“This single is going to be a fiasco!” Queen’s agent had told the band’s lead singer, Freddie Mercury. The song was utterly fantastical, rambling and incoherent. At six minutes, it was far too long for commercial radio. The stations would never agree to play it, and nobody was going to buy a 45 record! But Freddie Mercury would not be moved. He had a vision, clear as day, and was convinced that his rhapsody would succeed. He’d composed the song in his London apartment, sitting alone at the piano for nights an end, feeling the sunlight creep through his apartment then recede again, his hands never leaving the keys. The world had fallen away from him, and along with it the flamboyant parties and the handsome young men; all that remained were those eighty-eight black and white ivories and the sound of his voice. It was a voice that seemed no longer his, but the voice of inspiration that had descended upon him. The drugs kept him focused, and he felt his wings unfold, taking him to the darkest and guiltiest corners of his psyche. He was Faust, selling his soul to the devil in exchange for the secrets of the universe; a murderer descending into hell, with the cries of a bereaved mother echoing in his ears. “Thunder and lightning, very very frightening me!” he’d sung with an operatic flourish.
Bohemian Rhapsody remained a mystery, full of guilt and pain wrapped up in a Pandora’s Box of musical intrigue. It was an intimate, cryptic song, the cry of a heart kept hidden away. Its meaning was bricked up like a Pharaoh’s tomb, shrouded in mystery. People said that Freddie Mercury had infected another man in the days before the public knew about AIDS, and he’d caused the death of a lover. In his song he portrays himself as a man suffering divine punishment; he who had been a regular in London’s most decadent underground establishments, he who enjoyed nothing more than getting lost in drugs and the arms of other men, who carried poison in his blood. Here was his retribution. To the shame of homosexuality he would add the guilt of murder. Being gay was a black mark in the seventies, and he was persecuted by the press, accused and humiliated. They reduced him to a deviant; not just eccentric, but abnormal. Bohemian Rhapsody was a gradual, lyrical descent into hell – a rambling rock-opera that transcended Freddie’s inner turmoil and channelled it into something sublime. “I want to break free,” he would sing ten years later.
When it came out, Bohemian Rhapsody was a colossal success. Radio stations played the song on repeat day and night, and the British people loved it. What was the song about? It was something new and unimagined; a rhapsody, a collection of songs stitched together by the same majestic voice. It topped the charts. Freddie Mercury had set off his bomb, imposing Bohemian Rhapsody on the world. The entire song was so difficult it would take six weeks (the operatic section alone accounting for three) and eighty sound takes to record. Freddie Mercury had led the group from beginning to end like a conductor; his vision was precise and all-encompassing. Everyone listened to him, despite his exhausting perfectionism, rehearsing for ten hours a day, sweating blood and water to create this long, dense canticle. They recorded the introduction, then the ballad, then the guitar solo, then the opera, then the rock section, then the outro. On and on it went, six minutes of musical acrobatics; six minutes of Freddie Mercury’s delightful, inimitable madness.
Alan Alfredo Geday