(Credits: LastFM)
Tue 31 March 2026 8:32, UK
It’s a rarity in life. It will only happen maybe a dozen times: that moment when you hear a song for the very first time, and it pulls the floor out from under you.
Flawed and frenzied, you’ll race back to the proverbial jukebox and drop in another coin, hoping to embalm yourself in the rhapsodic torpor you have just experienced, like a baby after its first addled encounter of ice cream. This is music at its best, and when a band creates a song like that, even they find themselves wrapped up in it. Just ask Brian May.
Queen didn’t get off to a flier. The band’s debut album had been a disappointment, leaving them “frustrated”. Management were desperately trying to label them as the new Led Zeppelin and then the new ABBA when that didn’t stick. Queen, meanwhile, didn’t want to be the new anything.
They just wanted to be Queen. But what exactly was that? What was the essence of the group that an A&R worker could happily note down on their docket and pass on to the press? Well, they were a group in the traditional sense, first and foremost. Each member brought their own array of influences, inspirations, and ideas. Queen functioned as a true ensemble.
Freddie Mercury’s favourite songs were as disparate as ‘Kashmir’ by Led Zeppelin through to ‘Goin’ Back’ by Dusty Springfield and ‘Vesti La Giubba’ sung by Carreras, Domingo, Pavarotti and Mehta. May was enamoured with the technical stylings of Ritchie Blackmore and the “incredible” Rory Gallagher.
(Credits: Far Out / Spotify)
While Roger Taylor had his eye on traditional songwriting prowess in the form of favoured tracks like ‘Jealous Guy’ by John Lennon, and even, in time, futurist innovation like ‘Born Slippy’. John Deacon was more than happy to facilitate from the shadows, his eclectic taste and understated attitude rendering him the perfect glue.
This created a bold and magnetic melee, defined, more than anything, by a sense of envigorating drama. The song that sits proudly in the centre of this magical and unique Venn is ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. It is one of those rare songs that hit you like the moment you take one step too many when climbing a flight of stairs.
The band’s breakthrough masterpiece?
The wavering pantomime of the production pulls you into the rollercoaster ride of the song’s wavering emotion. Above all, it refuses to go unnoticed. After a shaky beginning where the band struggled to make their true identity known, it burst through like an assegai and made them unmistakable.
It was pop’s first opera, and that meant it couldn’t possibly be classified as ‘the new’ anything. It was too pioneering singular for that, which is why May figures the group live and die by it.
“It encapsulates a lot of what we are, what we have been, and what our dream was. There are a lot of facets to Queen’s music. We entered into so many areas believing we could innovate. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ has so much content,” he says. It’s a mini-opera, but it says a lot about its appeal that the anthem – so technically ambitious that they had to adapt it radically for live performances – still managed to top the UK charts upon release, despite Elton John claiming it was surely far too long and experimental to budge the needle of mainstream public interest.
The anthem waltzes through hard rock, art rock, prog and simple pop modes. It switches between four keys and 4/4 meter is modulated on more than one occasion. None of that should work. It should be too confusing and convoluted for any listener. But somehow, it achieves exactly what its title implies: an exultant journey through modern boho artistry. That’s all Queen ever wanted to do.
“It felt very dangerous and very exciting. So we wanted all that. We wanted that base layer of what’s new.”
Brian May
As May explains, “We had a vision in our heads and a collective dream in the very early days because we were in an atmosphere of change, innovation, and new freedoms. We grew up with our influences as everybody does, but we were lucky enough to grow up just as rock and roll was being born.” With the song, the group aimed to push it beyond its infancy towards something more technical without ever losing sight of the liberating energy of the Promethean heroes of the genre.
This is exactly why May notes that there are flavours of Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and Elvis Presley in the mix. It is, in many ways, the band realising the ambitions that these luminaries stirred up. “We had a dream that we would be songwriters. We would be creators. And underneath all that would be something very imponderable, thrilling, heavy, and challenging. I suppose inspired by all the stuff that was happening as we were starting to evolve as a group, which was that heavy music was being born. It never was there before,” May told Vulture.
“It’s hard to imagine a world where we just didn’t have heavy music here,” he adds. But the world had decreed its arrival as necessary. The song was written mere months after the horrors of the Vietnam War had ‘officially’ come to a close. So, while lyrics like “Mama, just killed a man” might be the source of endless mystery today, death seemed so commonplace at the time that such a line was only rendered startling by virtue of its delivery and the change of pace that precedes it.
In its own way, rock ‘n’ roll was borne from the heaviness of the modern world. As May explains, “You wouldn’t call Buddy Holly heavy now, although at the time, people thought he was very cutting edge and dangerous. In that sense, it was. You also wouldn’t think the Shadows were heavy. It’s purely instrumental music, but at the time it had a great edge to it. It felt very dangerous and very exciting. So we wanted all that. We wanted that base layer of what’s new – like the beginnings you can find on Jeff Beck’s Truth album, on Led Zeppelin’s first album, or Black Sabbath’s first album.”
All of that is channelled into ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, a song that you wouldn’t even describe as heavy itself. However, when looked at in the cold light of day, it’s so dense that you could drop an anvil into it and never live to hear it hit the bottom. For anyone who thinks Queen aren’t deep, then this is the song to point them towards.
It is full of imagination, gusto, and technique. In an age of punk, that product of that technicality was also notable, with Taylor explaining that to pull the song off “you actually had to be good at your instrument”. Vitally, that prowess brough about a heavy emotional weight. It was even inspired by Abbey Road.
“We wanted to have that as our bedrock,” May says of the heaviness at the heart of the song and band. “But we wanted to build on it with melody and harmony and tunes, which move people, tell stories, and make people feel something that they never quite felt before,” he added of its Beatleseque nature.
Concluding, “So it’s a big dream. Collectively, we started to work on achieving that dream from the first album onward.”
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was when they realised it most purely.
