“Bohemian Rhapsody” - Queen
Album: A Night At The Opera
Released 1975 (Farewell Concert - Extended Edition)

Freddie Mercury wrote the lyrics, and there has been a lot of speculation as to their meaning. Many of the words appear in the Qu'ran. “Bismillah” is one of these and it literally means “In the name of Allah”. The word “Scaramouch” means “A stock character that appears as a boastful coward”. “Beelzebub” is one of the many names given to The Devil.

Mercury's parents were deeply involved in Zoroastrianism, and these Arabic words do have a meaning in that religion. His family grew up in Zanzibar, but was forced out by government upheaval in 1964 and they moved to England. Some of the lyrics could be about leaving his homeland behind. Guitarist Brian May seemed to suggest this when he said in an interview about the song: “Freddie was a very complex person: flippant and funny on the surface, but he concealed insecurities and problems in squaring up his life with his childhood. He never explained the lyrics, but I think he put a lot of himself into that song.”

Another explanation is not to do with Mercury's childhood, but his sexuality - it was around this time that he was starting to come to terms with his bisexuality, and his relationship with Mary Austin was falling apart.

Whatever the meaning is, we may never know - Mercury himself remained tight-lipped, and the band agreed not to reveal anything about the meaning. Mercury himself stated, “It's one of those songs which has such a fantasy feel about it. I think people should just listen to it, think about it, and then make up their own minds as to what it says to them.” He also claimed that the lyrics were nothing more than “Random rhyming nonsense” when asked about it by his friend Kenny Everett, who was a London DJ.

The band were always keen to let listeners interpret their music in a personal way to them, rather than impose their own meaning on songs, and May stated that the band agreed to keep the personal meaning behind the song private out of respect for Mercury.

Mercury may have written “Galileo” into the lyrics for the benefit of Brian May, who is an astronomy buff. Galileo is a famous astronomer known for being the first to use a refracting telescope.

The backing track came together quickly, but Queen spent days overdubbing the vocals in the studio using a 24-track tape machine. The analog recording technology was taxed by the song's multitracked scaramouches and fandangos: by the time they were done, about 180 tracks were layered together and &ldbounced” down into sub-mixes. Brian May recalled in various interviews being able to see through the tape as it was worn so thin with overdubs. Producer Roy Thomas Baker also recalls Mercury coming into the studio proclaiming, “oh, I've got a few more 'Galileos' dear!” as overdub after overdub piled up.

Was Freddie Mercury coming out as gay in this song? Lesley-Ann Jones, author of the biography Mercury, thinks so.

Jones says that when she posed the question to Mercury in 1986, the singer didn't give a straight answer, and that he was always very vague about the song's meaning, admitting only that it was “about relationships”. (Mercury's family religion, Zoroastrianism, doesn't accept homosexuality, and he made efforts to conceal his sexual orientation, possibly so as not to offend his family.)

After Mercury's death, Jones says she spent time with his lover, Jim Hutton, who told her that the song was, in fact, Mercury's confession that he was gay. Mercury's good friend Tim Rice agreed, and offered some lyrical analysis to support the theory:

“Mama, I just killed a man” - He's killed the old Freddie he was trying to be. The former image.

“Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead” - He's dead, the straight person he was originally. He's destroyed the man he was trying to be, and now this is him, trying to live with the new Freddie.

“I see a little silhouetto of a man” - That's him, still being haunted by what he's done and what he is.

Queen made a video for the song to air on Top Of The Pops, a popular British music show, because the song was too complex to perform live - or more accurately, be mimed live on TOTP. Also, the band would be busy on tour during the single's release and thus unable to appear.

The video turned out to be a masterstroke, providing far more promotional punch than a one-off live appearance. Top Of The Pops ran it for months, helping keep the song atop the charts. This started a trend in the UK of making videos for songs to air in place of live performances.

The video was very innovative. It was the first where the visual images took precedence over the song. It was based on their Queen II album cover, with the four band members looking up into the shadows. Directed by Bruce Gowers, it was shot in 3 hours for £3,500 at the band's rehearsal space.

Gowers got the gig because he was one of the few people who had experience working on music videos - he ran a camera on a few Beatles promotional clips, including the one for “Paperback Writer”. The two big effects used in the video were the multiple images that appear in the “thunderbolts and lightning section”, which were created by putting a prism in front of the camera lens, and the feedback effect where the image of the singer travels to infinity, which was done by pointing a camera at a monitor (like audio feedback, this is something you usually tried to avoid, but when harnessed for artistic purposes, was innovative). At the time, the video looked high-tech and futuristic. It was also the first music "video" in the sense that it was shot on video instead of film.

This was Queen's first Top 10 hit in the US. In the UK, where Queen was already established, it was #1 for 9 weeks, a record at the time.

This got a whole new audience when it was used in the 1992 movie Wayne's World, starring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey. In the film, Wayne and his friends lip-synch to it in his car (the Mirth Mobile), spasmodically head-bobbing at the guitar solo. As a result of the movie, it was re-released as a single in the US and charted at #2 (“Jump” by Kris Kross kept it out of #1).

In America, this marked a turning point in Queen's legacy. The band's 1982 album Hot Space contained a side of disco-tinged tracks at a time when disco was anathema to rock fans. The album had disappointing sales in the U.S., and also cost Queen in credibility. Their tour to support the album would be Freddie Mercury's last with Queen in America, and the band was largely forgotten there for the rest of the decade. When Wayne's World revived “Bohemian Rhapsody”, American listeners remembered how cool Queen really was, and they the ringing endorsement from Wayne and Garth to back them up.

At 5:55, this was a very long song for radio consumption. Queen's manager at the time, John Reid, played it to another artist he managed, Elton John, who promptly declared: “are you mad? You'll never get that on the radio!”

Brian May recalled recording “Bohemian Rhapsody” in Q Magazine March 2008: “That was a great moment, but the biggest thrill for us was actually creating the music in the first place. I remember Freddie coming in with loads of bits of paper from his dad's work, like Post-it notes, and pounding on the piano. He played the piano like most people play the drums. And this song he had was full of gaps where he explained that something operatic would happen here and so on. He'd worked out the harmonies in his head.”

Thanks to this track, A Night At The Opera was the most expensive album ever made at the time. They used 6 different studios to record it. Queen did not use any synthesizers on the album, which is something they were very proud of.

In 2002, this came in #1 in a poll by Guinness World Records as Britain's favorite single of all time. John Lennon's “Imagine” was #2, followed by The Beatles' “Hey Jude” .

The name “Bohemian” in the song title seems to refer not to the region in the Czech republic, but to a group of artists and musicians living roughly 100 years ago, known for defying convention and living with disregard for standards. A “Rhapsody” is a piece of Classical music with distinct sections that is played as one movement. Rhapsodies often have themes.

You can make the case that the song title is actually a parody, and a clever one at that. There is a rhapsody by the composer Franz Liszt called “Hungarian Rhapsody” , and “Bohemia” is a kingdom that is near Hungary and was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Furthermore, “Bohemian” is an adjective for something unusual or against convention, and the song is just that.

So, “Bohemian Rhapsody” could be a clever title that not only parodies a famous work but also describes the song. In a nod to the Liszt composition, Queen would go on to release a live DVD/CD package in 2012 titled “Hungarian Rhapsody”, featuring their famous shows behind the Iron Curtain in Budapest on the Magic tour in 1986.

The song is one of Freddie Mercury's great mysteries - according to everyone in the band, only he knew truly how it would come together, and according to some sources, its genesis could have come many years earlier. Chris Smith, the keyboard player in Mercury's first band Smile, claimed that Freddie would play several piano compositions at rehearsals, including one called “The Cowboy Song”, which started with the line, “mama, just killed a man”.

Queen official site / Rock & Roll Hall of Fame / Rolling Stone / Billboard / Song Facts / Wikipedia

Image: “A Night at the Opera (album)” by Queen