QUEEN – "Bohemian Rhapsody"

The thing that I’m never sure about with Queen is how seriously anybody ever took them, even their fans. Did anybody listen to this – as I imagine people listened to Yes, say – concentrating on it as a three part work of depth that explored the notion of mortality, through a tripych tale about a character facing the death penalty, or whatever happens in this song? Or was it always just a joke, a bit of fun for everybody?

I was certainly a bit disappointed when I first read that the book for the Queen musical was to be written by Ben Elton. Surely, the vainglory of that I could sort of here in the songs would have been better realised by Peter Shaffer.

I don’t mind this single, but like ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, its another one that I never need to hear again.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” made me instantly happy, as I felt it marked a return to the ornate, baroque, fastidious second-side-of-Queen II era that I loved, as opposed to the worryingly banal cock-rock diversions of Sheer Heart Attack. We’d been here before with “The March Of The Black Queen”, but this felt like an upgrade: the ultimate fusion of Mercury’s grandiose romantic/operatic tendencies and May’s elegantly pristine riffing-at-one-remove.

Perhaps the similarly episodic, dramatic, lavish, prog-tinged “Space Oddity” had helped to make room for it, but there seemed to be an immediate and across-the-board acceptance of BR’s lavish boundary-stretching. There were no “O Superman” WTF dissenters to be found here. And given the length of its stay, as further expanded by the traditional slowing down of the Christmas chart, we had the time to get to know it, week after week at the end of TOTP, savouring all the details to the point of mass familiarity.

All of which proved a great boon to me over the next two or three months, as I shivered and shook on the wind-lashed rugby fields of Cambridge, wishing myself elsewhere. “Three more Bohemian Rhapsodys and I’ll be back in the changing room”, I would mutter to myself, re-cueing the track in my mental jukebox. There’s nothing like episodic prog-pop for passing the time…

This was number 1 for two months in 75-76 and boy did I hear it a lot on the radio at the time. (In fact, it got to the point where radio would more often than not spin an edited version of the single that considerably shortened the ‘ROXOR’ section – cutting all of the “So you can think you can stop me” verse – something that would probably be considered sacrilege these days. It certainly bugged me at the time).

I say this because I can’t ever remember a time when I’ve been fed up of hearing this song, even at its most ubiquitous. And yes, I think it is the ‘fat free’ element that is the key here. If you don’t like this bit, there’s a completely different “good bit” coming along in a moment.

We were discussing good parodies on the “D.I.V.O.R.C.E.” thread. There’s a great Christmas-themed appropriation of “BoRhap” by Pledge Drive, that I discovered a couple of years ago and which I always play every wobs now.

I have deliberately not looked at the above comments, but the following is a continuation of another story and I’ll try working my way back…

So, the end of 1975, and maybe the end of quite a lot of things and the concomitant beginning of a lot of others. I was nearly twelve and for me it was Patti and Freddie.

In August of that year I started at Uddingston Grammar School and by December I still wasn’t getting used to it; the uprooting from uncomplicated childhood and all the other dread-inspiring factors which I have previously mentioned – above all, the gradually chilling feeling that in some way I now had to “knuckle down” and begin preparing myself for this chimera called the “real world.” It didn’t help that, thanks to the Hamilton Advertiser’s reminder, I arrived at the Grammar as something of a “celebrity,” the supposed child prodigy, although most of the people in my various classes were as smart or markedly smarter than me. It took a while to settle and it was painful.

I decided that I wasn’t much taken with this notion of the “real world” and hence kept drifting mentally – the reluctant schoolboy with Saturday morning satchel westering to his spiritual home in Kelvingrove – into the realms of art and fantasy and fascination; and sexual awakening was a major part of that. Rather unbelievably, I was liked, and maybe even fancied, by quite a lot of the girls in my year, but I could never tell whether they were mocking me or being genuine; I kneejerkedly assumed the former and thus did they quickly retreat – although my dad had already warned me off having a “girlfriend” since I was supposed to study until my brain and fingers bled and woe betide me if I didn’t come top of the year, let alone the class.

Then again, I have to admit that I wasn’t very attracted to the girls in my year on a deep (i.e. meaningful) level – what I did have by the dozen were teacher crushes; the women who taught me (I had plenty of male teachers too, of course, but there was no danger of any crushes developing there) seemed much wiser, much more open to speaking with me of uncommon things, far more interesting, worldly, enticing. The best of them made me feel like an equal, and even though that was more likely to be flattery than anything else, I still found it extremely touching.

Meanwhile I would creep home, my head full of Ornette Coleman and Alex Harvey and Marvel Comics (especially the Steve Gerber ones), Gollancz’s Science Fiction Argosy and The Dice Man, and wondered how best to get the world I saw from my bedroom window to fit, or accommodate, the far brighter world I was seeing inwardly.

Then came Horses.

I read CSM’s NME rave, sniggered at Steve Lake’s pissed off Jazz Journal oldster MM debunking and I pestered my dad to buy it for me (I did not get full-scale pocket money until I was allowed or trusted to go into town myself, towards the end of 1976); in order to shut me up we went into HMV in Union Street and I saw the Mapplethorpe monochrome, the shirt and tie and fuck you (if only) pose, and I was immediately in love. Since when was a record supposed to start with “Jesus died for somebody’s sins…but not mine” (in a village like Uddingston where being a True Son of the Parish is pretty crucial, this really was akin to shouting the F-word over and over in the middle of Sunday morning mass)? And it only got better; not quite singing, not quite talking but those WORDS, those EXPRESSIONS just spilling out like I wanted to spill out and suddenly Suzi Quatro and Lynsey de Paul seemed a very long way away indeed, and nine-minute epiphanies, dripping taps turning into the resurrection of rock and roll with the emphasis on the Rimbaud roll and Lenny Kaye – whom at the time I only knew as the American correspondent for Disc and Music Echo – making out like a toytown Sonny Sharrock (which is always the best way to make out Sonny) – and suddenly it was like Ornette and Marvel Comics and Virginia’s waves and Marc Bolan sweeping over me in a glossalia of golden honey and I FELT Patti coming up the stairs, through my door and ACHING for her to do to me what she was doing to the ecstatic Gloria.

Yes, listening to Horses the first time was the aural equivalent of losing my virginity.

And then, Freddie, who in his regally womanly splendour summed up to me what I had wanted to sense in the glam icons but couldn’t quite palpate. Childish crushes were one thing – I don’t think I have ever been truly bisexual, since that feeling has markedly not strayed over into my real life with real, touchable people – but I felt in him what I would have felt from ’71 Marc. He seemed like the real thing; all the better for his constantly winking unreality. My wife has rightly pointed out that his teeth might in retrospect make him less fanciable, but I wasn’t too concerned about that at the time; I saw the magnificent flowing locks, the perfect Persian peacock profile and even the satin jumpsuits and my craving to be fucked by Patti and Freddie was pretty much equal bilaterally (and the final denial of actual bisexuality: when Mercury switched to the ‘tache and crew cut, I went off him altogether).

So my perspective of Queen as they were in 1975 is necessarily biased. Even if I hadn’t fancied Freddie, I still considered their music of the period a flamboyantly brilliant next step from glam, confidently bringing ridicule and art to a satisfactorily messy communion – the art-metal at which the 1970 Bowie groped, but now absolutely clarified and sparkling. No unclouded reader could fail to find treasures in Queen II or Sheer Heart Attack.

But 1975 was drawing to an end, and with “Bohemian Rhapsody” I feel we can usefully draw a line here – a line which may have begun with those late 1966 vibrations of stirring adventure. The record borrows both style and methodology from Sparks and 10cc (and, slightly less obviously, from the Who and, considerably more obviously, from the Beatles) but the group fuse their resources into something that is uniquely their own.

I’m not sure how much I actually like “Bohemian Rhapsody” now – as an impressionable eleven-year-old I unsurprisingly adored it, but now it seems more like a compressed six-minute advert for the group: “This is what we do, this is our range – what do you think?” And its parent album A Night At The Opera was noticeably patchier, and straining a little more, than its predecessors. Still, there’s no escape from Queen’s full knowledge of the record’s inbuilt absurdity, with its frankly but gloriously silly murder-trial-sentence scenario – nor from the unexpected poignancy with which it ends; Mercury’s concluding sighs of “nothing really matters…to me” seems the ultimate, if regret-filled, rebuttal of the vision which “Whiter Shade Of Pale” purported to show and I think “Bohemian Rhapsody” not just the natural climax of glam rock – and also its end, since whither to go from here? – but also the natural end of a chapter in pop, a chapter which started in 1966-7 when everything still seemed possible, when you could record abstract six-minute multisectional pop singles and still get away with it – the record is like a final, proud dying fall. The last “any way the wind blows” and mournfully authoritative, echoing gong convey their own warning; the times are going to change, a colder wind is making its way into the world, and although there will continue to be great number ones – not least “Bohemian Rhapsody”’s successor – there was the undertow that we will never be able to agree on anything again like we did with “Bohemian Rhapsody” and the rueful realisation that, in a lot of ways, from hereonin, we’re on our own now, hurtling minutely back towards the “real world.”

Xpost #1 : Should read “The vainglory that I could sort of hear in their songs”

Where’s my brain gone today? It’s been fizzled away by thinking too deeply about pop music for decades…

Every now and then I like to bang on about how this song’s re-release in ’91 kept the Prodigy’s ‘Everybody In The Place’ off the top spot in the first weeks of January ’92 – and we’d get to hear it the rest of that year after it’s insertion into Wayne’s World. But despite all this I always saw what there was to like about it and I did even though it is very much in that ‘never need to hear this ever again’ set of famous chart toppers.

Erithian – “spatchcocked” wasn’t meant to be about the storyline in Bo Rhap, more the “this is our range” thing Marcello is talking about: there doesn’t seem to be any special reason why the devils section shd be comic opera or why it should follow a guitar solo or whatever, which isn’t to say the clash of styles doesn’t work, because it does.

I did a little poll on LJ a couple of days ago about this song and asked “what’s it about”: responders were pretty fairly split between some variation of the death-and-demons story and “dunno mate”.

Yes, its funny how in the eighties – when this wasn’t quite as all-pervasive a song as it is now – and I was about twelve or thirteen, when I listened to this on one of those Capital Radio polls of best songs ever (it was probably either this or ‘Stairway To Heaven’ that won) I immediately got the narrative. I was probably an over-serious child, prepared to take things that had an aurra of importance as being inherantly important.

And now I’m middle-aged and have heard it (involuntarily) a thousand times, I can’t really be bothered to listen to it properly.

I wonder how many weeks that would have spent at the top if Zep had had the gumption to release it, uncut, as a single in ’71?

Personal memory time again. Having completely blanked out the previous two number ones from my memory of the time – I can’t have watched TOTP for a month, perhaps – this song’s stay at number one, and hence appearance at the end of TOTP every Thursday night, filled me with dread. Why? Because I hated the video. I was only six, all those superimposed faces during the operatic section seriously freaked me out, and I probably had nightmares about it at the time. As for the song, the closest thing I’d heard to it was Sparks, and that wasn’t as operatic as this was.

But still, the most redolent memory of the song is that I was opening my Christmas presents with this song in the background on the Xmas TOTP. I had a rather brilliant Matchbox cars box that year, like a suitcase of cars, and whenever I hear Bo Rap I always think of that suitcase of cars, and vice versa.

Oh, its a real privilege to be able to read bits of your autobiography-in-progress, Marcello. Its really good and worthwhile

Move over, Nick Hornby! Heh heh!

It’ll be fun anticipating which number ones will inspire further extracts…

Yes, comment #7 is one of your classics, MC. Much to agree on, both in terms of “BR” closing a chapter (funny how some Xmas #1s have the ability to do that, see also Slade two years earlier) and – more personally, and fascinatingly – in terms of it representing something of a desperate clinging on to a vanishing fantasy world.

Re #1, Billy, I think there were serious Queen fans. Or at least there were at my school; in the early eighties I got threatened with violence for suggesting that Freddie Mercury might be gay. The would-be assailant was a serious metalhead and seemed to treat Queen as every bit humourlessly hard ‘n’ heavy as the the rest of his favourites. I wonder if it was the video for ‘I Want to Break Free’ that turned them decisively into cuddly campy favourites rather than hard rockers? (And Billy, #15, you’re not middle-aged. I’M middle aged…)

I’ve never really loved this song, though, as other posters have said, the head-banging moment in Wayne’s World did make me warm to the ‘third act’ of the song. I was too young to get a sense of a wider cultural mood so I am intrigued and rather moved by Marcello’s suggestion that this was the swansong of both glam and a more chart-oriented prog. Though I wonder: just because this DID reach number one and lodged there for two solid months, does that mean it COULD? Which is to say: was there really a widespread feeling at the time that you could release six-minute records, or is this a one-off? I seem to remember reading somewhere that the band had a battle with their label to get the thing released as a single, having to face down the obvious argument that the radio won’t play it.

Queen have the reputation of pomposity, which I think is justified, but this single is often brought out as exhibit A, which I think is unfair. Somewhat like the previous inhabitant of the #1 slot, this doesn’t seem to me to pretend to be any more significant than it is. The middle section is so preposterous as to be witty, rather than grand. As Tom says, light opera, not Wagner.

As Erithian hinted on the David Essex thread, “BR” did inspire (or at least open the door to) a short run of similarly grandiose/episodic chart hits, the two which spring to mind being John Miles “Music” and David Essex “City Lights”.

Back to MC’s #7: As with Starman on TOTP, Freddie evoked not a flicker of recognition, nor of desire. In a reversal of MC’s position, it took the crew-cut and the ‘tache to do that. Proper Gay me, evidently!

“Dan – how could anybody not see that Queen were quite outrageously camp? ”

well obviously. however, it just wasn’t that widely recognised back then in many parts of the world.

But the digressions are the best thing about it…

I’m not sure that I have 1975 memories of this, being a whippersnapper of 3-and-a-half at the time, but it was always around the house. My parents had it on a compilation tape they’d made for an RAF mess party and my mum always loved the Brian May rockout after the quasi-operatics – as did/do I. I still think it’s a great record, and I don’t think I tire of it.

‘BoRhap’ is, of course, a profound influence on Flowered Up’s ‘Weekender’.

Number 2 watch: 3 weeks of Hot Chocolate’s ‘You Sexy Thing’, 2 weeks of Laurel & Hardy’s ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’, 2 weeks of Greg Lake’s ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ and 2 weeks of ‘Glass of Champagne’ by Sailor.

4 songs which I far prefer to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’!

i always cringe at 6 😀

It’s worth pointing out that “Bo Rhap”‘s initial nine-week stint at the top was the longest run achieved by any number one since Paul Anka’s “Diana” back in 1957.

‘Sheer Heart Attack’ was the first album I ever bought myself so I was a fan but I really don’t know what I think of this song anymore, it’s like the Mona Lisa and I’d rather look at lesser-known Leonardo paintings and listen to other, simpler Queen tracks like ‘Now I’m Here’ or ‘The Seven Seas of Rhye’. It starts off lovely and the rockin’ end brings out the latent head-banger in me but the middle now seems like too much silly icing. If there was an ‘unplugged’ version you’d hear what a lovely melody it had but all the opera stuff now seems like them crossing the line from enjoyable Pomp to Cecil B. DeMille ridiculousness.

It does have a great misheard lyric though:

“Spare him his life from these pork sausages!”

Forty-plus posts in and no mention yet of “Bismillah!”?

When did I first hear the song? – it was probably when the promotional video was shown on tv, late in ’75. Did I see it on a friend’s parents’ color tv? Most likely yes. Did I understand anything about the song at all? No! I was too young (still eight) to understand why it had so many parts (exhausting to listen to, since as soon as I got used to one thing they would change it and I’d have to get used to the new section). I had no knowledge of opera, heavy or light, and the video was impressive but I was under the impression it was almost a one-off, not anything likely to occur again, done almost to show off whatever lense was on the camera. How wrong I was, but I was only eight…

…but those just older than me – my friend John’s older brother for instance – most certainly did get it. It was a hit in the US as well, though not a #1 – it was kept off by one of these songs (not sure) – “Fly Robin Fly” by Silver Convention, “That’s The Way (I Like It)” by KC and the Sunshine Band, “Let’s Do It Again” by The Staples Singers or, and this would be ironic…”Saturday Night” by the Bay City Rollers. At the time I most certainly understood these songs as songs much better than Queen, as they were groovy and danceable and in one case virtually demanded an ecstatic response. Queen were more grown-up and for more grown-up people…

Thinking back I’m pretty sure I preferred the b-side “I’m In Love With My Car”

Was “You’re My Best Friend” the the follow-up single? Talk about chalk and cheese.

John Deacon used to come in the Putney WH Smith I worked at quite a bit, always looked so normal. I think Freddie M. lived in Putney too (had a big house up my mates street if I recall) but he was more likely to be seen at Biba than WH Smith.