Queen Open Up on the Making of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’
Cover image by ©Mick Rock/Estate of Mick Rock. Motion design by Sara K. Afridi. Image within video by Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images; Andrew Putler/Redferns/Getty Images; Watal Asanuma/Shinko Music/Getty Images, 7; © Queen Productions Ltd; Johnny Dewe Mathews/© Queen Productions Ltd
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ at 50! Brian May and Roger Taylor on Queen’s Masterpiece
Making the most-streamed song from the 20th century took ambition, hard work, and a dash of opera
September 24, 2025
Their real life was about to slip into fantasy, which was pretty much the plan. At the tail end of the 1960s, Roger Taylor and Freddie Bulsara would lie on the floor together, head to head, getting lost in Electric Ladyland, talking about their future.
Maybe they’d share a bottle of wine, nothing stronger. “Fred and I were no good at smoking weed,” Taylor says, more than five decades later. “I used to think my head was on fire at the back. It never did agree.”
Even before Bulsara joined the band that became Queen and renamed himself Freddie Mercury, he and Taylor shared a velvet-heavy fashion sense, a passion for Jimi Hendrix, and some fat-bottomed ambitions. “We wanted to be the best,” says Taylor. “We both really wanted success.” Queen’s drummer is, at the moment, sitting in a vast living room on his 18th-century estate in the British countryside, amid 48 wooded acres. He might not have made it here without the song we’re here to discuss, the moment Queen reached as far as any band ever dared, then went a bit further, and then added a few more “Galileos” for good measure: “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
The track, first played on U.K. radio in October 1975 and squeezed onto a seven-inch single at the end of that month, has become the most-streamed song from the 20th century, with more than 2.8 billion plays on Spotify alone. “Incredible,” Brian May says when I visit him the next day. “‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ doesn’t get old, does it? And I suppose that’s the magic for us. We’re lucky that we don’t get old.” He pauses and makes a slight correction. “The music doesn’t seem to get old.”
The statistic leaves little doubt: Queen’s biggest song is on its way to becoming the rock era’s most lasting artifact, Figaro, Beelzebub, and all. “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a five-minute-and-54-second remnant of a brief slice of time when musicians could afford to spend weeks slathering overdubs onto a single track, when engineers made edits with a razor on magnetic tape, when bands raced to push the limits of song structure and recording technology, and maybe when, as Taylor caustically argues, “you actually had to be good at your instrument — that doesn’t seem to be a necessary requisite these days.” Even as Queen labored over “Rhapsody” and the rest of their fourth album, A Night at the Opera, the clock was ticking. Two weeks before the album’s release, the Sex Pistols played their first show in London.
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The song is also, of course, an eternal encapsulation of the brilliance, wit, and pain of its lead voice and composer, Freddie Mercury, who died of complications from AIDS in 1991 when he was just 45. “In certain areas, we feel that we want to go overboard,” he said. “It’s what keeps us going really, darling.… We’re probably the fussiest band in the world.”
On a pleasant late-spring morning, Taylor’s side doors are flung open to his sprawling garden. Somewhere out there, not quite in sight, is a 20-foot-high fiberglass statue of Mercury that once advertised the We Will Rock You musical.
Taylor is positive his late friend would’ve found its new home hilarious. Elsewhere among the greenery is the very same 60-inch gong we hear Taylor strike in the final seconds of “Rhapsody.” “I remember Led Zeppelin had a gong,” Taylor says with a smirk. “So we had a much bigger gong. Pathetic one-upmanship, really.”
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Continue/Read Original Article Here: Queen Open Up on the Making of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’
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