“And now, on with the opera. Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons, and necking in the parlour” – Groucho Marx in the 1935 film A Night At The Opera.
Prologue
Queen are deep into recording their new album at Rockfield Studios in Wales. It’s been a tiring couple of days as they attempt to get their heads around an outrageously operatic new song Freddie Mercury has concocted, titled Bohemian Rhapsody. Right now, Mercury and drummer Roger Taylor are taking a break.
They’re watching an old black-and-white Marx Brothers film on a primitive video player owned by the band’s producer Roy Thomas Baker. The film features Groucho Marx in full cigar-brandishing, eyebrow-waggling, wisecracking mode as Otis B Driftwood, an entrepreneur trying to matchmake two singers. The title of the film is A Night At The Opera.
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Mercury and Taylor exchange a look. “That’s a great title,” one of them says. “We’ll have it.”
Act I: ‘You suck my blood like a leech…’
At some point in late 1974 or early 1975, Queen bassist John Deacon turned to his bandmate Roger Taylor and broke the bad news.
You know,” Deacon told Taylor, “we’ve got fifteen hundred quid in the bank.”
Fifteen hundred quid in the mid-70s wasn’t a trivial amount of money, but it wasn’t exactly big bucks either. Especially not for Queen, already three albums into their career.
“We were supposedly a successful band, an international band,” says Taylor, silver-haired and elegant today, radiating the easy charisma of a man who settled into the job of being a rock star a long time ago. “We’d generated a lot of money, just not for ourselves.”
“We were in a bad state financially,” says Sir Brian May, still as recognisable as ever thanks to that now white thatch of hair. “We owed everybody money. We knew that if the next album didn’t succeed, the ship would sink. But we were defiant.”
That defiance fuelled Queen to make the most opulent, most joyous, most pivotal album of their career. One that, with the help of an outrageous and freakishly huge hit single, would save their career and give them a future.
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“A Night At The Opera was a hugely important album,” says May. “It opened up the world for us.”
Creatively, Queen were on fire. They had carved out unique space for themselves with their first three albums: 1973’s self-titled debut, 1974’s Queen II and the same year’s Sheer Heart Attack. They didn’t sound like Led Zeppelin, Genesis or Bowie, but they had a little of the spirit of all three, along with a bit of Noël Coward, The Who and Aretha Franklin.
Brian May, Roger Taylor and Freddie Mercury recording vocals for A Night At The Opera at Scorpio Sound studios in London, September 11, 1975 (Image credit: Watal Asanuma/Shinko Music/Getty Images)
Behind the scenes, things were less happy. In 1972, the band had signed a deal with sibling entrepreneurs Norman and Barry Sheffield, owners of Trident Studios in London’s Soho. Under the company name Trident, the Sheffields invested money in the band, funding everything from studio time to stage clothes. But Trident also managed the band, controlling their publishing and music rights. Money was being made, says Brian May, but Queen weren’t seeing much of it.
“We owed everybody,” the guitarist says. “We were in a lot of debt. Freddie, in particular, was very upset by the situation. He felt that it was stopping him moving forward and making this a career. He couldn’t even afford a piano. It was hard. By that point, we were serious about what we were doing. It wasn’t ‘Let’s give this a try’, it was our lives.”
The future wasn’t completely bleak. Even Queen’s perilous finances couldn’t dent their confidence.
“Freddie, Brian and myself had belief in the band,” says Taylor. “I think John was slightly more sceptical. Well, he was quite tight [laughs]. I don’t think he was as far-sighted as we were, but what can you say?”
In the bassist’s defence, he had got married in January 1975, while the band were deep in the hole to Trident. But still, Queen were agitating for a move away from their managers. One of the people on their radar was Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant.
“We loved Zeppelin and we loved Peter,” says Taylor. “He was a fearsome man. Hell of a manager.”
Grant had a proven track record and the muscle and know-how to extricate Queen from their Trident deal and solve their financial crisis. But there was one caveat: Queen would have to sign to Swan Song. And they weren’t ready to play second fiddle to anyone, not even Led Zeppelin.
“Bad Company did that and they did very well out of it,” says Taylor. “But it wasn’t what we wanted. We were far too strong-minded.”
Salvation eventually came in the form of John Reid, a businesslike Scotsman who had been Elton John’s manager and lover since the early 1970s.
“John had different kinds of plans, a longer-term view,” says May. “That filled us with optimism.”
Taylor is more blunt. “It meant we might actually make some money.”
With Reid’s assistance, Queen disentangled themselves from their deal with Trident and signed up with him. “He promised us he would sort out all the business side,” says May. “He said: ‘Don’t you guys worry, you go away and make the best album you’ve ever made.’ And we were in that mood. But no matter how great a manager you’ve got, if the next album doesn’t sell, you’re in the mire.”
Queen at Scorpio Sound (one of several studios they used for recording A Night At The Opera) L-R: John Deacon, producer Roy Thomas Baker, Freddie Mercury, Brian May and Roger Taylor (Image credit: Watal Asanuma/Shinko Music/Getty Images)
Act II: ‘Don’t fool with fools who’ll turn away…’
Queen’s fourth album didn’t arrive out of nowhere, although the musical path that brought them there was a zig-zagging one. Their debut had been an album for people in denim who liked heavy rock, albeit heavy rock with plenty of charisma, flamboyance and musical ambition – Mercury’s outré My Fairy King, Great King Rat and Liar feel like the seedlings from which later more famous glories would sprout.
Queen II was different. It filleted out the most ambitious moments of its predecessor and spread them out across an entire album. Not for it the traditional Side A and Side B, but rather Side White and Side Black, matching its chess-piece centrepieces: May’s White Queen (As It Began) and Mercury’s The March Of The Black Queen. Their critics, and even some fans, were unconvinced by this air of cultivated grandeur.
“Queen II wasn’t well received by everyone,” says May. “At the time, a lot of people thought: ‘Oh, what’s this? This isn’t rock’n’roll any more. What have they done?’ And in a way we made Sheer Heart Attack to lay that ghost to rest: ‘Let’s make something simple and easy that people can get.’”
Sheer Heart Attack, released nine months later, was certainly less filigreed and more direct than its predecessor, but it was hardly the sound of a band dumbing down.
“I was very pleased with Sheer Heart Attack,” says Roger Taylor. “I remember driving somewhere or other with Fred and thinking, ‘We’re going to have to do something even better, and it’s not going to be easy.’”
Still, for May, their next record had to hew closer to the sumptuous spirit of Queen II than Sheer Heart Attack’s rock’n’roll razzle dazzle. “I thought: ‘We’ve made the sensible rock album, let’s do what we really want to do now.’ I don’t know if you’d call it indulgent, but it was a determination to be ourselves in every possible way we could.”
It helped that Queen had two strong and distinct songwriters in Mercury and May, and a third in Taylor, who was beginning to find his feet. Even at that stage, the singer was a formidable talent.
“He was quite fearsome,” May acknowledges. “You never knew what he was going to come in with. Was I intimidated by him? Yes, I think so. In a good way: ‘This is inspiring. I have to get my shit together.’ We were competitive, all of us. You get spurred on by things like that.’”
The songs they came up with for the next album would match Queen II for opulence, and they also had the stylistic breadth of Sheer Heart Attack. They needed both. This album was make or break for Queen.
Freddie Mercury at the grand piano at Ridge Farm Studios, July 14, 1975 (Image credit: Watal Asanuma/Shinko Music/Getty Images)
Act III: ‘I feel like dancing in the rain…’
Queen had prepped well. They spent most of July and some of August at Ridge Farm Studios in Sussex. There they rehearsed the songs they’d written so far and relaxed by playing pool and tennis (Mercury was reputedly a demon on the court). Mercury had rented a white Bechstein piano for the sessions, hence his credit for “Bechstein debauchery” on the album.
In mid-August, they decamped to Rockfield Sudios, a converted farm in bucolic Monmouthshire, where much of A Night At The Opera was recorded, and recording began in earnest. The task of co-producing the album once again fell to Roy Thomas Baker, who had worked with the band on their first three albums, first as a glorified engineer on the debut and then as a fully fledged producer on Queen II and Sheer Heart Attack. Baker, who died in April 2025, was a larger-than-life character who could match any musician for ego and stubbornness. He needed it – producing Queen wasn’t an easy job.
“We were very precocious boys,” May concedes. “I imagine we must have been quite difficult to deal with. We were quite insistent. We knew what we were trying to do at that point. We were doing a lot of our own production in a way.”
It wasn’t just outsiders who butted heads with Queen. They often butted heads with each other, not least May and Taylor. Mercury may have increasingly relished the role of diva, but it was often he who poured oil on troubled waters.
“We needed someone who would be the diplomat. And, strangely enough, Freddie was that guy,” says May. “One of Freddie’s great catchphrases was: ‘We don’t compromise.’ But within the band, we did. And that’s why we survived.”
“Fred was fantastic,” says Taylor. “He was so enthused about everything, and so creative. When someone had an idea, he’d chase it down. He’d spend countless hours at the desk with the engineer, balancing the harmonies. He normally knew what he wanted. Mind you, we all thought we did.”
Down time playing pool at Ridge Farm (Image credit: Watal Asanuma/Shinko Music/Getty Images)
Mercury certainly knew what he wanted from the song that would open the album. Death On Two Legs was a forceful rocker that opened with Mercury’s piano and May’s wailing guitar, then exploded in a storm of wailing guitars and vituperative lyrics. ‘You suck my blood like a leech, you break the law and you breach,’ snarled Freddie, going on to describe the object of his ire as ‘a dog with disease… king of the sleaze’. Although the song appeared on the album’s track-listing with the ambiguous addendum “Dedicated to…”, the villain of the piece wasn’t difficult to work out: the band’s hated former managers Norman and Barry Sheffield.
“Fred was so angry, there was pure bile coming out,” says Taylor. “Did we try to rein him in? Oh no. It was very vitriolic, but I think it was deserved. We were all for it. It was rather well put, I thought.”
Norman Sheffield didn’t agree. He sued the band and EMI for defamation. The case was settled out of court, although that didn’t stop Mercury from describing his bête noire as “a real motherfucker of a gentleman” at live shows.
While Death On Two Legs was the singer at his most caustic, Love Of My Life showed him at his most delicate. A delicate ballad, it featured May playing harp.
“We went and rented one from some dusty old place,” he says. “It was hugely out of tune. And then once you’d tuned up, whenever somebody opened the door and a draft came through, it would go out of tune again. I’m pretty certain I never played the harp again after that.”
The song’s subject has been debated over the years. Mary Austin, Mercury’s then-girlfriend and lifelong confidante, seemed to be the obvious inspiration, but John Reid later revealed that the singer told him it was about David Minns, the EMI executive with whom Mercury had his first serious male relationship. Typically, Freddie denied it was about anybody in particular, saying he’d made the lyrics up.
Queen in the live room at Ridge Farm (Image credit: Watal Asanuma/Shinko Music/Getty Images)
By this point, Queen considered musical boundaries a distraction to be swatted away rather than an obstacle to be surmounted. Like Sheer Heart Attack before it, A Night At The Opera was a musical universe in itself. Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon and Seaside Rendezvous had Mercury channelling his inner Noël Coward, Deacon’s You’re My Best Friend was a sweet love letter to his wife, Veronica, that featured the bassist playing electric piano, the first time the instrument had appeared on a Queen track. May’s similarly nostalgic Good Company found him recreating the sound of an entire trad jazz band on guitar. “Which took forever,” he says. “I don’t think I’d do it like that today.”
Less arduous to write and record was ’39, a breezy skiffle-style shanty with a sing-song melody and yearning lyrics that put a sci-fi spin on the frontier tales of the Old West, with a group of astronauts exploring space to find a new home for humanity. But ever the astronomy student, May rooted it in hard science.
“I had this thought in my head that if you go close to the speed of light in a circle, Einstein’s theory of general relativity tells you that your clock goes at a different speed,” he says. “It could be that you come back after what you think is a year as an astronaut but it’s a hundred years later back on Earth. You would come back to find your children or even grandchildren grown up. It’s not the physics that got me, it’s the emotional content. It still sends shivers up my spine.”
At the other end of the musical spectrum were the guitarist’s Sweet Lady and Taylor’s I’m In Love With My Car. The former was a roaring rocker with a throaty riff, written in unconventional waltz time. Like many of May’s songs, Sweet Lady was about a conflicted love affair, although the brilliantly baffling line ‘You call me sweet like I’m some kind of cheese’ undercut any seriousness. “It was quite spiky to play,” May says. “I don’t think Roger liked it.” (“I don’t hate it,” Taylor protests.)
I’m In Love With My Car was no less revved-up. The song itself was inspired by petrolhead roadie Jonathan Harris, and the Alfa Romeo-driving drummer rasped his way through it like the louche boy racer they both were. The song featured an absolute zinger in the line: ‘Told my girl I’d have to forget her, while I buy me a new carburettor’. “I was quite proud of that one,” he says of that line. “Brian thought it was some kind of joke. But he was writing flimsy Victorian melodramas.”
Act IV: ‘Listen to the madman…’
Legend has it that the first time Freddie Mercury played an early version of Bohemian Rhapsody to Roy Thomas Baker, he stopped halfway through and said: “And this is where the opera bit comes in.” The producer later said he laughed at the outrageousness of it all.
Brian May and Roger Taylor had no such reaction.
“People have a hard time understanding how unsurprising Bohemian Rhapsody was to us,” May says. “‘If you look at the first album, you’ve got My Fairy King, which is very complex and goes all over the place. And then you’ve got March Of The Black Queen on the second album, which is enormously complicated. It’s way more complicated than Bohemian Rhapsody. So it wasn’t that much of a surprise to us. It was just: ‘We’ll do another one of these things.’”
“Another one of these things” turned into Queen’s most famous song, and one that best embodied A Night At The Opera’s title. Bohemian Rhapsody can be broken up into three sections, bookended by an a capella intro and a brief outro. The first section set the scene: Mercury at the piano, confessing murder to his mother and aware that he must face the consequences. The third section, dramatic and heavy, has the singer furiously raging against his own impending death. The middle section is Mercury’s “opera bit” – a cavalcade of tumbling ‘Bismillah’s and ‘Gallileo’s, written by a man who admitted he knew nothing about opera. But what it lacked in formality and meaning it made up for in audacity. And it wasn’t just Mercury who was all-in on it.
“As we were constructing the opera bit,” Taylor recalls, “we were getting more and more wild: ‘Stick a bit more on, stick another bit in, it’ll all be fine when it gets to the heavy section.’ And it was. We were planting our flag in the ground: ‘This is really us – it’s a bit mad but it’s got everything in it.’”
In subsequent decades, the deeper meaning of Bohemian Rhapsody has been dissected, analysed, parsed and re-parsed. It’s been interpreted as everything from Mercury’s exploration of his Zoroastrian roots to a coded message about his sexuality. Mercury never explained what his songs were about, and May and Taylor can’t shed much light on it today.
“We never really asked each other about our lyrics,” the guitarist offers. “It’s an emotional song, one something everyone can relate to,” says the drummer.
(Image credit: Queen Productions Ltd)
If there’s a secret meaning behind the song, then Mercury took it with him to his grave. In the end, Bohemian Rhapsody might just be a song about a man with a gun and his mum.
For most bands, one towering epic per album would be enough, but A Night At The Opera had two. If Bohemian Rhapsody was Mercury’s magnum opus, then The Prophet’s Song was May’s. At eight minutes, this portentous, quasi-biblical epic is two minutes longer than Bohemian Rhapsody and, with its cascading choral mid-section, just as ambitious. The finished track sounds like a mystical hard rock fever-dream – unsurprising given that’s how the beginnings of the song came to May.
“Even now, I can kind see this strange man, this prophet, that I dreamed about,” he says. “But I had a hell of a job translating it all into music. I remember Freddie banging out bits of Bohemian Rhapsody in the courtyard out in Rockfield while I was wrestling with what I was trying to do with the various versions of the verses and choruses in The Prophet’s Song.
“You get this moment of doubt where you think: ‘Maybe this is going to fall apart, maybe this isn’t going to work at all.’ A lot of people would have gone: ‘What the hell are you up to?’ But Freddie was so supportive, especially when it came to the [vocal] delays in the middle. And it all worked in the end.”
The Prophet’s Song opened Side Two of A Night At The Opera. On any other album it would have been the crowning glory, but here it was ultimately overshadowed by the record’s other attention-grabbing number.
“The Prophet’s Song is built into certain people’s lives, but it’s not like Bohemian Rhapsody, which everybody knows,” says May. “It didn’t become a worldwide instant classic.”
(Image credit: Queen Productions Ltd)
The intricacy involved in creating Bohemian Rhapsody, The Prophet’s Song and even the breezy Good Company meant Queen were forced to work in multiple studios simultaneously to meet their deadline.
“The album was getting more and more complex,” says May. “Freddie would be working on his vocal harmonies here, and I’d be working on my guitar orchestra over there for Good Company.”
That necessary excess goes some way to explaining why A Night At The Opera was reputedly the most expensive album ever made to that point, costing somewhere between £30,000 and £40,000 – more than £320,000 today. Neither Taylor nor May can confirm that figure, but both agree that nobody was keeping an eye on the meter as it ticked upwards.
“Was it the most expensive album ever made?” Taylor says. “I’m not sure it was. But we didn’t think about that sort of thing anyway. That stuff would all get ironed out.”
“It was way too late to worry about money,” says May. “We were already up to our necks in it. We were just going to grab this moment and make the best thing ever. We just knew it had to be right. That’s all we cared about.”
Budget buster or not, A Night At The Opera was finally finished in October 1975, and released at the end of the following month. Queen’s sink-or-swim moment was here.
“I remember we had a little party for friends to play back the whole album,” Taylor recalls. “We played side one, which ended with Seaside Rendezvous and ‘Give us a kiss’, which made everybody laugh. Then we put on side two, with The Prophet’s Song and Bohemian Rhapsody and everything, and I think everybody was pretty stunned – in a good way. I remember thinking: ‘This will be alright.’”
(Image credit: Queen Productions Ltd)
Act V: ‘Don’t have to listen to no run-of-the-mill talk jive…’
There was no doubt within Queen that Bohemian Rhapsody would be the first single from the new album. “We believed in the song,” says Taylor. “We always thought it should be the single.”
The problem wasn’t Queen, it was everybody else. Manager John Reid was sceptical. Their label EMI thought You’re My Best Friend would be more palatable to a public not ready for opera in the pop charts.
“Everyone told us: ‘It’s too long, it’s too complex, nobody’s ever going to play it,’” says May. “I think John [Deacon] wanted to cave in: ‘Give them what they want, edit it down and give them the single.’ But we went: “No, either we go with the whole thing or we don’t.’”
“There were huge discussions,” says Taylor. “I do remember John Reid sitting there and going: [grudgingly] ‘Actually, I think you’re right.’”
The band’s cause was helped enormously by Kenny Everett, a DJ on London’s Capital Radio whose anarchic, over-the-top personality was reflected in his shows. Everett and Mercury were friends, and the singer invited him to the studio to hear Queen’s new music. When Everett left, he’d taken with him a work-in-progress tape of Bohemian Rhapsody. Whether he had pilfered the tape without the band’s knowledge or taken it with their tacit blessing has been lost to time. Likewise the seriousness of Mercury’s instruction that he couldn’t play the song on air.
Either way, Everett spun snippets of the song directly from the reel-to-reel tape he’d taken. The switchboards lit up: what on earth was this, and can we please hear more of it? Over the next two days, Everett played the full song 14 times. His enthusiasm was matched by that of his listeners. Any doubt as to whether it should be a single was dispelled.
Bohemian Rhapsody was released on October 31, 1975, with Taylor’s I’m In Love With My Car on the B-side. The latter would cause much friction in subsequent years, due to the writer of a single’s B-side earning the same royalties as whoever wrote the A-side. One juicy rumour suggests that Taylor locked himself in a cupboard and refused to come out until his bandmates agreed to include his song on the single. “Internet bullshit,” he says emphatically today.
(Image credit: Queen Productions Ltd)
Bohemian Rhapsody entered the UK chart at a lowly No.47. It rose to No.17 the following week and No.9 the week after. There was a chance that it might reach No.1, which presented a problem.
Top Of The Pops was the UK’s biggest music show, and its policy was that the No.1 single had to be played on the programme each week, either mimed in the studio or to a pre-recorded film. Given that Queen were about to go out on tour, this could be tricky. And how the hell could a band play – or even mime – an operatic section anyway?
The solution was to film a promo video for the song. It wasn’t a radical idea – everyone from The Beatles to Queen themselves had done it before. But it would be a revolutionary one.
And so, on the afternoon on November 10, Queen and director Bruce Gowers met at Elstree Studios, where the band were rehearsing for their tour. Over the next four hours, Gowers filmed the band playing the song’s piano-led opening section and heavied-up climax live.
But it was the a capella intro and operatic part of the song that had the most impact. Gowers took photographer Mick Rock’s dramatic cover of Queen II – itself inspired by an image of Marlene Dietrich in the 1932 film Shanghai Express – as his jumping-off point.
Filming the band both in silhouette and lit starkly from beneath, Gowers turned Queen into an unearthly choir. The camera moved in time with the voices, shifting from side to side, kaleidoscoping the band, using video feedback to draw their faces across the screen.
The whole thing took four hours and cost a reported £4,500. When it was finished, everyone went to the pub for last orders to celebrate.
“I remember watching the thing we did with Bruce Gowers for the first time in a hotel room,” says May. “We just laughed. We thought: ‘Are we going to get away with this?’ Because to us, it was funny and cheeky.”
They did get away with it – and then some. Bohemian Rhapsody premiered on Top Of The Pops on Thursday, November 20, when the single was at No.9. Queen had a night off and could feasibly have made it back to London for the live show, but why should they? That’s why they made the video in the first place.
That Top Of The Pops transmission was the accelerant that set the fire raging, turning an already exotic song into something glamorous, otherworldly and new. When the latest singles chart was announced on the following Sunday, November 23, Bohemian Rhapsody was at No.1. It would stay there for a record-breaking nine weeks in total, including over Christmas.
“It was nice because it meant we didn’t have to do it,” says May. “And it was amusing for us, because I think they felt uncomfortable having to do that week after week.”
A Night At The Opera was released on November 21, 1975, and reached No.1 in the UK three weeks later. Queen’s regal gamble had paid off.
Act VI: ‘Any way the wind blows…’
A sixty-inch gong stands in Roger Taylor’s back garden. It’s the same one the drummer took on Queen’s A Night At The Opera tour 50 years ago, striking it with force every night at the end of Bohemian Rhapsody.
“Led Zeppelin had a gong but we had a bigger one,” Taylor says proudly. “Sixty inches. It’s a fucking big gong.”
The tour in support of the album had begun at Liverpool Empire on November 15, 1975, two weeks before the album was released. They may still have been up to their eyeballs in debt at that point, but Queen weren’t about to let something as trivial as money stand in their way.
“We’d always spent more than we could on touring,” May says. “We were big spenders. We ploughed everything back into the shows. We wanted to give people everything we could. We wanted it to be the greatest thing they’d ever seen in their lives. Our motto was: ‘We’ve got two hours to deafen and blind them and let them go away happy.’”
During the early part of the tour, they would get reports on how Bohemian Rhapsody was performing.
“You’d get the chart positions: ‘Oh, we’re Number One again…’” says Taylor. “It almost got boring after a while.”
Such was that song’s all-encompassing success that follow-up single You’re My Best Friend wasn’t released until the following June.
“Suddenly, everybody knew who we were because of Bohemian Rhapsody,” says May. “It made us recognised in every country we visited.”
In September 1976, the band took a break from recording A Night At The Opera’s follow-up, A Day At The Races (another Marx Brothers film title) to play four UK shows. The biggest of these was a free concert in London’s Hyde Park on September 18, promoted by Virgin Records co-founder Richard Branson and attended by an estimated 350,000 people.
“It was odd,” says May, “because we’d been around the world and we weren’t sure whether people had forgotten us back home. We were quite shocked at the reaction. It seemed like there were a million people there. The only problem was that the police got very iffy because they thought there would be some kind of riot, and they wouldn’t let us back on stage for an encore.”
Unfortunate ending aside, the Hyde Park show felt like Queen’s official coronation, and not just because it took place a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace. They’d made the album of their career and had a record-breaking hit single. And they finally had more than £1,500 in the bank.
“Suddenly we were in the black,” says May. “The money‘s coming in. We’re able to pay off all our old debtors – lighting companies, sound companies.”
(Image credit: Queen Productions Ltd)
Epilogue
A Night At The Opera isn’t Brian May’s favourite Queen album. That would be a toss-up between Queen II and 1994’s moving Made In Heaven. Nor is it Roger Taylor’s – for the drummer, Sheer Heart Attack still edges it. But, 50 years on, both recognise that A Night At The Opera remains Queen’s most important album, the one that saved their career and secured their place at rock’s top table.
“It was a watershed album for us,” says May. “Thanks in a large part to Bohemian Rhapsody, people knew who we were. Not just in the UK, but in America, Australia, everywhere.”
“We were at the peak of our confidence,” Roger Taylor adds. “It felt like there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do, and it shows on that album.”
