Rhapsody In Blue

RCD, 1992

As a host of stars play Wembley in tribute to Freddie Mercury, Douglas J Noble asks Brian May, producer Roy Thomas Baker and video director Bruce Gowers about the song with which he will always be associated: Bohemian Rhapsody

Bohemian Rhapsody was produced by Roy Thomas Baker and Queen. Roy recalls how Freddie first played the song to them : 'We were with Freddie in his apartment when he announced, "I've got this idea for a song." So he sat down at his piano and started playing - it was still at an early stage but it was sounding good. Some of the words and music were missing - he played us just the basic framework of the song. He was playing away and then he stopped and said, "And now my dears - this is where the opera section comes in." I went, "Oh my God!"'

By the time Queen started recording the A Night at the Opera album Freddie had the song in a more complete form, as Brian May remembers. 'Freddie had all the vocal harmonies worked out in his head - he used to come into the studio with little sheets of company notepaper from some place with all the chords and all the notes written out. The only bit that we improvised was the guitar solo but really, the whole thing was Freddie's baby - he had it in his head and we just had to capture it on tape.

'We did the basic backing track counting all the way through the song -every little detail was mapped out beforehand. The backing track itself took about two days to record and the singing section took seven days. In all, Bohemian Rhapsody took about three weeks to record. We did so many over-dubs that the tape started wearing out!

Nowadays with digital recording equipment you don't get this problem but technology was still fairly basic then.

'Roy Thomas Baker's influence was very largely technical, rather than acting as a producer who decided what the finished product was going to sound like. We knew how to ask questions and we also knew what the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix had done - we had studied all that stuff and taken it apart to see how it worked. We would ask Roy "how was that done?" and "how can we make it sound such-and-such a way?" Roy would always have the answer - he was a very experienced engineer. He had been brought up in an "old school" way of working in the studio and in the beginning he tried to impose this on us - but by the time of our fourth album and Bohemian Rhapsody "we weren't having any of it.

'At the time of Bohemian Rhapsody we had had a couple of hits but we were still penniless and unable to pay our debts - it was quite embarrassing! So it was just as well Bohemian Rhapsody and A Night At The Opera were hits otherwise I don't know how we could have carried on - that would have been it!'

Bruce Gowers directed the video for Bohemian Rhapsody and started a new trend for pop and rock videos. 'I'd shot a couple of concerts for Queen and so they asked me to do the video with them. Pop promos, as they were known then, were just starting to happen. We shot the video at Queen's rehearsal studio where they were practising for their next tour. Looking back, it was shot in no time at all - we started shooting at about seven or eight at night and I remember having a drink in the pub at about 10 30!

'We shot the visual effects for the operatic section on one side of the rehearsal stage then filmed the rock 'n' roll section on the other side using Queen's lighting rig. The idea in my head was to use the visual medium to reflect the music, which hadn't been done before. So, for the harmony echos in the music we used 'visual echos' -quite simple really! The images in the video were influenced by the album cover of Queen // which shows the four faces bathed in white light against a black background.

'Everybody said the song wouldn't get any airplay because it was too long. Once the single was in the charts Queen refused to go on Top of the Pops so they had to play. the video - as soon as they played the video Bohemian Rhapsody went straight to number 1 which in turn gave the video even more exposure!

'We had no idea that the video would start a new trend. And after the video was shown my phone never stopped ringing - it changed my life completely!'

Douglas J Noble