Why ‘ Bohemian Rhapsody ‘ the queen song that terrified Queen’s record label

Why ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’: the song that terrified Queen’s record label

Picture the scene: you’re an up-and-coming producer, Roy Thomas Baker, with a few hit records to your name, including Free’s Fire and Water. Your rising star, however, is a flamboyant band of art-metal eccentrics called Queen, who are steadily becoming a big deal. They’re fun to be around, and one day, you find yourself at their singer Freddie Mercury’s flat. Freddie plays you a song he’s working on—a pleasant piano ballad about cowboys. You see potential in it. Then Freddie turns to you with a mischievous grin and declares, “This is where the opera part comes in, darling!”

Now, the truth is that Queen were already weird enough to make this work. Their first couple of albums contain a number of narrative songs taking place in the fantasy kingdom of Rhye. The second side of their second album opened with a song called ‘Ogre Battle’, which was about, you guessed it, battling ogres. When it became clear that Queen’s album A Night At The Opera was going to contain a near six-minute song of five separate suites, going from piano ballad to opera to heavy metal, that was actually par for the course for Freddie and Co.

As with everything, context is key, though. Queen had a few minor hits to their name; their previous album, Sheer Heart Attack, had been a big deal and the deathless ‘Killer Queen’ had hit number two on the UK charts. Being a mid-level band with a few hits was never going to be enough for a band fronted by Freddie Mercury, though. They were going to be the biggest band in the world or die trying, so with A Night At The Opera, they were betting everything they had on it.

That’s OK, though; massive albums always had weird songs, especially in the 1970s. Just tuck it away on side two somewhere, get Roger Taylor’s number ‘I’m In Love With My Car’ for the opening single, or even John Deacon’s ‘You’re My Best Friend’, there’s a fistful of hits to choose from… but the band were adamant. The first single for this album, the one tasked with singlehandedly shooting them to the top of the charts, was going to be a six-minute prog-metal song about murdering someone—with an opera part in the middle.

The band’s record label nearly had them sectioned. They tried putting their foot down for many reasons. Chief among them that the song was nearly twice the standard length of a single in those days, so the band and the label were at a stand-off, with Queen needing a way of convincing the label of the song’s commercial viability. Fortunately, they knew just the man. Mercury was a close friend of the comic Kenny Everett, whose radio show on Capital was one of the most popular in the country.

The band leaked a copy of the track to Everett, who swore blind that he would never play the song on his show without permission. He was true to his word in a sense. He didn’t play the song… in full. Instead, he would play snippets of it, teasing his listeners by saying Queen had given him the biggest song of the year, but if his audience wanted to hear it, they had to really let him know. Audience demand was so big that when Everett got the OK to debut the song in full, he ended up playing it 14 times in two days. An unheard-of level of play in those days.

A tape of the song playing on Everett’s show even found its way across the pond and onto several radio stations there. It soon became clear that the record labels no longer had a leg to stand on, and the OK was given to release the song as A Night At The Opera’s lead single. It would top the UK charts for nine straight weeks upon release, even being Christmas number one in 1975. It was the band’s first appearance in the Billboard Hot 100’s top ten, reaching number nine.

All this to say, the song was a colossal hit, making Queen not just a mainstream concern but one of the biggest bands in the world. Because, sure, the song is long. Sure, it’s a strange mix of musical-theatre balladry, opera and heavy metal. Sure, it’s deeply queer-coded at a time when that could easily kill a band’s career. All the record label suits were forgetting one important thing, though. That song was ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and no one had heard something like it before or would ever hear it again.