How Queen Recorded Bohemian Rhapsody

Three men in a Welsh farmhouse hold a strip of magnetic tape up to the light. And they can see straight through it. The most famous vocal arrangement in rock history, and the music has physically worn off the tape. So how do you wear a song down to nothing? You need a hundred and eighty overdubs, eight generations of tape... and one man who will not stop singing the word Galileo. Back up a few months. Kensington, nineteen seventy-five. A producer turns up at a flat to collect his friend for dinner, and the friend sits down at the piano instead. Freddie Mercury plays him a ballad. Slow. Sad. Something about killing a man. Then he stops dead, looks up at Roy Thomas Baker and says, and this is where the opera section comes in. Baker laughed. He thought it was a joke. It was not a joke. Freddie had been carrying pieces of this thing around for years. His old friend Chris Smith, a keyboard player from Freddie's pre-Queen band Smile, remembers him noodling with it back in the late sixties, in something they called The Cowboy Song. And it was already in there, that line. Mama... just killed a man. He told the others he probably had enough material for three separate songs. Instead he wanted to glue them together into one ridiculous extravaganza. Nobody in pop music was doing that. Nobody. Three weeks of rehearsal at a place called Penrhos Court in Herefordshire. Then, the twenty-fourth of August, nineteen seventy-five. Rockfield Studio One, outside Monmouth in Wales. Green fields, sheep, a farm basically. And inside, Freddie at a Bechstein concert grand with every note already written out in his head. Brian May put it beautifully. He played the piano, May said, like most people play the drums. Hammering it. Now, because the ending needed layered voices too, they had to build the whole thing backwards. Drums. Bass. Guitar. Piano. Then all the harmonies... with no lead vocal anywhere in sight. Which left something strange on the tape. A gap. A hole in the middle of the song, held open by a click track, waiting for an opera that did not exist yet. They gave it a week. Freddie in the middle register, Brian down low, Roger Taylor up in the stratosphere, because Roger could get to places the other two couldn't. John Deacon played bass and sensibly declined to sing. Ten to twelve hours a day. Galileo. Galileo. And every single morning Freddie would arrive with... just a few more Galileos. Roughly one hundred and eighty separate overdubs. In nineteen seventy-five, state of the art meant twenty-four tracks of analogue tape. So they bounced everything down through eight generations of it. Nearly two hundred tracks in total. And here's the cruel physics of that: every bounce costs you something. Every pass over the heads shaves a little magic off the oxide. Which brings us back to the lamp. We held the tape up to the light, Brian May said decades later, and we could see straight through it. The music had practically vanished. Sit with that for a second. They were destroying the thing at the exact moment they were creating it. Five studios in the end. Rockfield, the Roundhouse, Sarm East, Scorpio Sound, Wessex. And when they finally carried it into EMI, the label sat through nearly six minutes of piano ballad, mock opera and hard rock, with no chorus... and said absolutely not. Too long for radio. Release You're My Best Friend instead. Queen said no. Which left them exactly one option. Freddie takes a copy to his mate Kenny Everett, a famously unpredictable radio DJ, who promises, faithfully, not to play it. Everett then goes on air and starts teasing little fragments. Apologising that his finger keeps slipping. Oh dear, the whole song has come on again. Accidentally. By the end of that October weekend he'd played it fourteen times. Monday morning, record shops were mobbed by people demanding a single that wasn't out yet. EMI's objection became, let's say, academic. One problem left. Top of the Pops wanted them, Queen were on tour, and frankly the song was unmimeable. So on the tenth of November they borrowed a truck from Trilion, rolled into Elstree Studios where they were already rehearsing, and shot a promo film with director Bruce Gowers in four hours, for about four and a half thousand pounds. Four faces floating in the dark, exactly like their Queen Two album cover. It aired ten days later. Roger Taylor's takeaway now sounds like prophecy. We realised you don't even have to be there to promote your new record. Nine weeks at number one in Britain. The Grammy Hall of Fame in two thousand and four. And a four-minute film knocked out in an afternoon so four men could skip a TV appearance, which historians now credit with helping invent the music video... seven years before MTV switched on. Every clip your thumb flicks past tonight is a distant cousin of that truck at Elstree. So the next time somebody tells you an idea is too long, too weird, too much, remember a strip of tape in a Welsh farmhouse, worn so thin you could see daylight through it. They ruined the tape. The song got out anyway.