and harmony. So you got it all. That’s what we were looking for.” When May caught an early concert by prog-rock giants Yes, with their fusion of twisty riffs and Crosby, Stills, and Nash-inspired harmonies, he thought, “Well, that comes close.”

In December 1969, May, Mercury, and Taylor all went to see the Who play their then-new album Tommy at the London Coliseum. It was another piece of the map to their future — maybe not operatic rock, but a surging, bombastic rock opera, to be sure. Taylor still thinks the studio Tommy was underproduced, smaller-sounding than the Who’s onstage versions. That was one criticism no one would ever apply to his own band. (As May sees it, the Who’s earlier work was more of an influence: “Tommy‘s a bit late in our development,” he says.)

May and Taylor were also struck by the unearthly conglomeration of voices on another new piece of music from that year, the Beatles’ “Because.” “We were transfixed,” says May. “I can feel the shivers going up my spine. We thought, ‘Oh, my God, that has to be the most daring piece of pure harmony we’ve ever heard.’” To create a choral effect, the Beatles stacked their voices in multiple layers, a technique May, Taylor, and Mercury would soon push much further.  But Queen were just as influenced by tracks as early as 1964’s “This Boy,” and before that, the Beatles’ own heroes, from Buddy Holly to the Everly Brothers. “It was everything the Beatles did,” May says. “We were able to sort of take up where the Beatles left off.”

“We thought, ‘well, this is kind of ridiculous, so let’s go.’ We really enjoyed the silliness of it.”

Roger Taylor

THEY’VE HAD 50 YEARS to ponder it, but May and Taylor still haven’t nailed down what Mercury was singing about on “Bohemian Rhapsody.” “Sadly, we can’t ask Freddie,” Taylor says. The members of Queen never discussed their lyrics with one another, and Mercury was hardly eager to offer explanations. “People still ask me what ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is all about,” he said years later, “and I say I don’t know.” Any revelation, he suggested, “loses the myth and ruins a kind of mystique that people have built  up.” His late friend Kenny Everett, the DJ who debuted the song, said Mercury privately went as far as to dismiss the whole thing as “rhyming nonsense.”

John Reid, who became Queen’s manager in mid-1975, just before they began work on A Night at the Opera, was openly gay, and happened to be dating another client, Elton John. After Reid mentioned his own sexuality over dinner, Mercury casually came out to him. Mercury was still living with Mary Austin, but spending his evenings at the gay club Rods, where he met a young man named David Minns and began an affair. Reid is convinced that a widespread theory about “Bohemian Rhapsody” is correct, that the song is fundamentally about Mercury coming to terms with his sexual identity. A line like “Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth” all but begs for that reading. “I think that’s the key to it,” Reid says, “and a little bit of self-doubt, and the fact that he could never be that open to his parents.”

As Minns once wrote, Mercury “was tormented by some form of guilt that he had about his past life.” Those feelings seem to define “Rhapsody,” so much of which is addressed to “Mama.” It’s tempting to see the man shot dead in the opening lines as a stand-in for the end of Mercury’s pose as a straight man, even if he apparently began writing that lyric in the late Sixties. “He was saying goodbye to that life,” Reid says. (Mercury sometimes described himself as bisexual rather than gay, a label that could be supported by a new book’s claims he sired a “secret daughter” circa 1976. Reid simply doesn’t believe the story, however, or even the idea that Mercury could’ve hidden it. “ The whole thing is completely ridiculous,” he says. “There were too many people that knew what Freddie was up to within his circle.” Taylor and May declined to comment on the book.)

For Taylor, almost all speculation about “Bohemian Rhapsody” is “overinterpretation.” “He was writing a fairly intense, ruminative song,” he says. “And then we put all these amazingly daft bits in the middle. So many people have been wondering, ‘What’s the secret meaning?’ I’m not sure there is one. I think what’s there is plain, and the rest of it is nonsensical in a sort of Lewis Carroll way. ‘Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me.’ For me, it’s all nice imagery, really. I wouldn’t go too much further.” (“It doesn’t necessarily mean I study demonology and things,” Mercury once said. “I just love the word Beelzebub! Great word, isn’t it?”)

May, who has a habit of speaking of his long-gone friend in the present tense, is less certain about it all. “He’s creating something beautiful in his mind,” he says. “And he’s using everything that’s in his mind. He’s using his pain, his frustration, his confusion. It’s not very literal. It’s not very conscious. If you listen to ‘My Fairy King,’ is that part of his inner fantasy in the same way?” (“Someone … [has] broken my fairy circle ring/And shamed the king in all his pride,” Mercury sang on that one. “I cannot run/I cannot hide.”) “It’s equally oblique. Freddie doesn’t feel the need to explain himself, or be direct.  Sometimes he loves the way his voice sounds doing those syllables. It’s all jumbled up in a sort of joy of creation. That’s the way I see Freddie.”

In the middle section, some kind of battle is clearly underway, with our hero’s body and soul at stake, and a “monstrosity” in pursuit. But any lyrical intensity is undercut, to say the least, by the playfulness of Mercury’s vocals and the gleefully absurd operatic bits. A recently auctioned handwritten draft of the song, scribbled in pencil on airline stationery, suggests that “scaramouche,” “Figaro,” “Galileo,” “magnifico,” and “fandango” came from brainstorming Italianate or opera-associated words, with more concern for sound and rhyme than meaning. Mercury also wrote down “belladonna,” “castanetta,” and “barcaraola” (he probably meant “barcarolle”) among other options. Without all of that whimsical counterpoint, he might not have allowed the glimpse of the abyss that precedes it, one that somehow still breezes by some listeners: “I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all.”

Mercury was proud to acknowledge that he conducted some research into opera for the song, without ever going into specifics. “Something like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ didn’t just come out of thin air,” he said. Childhood piano lessons gave him some previous knowledge of classical music, and even the name he chose for the song winks at that world. The same auctioned lyric sheets show Mercury first considered, then crossed out, the tongue-in-cheek title “Mongolian Rhapsody,” almost certainly a twist on Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. (When a tuxedoed Bugs Bunny plops down at a piano to perform “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” in the legendary 1946 short Rhapsody Rabbit, he throws in a reference to a character from one of Mozart’s operas: Figaro.)

Mercury was well aware of the uniqueness of his project. “If you really listen to the operatic bit, there are no comparisons, which is what we want,” he said. “But we don’t set out to be outrageous – it’s in us.” At moments — magnifico! — the song veers all the way into comedy, with camp self-awareness that eludes, for instance, 1971’s “Stairway to Heaven,” which is quite solemn about the bustles in its hedgerows. “I think it’s healthy to have that kind of sense of humor about what you do,” says May. “It doesn’t mean you’re not serious.”

“We thought, ‘Well, this is kind of ridiculous, so let’s go,’” adds Taylor. “We really enjoyed the silliness of it.” 

BRIAN MAY HAD A MASTERPIECE in his head, and he couldn’t quite get it right. In mid-1975, he began writing a lengthy prog-rock journey with an intricate structure, freaky vocal effects, and explosive peaks. But it definitely wasn’t “Bohemian Rhapsody.” In the earliest stages of A Night at the Opera, Queen decamped to Ridge Farm, an hour outside of London, to get some writing done. They were fresh escapees from a management deal that left them impoverished and in debt, even after scoring a huge hit with 1974’s “Killer Queen.” 

“We were incredibly poor,” says May. “We had nothing. Everybody thought we were rolling in it.” He recalls the band’s old manager, the late Norman Sheffield, quibbling over new drumsticks for Taylor, and refusing to buy Mercury a new piano. But Reid, their new manager, persuaded EMI Records to advance enough money to allow the band to create without limits for the first time. He told them to go off and handle the music while he dealt with their old contracts. In his memoir, Sheffield claimed the band were about to get a big payday either way, but left because Mercury was impatient. The singer savaged Sheffield on A Night at the Opera’s “Death on Two Legs,” howling, “You suck my blood like a leech,” and the manager filed a quickly settled libel suit.

At the farm, May continued to struggle with his ambitions for his track “Prophet’s Song,” a warning to “people of the earth,” based on an apocalyptic dream, that would turn out to be two minutes longer than “Rhapsody.” He was feeling blocked as he recovered from an ulcer, and it didn’t necessarily help that one of his bandmates was having a lot more luck. Queen is one of the only major rock bands where every single member wrote hit singles over the years, but they didn’t get there without some friction. “We were quite competitive, of course,” May says, softly. “ I could hear Freddie hammering away at ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’  We’re all in separate rooms, doing our bits of writing. He’s got a piano in the yard someplace outdoors, and I can hear him thrashing away, and it’s getting more and more complex and more and more frenetic. And I’m thinking, ahhhhh. I have this vision for ‘Prophet’s Song,’ but I can’t bring it to life. It was a difficult time for me.”

May is in a garage-like carriage house on his own country estate, not far from Taylor’s. He’s sitting at a simple wooden table in a little room he swears is bigger than the apartment he shared with his girlfriend just before recording A Night at the Opera. There’s a few astronomy-themed photos on the walls, along with plaques celebrating sales milestones for May’s composition “We Will Rock You” and Queen’s Greatest Hits. His hair, gray now but still the same curly mop, is wet from a morning swim.  “I had some physical problems,” he says, an understated allusion to a stroke he suffered last August that temporarily impaired his guitar playing. “And it seems to make a huge difference, working out.”

A badge on May’s jacket commemorates the NASA space probe New Horizons’ 2015 flyby of Pluto, to which — rather incredibly — he contributed data analysis. In 2007, he completed his astrophysics Ph.D., decades after appalling his family by leaving it behind for Queen. “My dad said, ‘You are throwing your life away,’” May says. His father still felt that way by 1975, which only added to the band’s general sense about A Night at the Opera: “It was make or break,” Taylor says.

May lights up when I mention my fondness for “Prophet’s Song,” which, to be fair, has always had its fans, including Mercury, who once mentioned it as a possible single. Rolling Stone had a rocky relationship with Queen in those days — the otherwise brilliant critic Dave Marsh called them “the first truly fascist rock band” in 1979, in what now feels like a baffling overreaction to “We Will Rock You” — but our review of A Night at the Opera was positive. Somehow, though, it didn’t mention “Bohemian Rhapsody” at all, instead naming “Prophet’s Song” as the LP’s best track.  “It’s the shadowy other universe really, that song,” May says. “It’s never got that much attention, because of the behemoth on the other side.”

As May overheard the birth of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” he couldn’t help turning his attention from his own song to Mercury’s. Guitar orchestrations and solos started brewing. “The idea for all the instrumental stuff in ‘Rhapsody’ was growing while I was listening to him developing the song,” he says. “Freddie had some amazingly lateral thought processes.  It was always easier for me to play on his songs than mine, ’cause there was so much stimulation coming.”

The winding, heavy riff after the opera section, the one that would give the song one of its many second lives when Mike Myers and Dana Carvey headbanged to it in 1992’s Wayne’s World, was Mercury’s own invention. It never felt quite right under May’s fingers. “‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is never that easy to play, even after all these years,” he says. “I still have to keep my wits about me or I’ll fall off the train.”

Queen next headed to Rockfield Studios, on another farm, this one in Wales, to begin recording. The basic tracks — drums, bass, piano — came quickly. Mercury embedded the melodies for the operatic bits in his piano parts, with his percussive performance driving the momentum. “Forget about the ridiculous outfits, the showmanship,” says Taylor. “First and foremost, he was a brilliant musician. That becomes totally camouflaged by the outrageous-frontman thing.”

From there, the band bounced between multiple studios in London, a move that helped promote the myth that A Night at the Opera was “the most expensive album ever made.” Reid, who would know, says that’s nonsense. “There was no waste,” Reid says. “They weren’t wasteful musicians.… I’m sure the Stones spent more.” 

“I remember Led Zeppelin had a gong,” Taylor says with a smirk. “So we had a much bigger gong. Pathetic one-upmanship, really.”

Fortunately for Queen, studios didn’t charge by the overdub. “I think between the three of us we re-created a sort of 160- to 200-piece-choir effect,” said Mercury, who somehow kept the entire arrangement in his head — at most, he scribbled down notation for some of the harmony parts. They worked on the operatic section alone for three weeks straight, including weekends, with the band collaborating with producer Roy Thomas Baker (who died earlier this year) and the late engineer Mike Stone.  “ The fact that certain bits are only sung at certain times and that they would appear and disappear?” says Gary Langan, the sessions’ assistant engineer. “That’s unfathomable to me to have that all in your head.”

“It seemed to go on forever,” says Taylor. “ The way we would do it, all three of us would sing every part, which gave it a real thickness, a body.” The exceptions, as shown in the 2018 Bohemian Rhapsody biopic, were the highest “Galileos,” which only Taylor could manage. And the process did get to the drummer, who threw a tantrum that, if anything, is underplayed in the film, according to Langan.  “He really did lose it,” the engineer says. “He was furious. It was up a few notches from what you see in the movie.”

Besides that, the only real moments of tension had to do with the song’s extravagant length for a single. “You had Fred, who was staunchly holding out for six minutes, of course,” says Langan. “And a faction of the band going, ‘You know what, Fred? I think you’ve gone one step too far here.’” Taylor even recalls Deacon attempting an edit, which didn’t go over well with the others. 

 The band was concerned about their record label’s reaction, but despite the movie’s scene with a Myers cameo as a contemptuous exec, Reid insists there was no confrontation. “There were two or three promotion men subscribing to ‘I’d say it’s way too long,’” he says. “In the end, they went with what we told them.” Some of the strongest objections, in fact, came from Elton John. “He said, ‘Are you fucking crazy?’” Reid recalls. “‘That will never be a hit. It’s too long!’ He was adamant.” 

The band’s final innovation was to record a music video for the song, a rare move in 1975. (Years later, a Wayne’s World re-edit of the footage would relaunch the song in the United States.) They spent only four hours on it, at Elstree Studios, the same spot where much of Star Wars would shoot a year later. Taylor, again, didn’t have much fun. “I had to be stripped to the waist and covered in baby oil,” he says. “And it was, like, 1:30 in the morning.”

May recorded all of the song’s many layered guitar parts with his Red Special, the guitar he’d built from scratch with his dad as a teenager, using wood from an antique fireplace. When he takes me by his home studio after we talk, I inquire about its whereabouts. “Oh, you wanna see?” he asks, sending an employee off for it. When it arrives, moments later, May plays a few suspended chords, talking about the influence of the Who’s Pete Townshend. “She’s a good old friend,” he says. Then he puts it in my hands. It’s heavy with dense wood and the weight of history, but I dare to play the first few notes of the “Bohemian Rhapsody” solo, feeling my fingers on the buttery fretboard in the exact spots May put them. May raises his eyebrows, and laughs. “Ah, good,” he says. “That could work!”

SINCE 2011, QUEEN HAVE toured the world several times with Adam Lambert on vocals, and they have good news for their fans: “ I don’t think we’re done,” says Taylor. “And I don’t think we’re gonna say, you know, final farewell tour or whatever. ’Cause it never is, is it?” They still haven’t released new Queen music with Lambert, but May says that idea is “always in the mind. Not many people know, but Adam and we have been in the studio trying things. Nothing really materialized so far. Some things are meant to be and some things are not.” 

May is weary of the road, but still wants to perform. “ I’ve had 50 years of touring and there’s a part of me that thinks it’s enough,” he says. “I don’t like the idea that you wake up in your hotel room and you’re trapped. I had a few experiences recently where stuff happened at home with my family and I could not go home. It got under my skin and I just thought, ‘I’m not sure if I want this anymore.’ I feel like I’ve given up my freedom too many times. So my feeling at the moment is I don’t want to tour as such. I still want to play shows. I still want to innovate.”

To that end, May has his mind set on a Queen residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas, which awed him with its 360-degree screens and other tech innovations when he caught a gig there by some classic-rock peers. “ I’m very keen on the Sphere,” May says. “It’s got my mind working. I sat there watching the Eagles, thinking, ‘We should do this. The stuff that we could bring to this would be stupendous.’ So, yeah, I would like to do it. We’re having conversations.”

Still absent from those conversations is John Deacon. Always the quietest member of Queen, he retreated into a private life after Mercury’s death; he hasn’t given an interview in decades, and he doesn’t speak to his bandmates at all, even socially. “I  think both Roger and I find it quite hard, but he doesn’t want to and we have to respect that,” May says. “He wants to be separate. He’s still part of the destiny of the band, though. If we’re trying to make business decisions, he’s always consulted, but it happens through the management or through our accountant. We don’t speak, which is a shame, but we do know that we have his blessing. That’s important.”

Even Mercury somehow feels more present in their lives. “Brian and I often think he’s in the room in the corner,” says Taylor. “’Cause we know exactly what he’d say and what he’d think. Even though it was all those years ago now that we lost him.” To this day, Mercury has a habit of popping up in May’s dreams. “It’s always very prosaic,” he says. “It is never a surprise that he’s there. I don’t think ‘You shouldn’t be here.’ It’s just like he’s part of my life, as he always was.”

Mercury would sometimes echo his “nothing really matters to me” lyric by airily downplaying the importance of his music, ­claiming none of it deserved to last, even “Bohemian Rhapsody.” “He used to say, ‘Oh, my art is like fish-and-chip paper,’” says May. “You remember that quote? He says, ‘It is disposable.’ But no, he didn’t think so. Not really.” He sighs aloud, thinking about his friend, and repeats his thought. “Not Freddie.”

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Senior writer BRIAN HIATT interviewed James Gunn for the July-August issue. He is the host of Rolling Stone Music Now, available wherever you find podcasts.