{"id":49927,"date":"2025-11-24T04:24:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T04:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/49927\/"},"modified":"2025-11-24T04:24:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T04:24:08","slug":"inside-the-big-issue-queens-bohemian-rhapsody-at-50","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/49927\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Big Issue: Queen&#8217;s Bohemian Rhapsody at 50"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cYeah, he loved the whole thing,\u201d says his bandmate, Queen drummer Roger Taylor. \u201cYou know, the house would have been full of all these decorations. He loved his decorations. And he had a great, unerring eye.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Queen had special reason to celebrate 50 years ago, when their creation \u201cBohemian Rhapsody\u201d changed the world. Number one in the UK for nine weeks between November 1975 and January 1976, it\u2019s the epic that turned the group into global superstars and household names. It\u2019s the third-best selling single in British history. And until Wham! reached the top spot in 2023 with the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bigissue.com\/culture\/music\/wham-last-christmas-single-40-years\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">near-40-year-old Last Christmas<\/a>, it had been the only single to be the UK Christmas number one twice in its original form.<\/p>\n<p>So how would <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bigissue.com\/culture\/music\/roger-taylor-on-elvis-freddie-mercurys-belief-in-queen-and-his-weekend-with-bowie\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Freddie<\/a> be celebrating the anniversary if he was still around? Queen guitarist Brian May grins and says, \u201cI think that he\u2019d probably open a bottle of Cristal. He would be very, very happy, and I can see that kind of wicked smile on his face, like, yeah, we did it after all, didn\u2019t we?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In this week\u2019s Big Issue, Brian May and Roger Taylor reflect on the making of a seasonal classic.<\/p>\n<p>        <a href=\"https:\/\/bigissue.secure.darwin.cx\/BIGBFCTA25\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><\/p>\n<p>                                                    <img decoding=\"async\" class=\"polaris__image image-cta__image\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/BI-Black-Friday-Subs_800x250.jpg\"  alt=\"\" height=\"320\" width=\"1024\" loading=\"lazy\"\/><\/p>\n<p>        <\/a><\/p>\n<p>We look at Christmas past , present and future<\/p>\n<p>In the tradition of the greatest of all Christmas morality tales (maybe aside from the one that came out of the manger) we look to Christmas past, present and future to see how the key period sits. From Labubus to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bigissue.com\/opinion\/artificial-intelligence-world-get-real-john-bird\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">AI<\/a>, here\u2019s what we learned.<\/p>\n<p>Revealed: The new drugs crisis hitting Britain\u2019s creaking prisons<\/p>\n<p>Prisons have rarely been more political. A wave of mistaken releases led justice secretary David Lammy to describe the system as \u201cunder horrendous strain\u201d \u2013 and his shadow <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bigissue.com\/news\/housing\/robert-jenrick-migration-rent\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Robert Jenrick<\/a> to post a video of the minister as a clown. But beyond the Commons chamber, something hidden is happening at the point of release: prisoners are dying within a single day of being let out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cYeah, he loved the whole thing,\u201d says his bandmate, Queen drummer Roger Taylor. \u201cYou know, the house would&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49928,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[28026,10865,2538,9,24,63,666,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-49927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-from-the-magazine","tag-interview","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queen","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49927","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=49927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}