{"id":242876,"date":"2026-05-25T07:11:38","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T07:11:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/242876\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T07:11:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T07:11:38","slug":"bohemian-rhapsody-by-queen-the-story-behind-the-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/242876\/","title":{"rendered":"Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen: The Story Behind The Song"},"content":{"rendered":"

Queen<\/a>‘s Bohemian Rhapsody is more than just a masterpiece of songwriting \u2013 it\u2019s a work of sheer bravado that only someone with the bulletproof musical confidence of Freddie Mercury<\/a> could pull off, critics be damned.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think fundamentally Freddie had that great freedom,\u201d Brian May<\/a> told Classic Rock in 2013. \u201cDeep down, he knew he was right and he didn\u2019t care if people slagged him off. He knew he was having fun, he was searching for a dream that was not only his dream, but in some sense fulfilled our audience\u2019s dream. He was an instinctive showman, and he was fearless. Really fearless.\u201d<\/p>\n

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That fearlessness is what propelled Mercury to write Bohemian Rhapsody. It was essentially three wildly different pieces of music glued together: the opening piano section, which had its roots in a pre-Queen number known as The Cowboy Song that Mercury had sketched out in the late 60s; the guitar-heavy grand finale; and, sandwiched in between them, that celebrated operatic section.<\/p>\n

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Nothing like the latter had ever been attempted before in rock music, and Freddie Mercury was the only one who knew what it would sound like. Producer Roy Thomas Baker<\/a> recalled the singer playing him the opening section for the first time.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen he stopped and said, \u2018This is where the opera section comes in!\u2019 Then we went out to eat dinner,\u201d said Baker. \u201cIt was all in Freddie\u2019s mind,\u201d added Brian May.<\/p>\n

It took a huge amount of effort to get the sounds in Mercury\u2019s head onto tape. \u201cWorking with Queen, you can\u2019t put it in normal terms,\u201d said Baker. \u201cThey can\u2019t work like any normal group. They utilise each other\u2019s talents to the fullest. The middle operatic section in Bohemian Rhapsody, for example, took about six to seven days to record in total.\u201d<\/p>\n

As they worked, the section grew and grew. \u201cFreddie kept coming in with more \u2018Galileos\u2019 and we kept on adding to the opera section, and it just got bigger and bigger,\u201d recalled Baker. The tapes were overdubbed so many times they were virtually transparent by the end of the sessions.<\/p>\n

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Several days later, the whole thing was done. When someone at the band\u2019s label, EMI, expressed doubt regarding airplay of this \u2018mock opera\u2019, Freddie retorted: \u201cOf course they\u2019ll play it, my dear. It\u2019s going to be fucking huge.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was right, of course. It seems perverse now that anyone could ever have doubted the song\u2019s world-conquering potential, but back in the mid-1970s, Queen were still mere mortals. Though Mercury loudly professed his belief that A Night At The Opera<\/a> was the band\u2019s best album to date, proudly asserting they\u2019d used it to \u201cgo out, not restrict ourselves with any barriers and just do what we want to do,\u201d there was still a level of nervousness within the Queen camp about its lead single.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith Bohemian Rhapsody, we just thought it was a very strong song and so we released it,\u201d Mercury told journalist Harry Doherty upon its release in 1975. \u201cBut there were so many arguments about it. Somebody suggested cutting it down because the media reckons we have to have a three-minute single, but we want to put across Queen as songs. There is no point in cutting it. If you want to cut down Bohemian Rhapsody, it just won\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

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He was right again. While Bohemian Rhapsody wasn\u2019t strictly where Queen found their feet, it was the moment the public finally caught up with them. Having ignored those warnings from onlookers, including friend and DJ Kenny Everett, Queen soon found themselves vindicated. Everett played it 14 times on his radio show that very same weekend. An American DJ followed suit and suddenly the record company felt compelled to release a song they thought was commercial suicide. It was the Christmas No.1 in 1975, staying at the top of the UK charts for a record-breaking nine weeks.<\/p>\n

Today, Bohemian Rhapsody is more than just Queen\u2019s signature song: it\u2019s become as big as the band that created it. The song reached No.1 again in the wake of Mercury\u2019s death in 1991, and featured in an iconic scene in the hit movie Wayne\u2019s World the following year. When the band decided to make a big screen biopic in 2018, there was only one song they cold name it after.<\/p>\n

More than 40 years on, its daring fusion of heavy metal, show-tune balladry and light opera remains the high watermark in Queen\u2019s career, and a tribute to the band\u2019s collective imagination and desire to push everything as far as as they could. It broke the mould in 1975, and no-one has even dared to try and compete with it since.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople ask me if I get tired of playing it, and I say \u2018never,\u2019\u201d said Brian May. \u201cI find the same listening to it. It\u2019s a fabulous bit of music. I don\u2019t take that much of a credit for it, because it\u2019s Freddie\u2019s brainchild. We all worked on it damn hard, and we all performed on it very well, and we all put in some ideas, but really you\u2019re talking about something that happened in Freddie\u2019s fevered brain at a certain point in time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Queen‘s Bohemian Rhapsody is more than just a masterpiece of songwriting \u2013 it\u2019s a work of sheer bravado…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242877,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-242876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}