Fifty years ago on 28th November 1975 Queen released their fourth studio album A Night at the Opera which contained the game changing single Bohemian Rhapsody. Allen Maslen revisits…
A Night At The Opera followed Queen’s acclaimed third album Sheer Heart Attack, which was released exactly a year earlier. The concept of a top band releasing two studio albums in twelve months seems remarkable today, with most contemporary artists leaving a minimum three or four year gap between studio offerings. In fact the one year hiatus between ‘Heart Attack’ and ‘Opera’ was somewhat leisurely for the mid-70s; the group took a full five months in the studio and racked up a then world-record £40,000 in studio costs, (just under a quarter of a million in today’s money), making it the most expensive album ever recorded at the time.
So before we dive into the music, let’s have a quick look at that timeline to illustrate how much has changed in fifty years.
Extraordinarily, this fourth album came out a mere two years and four months after their debut album Queen, with the follow-up Queen II (identified by many fans as their last pure rock album) appearing only seven months after the first.
Indeed, after the triumph of ‘Opera’ they would follow with two further albums, A Day at the Races and News of the World, in the subsequent 23 months, giving fans a smorgasbord of six studio albums in just over four years.
One of the main reasons ‘Opera’ stands out from the impressive pack is of course the presence of the album’s closing track, Bohemian Rhapsody. This six-minute epic would sell 6.3 million copies worldwide, hit number one in eight countries, and is now the third highest selling single of all time in the UK, closely behind Elton John’s 1997 tribute to Princess Diana and the 1984 Band Aid fundraiser.
But there is more to this album, and in particular Bohemian Rhapsody, than cold unit sales and chart positions; I would go as far as to argue this song changed the course of music history.
In late 1975 the punk revolution was more than a year in the future, and the UK singles chart was drowning in a sea of complacent BBC friendly pop, and stuff our grandparents liked. UK chart toppers in that year had included novelty singles from Telly Savalas with If, Billy Connolly with D.I.V.O.R.C.E., Windsor Davies & Don Estelle with Whispering Grass, and (I wince as I write this), Typically Tropical with the stereotype laden Barbados, a song about a Brixton bus driver flying home to the Caribbean on Coconut Airways. They all genuinely got to number one.
Other acts who made number one in the months before ‘BoRap’ included The Bay City Rollers, Mud and David Essex; safe three-minute prime-time fodder across the board, more blow wave than new wave.
Yes, there have always been rebels lurking around the periphery of the mainstream, and Freddie and the boys may not have been the edgiest act on show, but the presence of chain mail, androgynous looks, leather and loud guitars did a good job of upsetting some of our parents, which was always a good start. More importantly, Queen showed burgeoning acts that they could work outside the usual norms, put a finger or two in the air to the establishment, and still get on the telly and pull in the punters. They were glam enough to appeal to Bowie fans, they were hard rocking enough to make Zeppelin devotees raise an eyebrow, and their musical dexterity endeared them to the prog fraternity.
Around the time ‘Rhapsody’ was released a group of London lads calling themselves The Sex Pistols were doing their first gig. Were they inspired by Queen’s disregard for the establishment rules? Or was the arrival of a six-minute song at the top of the charts the final straw and something needed to be done? Whichever, I believe when the Stranglers and the Clash stormed the castle a year later, their job was made slightly easier because Queen had already kicked a few of the doors in.
But more on Galileo Figaro later.
The point of this exercise is to examine A Night at the Opera fifty years on, listening to it as though for the first time, while knowing what we now know about what happened next.
The album opens with a brave move, arguably the least commercial track on the album: a Freddie Mercury composition, Death on Two Legs. One might assume the follow-up to Sheer Heart Attack would begin with something radio friendly, but here we have over a minute of brooding minor-chord riffage, followed by Mercury’s acerbic vocal attack on somebody who had evidently pissed him off to the extent that he calls him “a sewer rat decaying in a cesspool of pride”. Great line. We won’t go into further detail here about the tiff, because the somebody in question took the band to court over the lyrics, and an out-of-court settlement was apparently reached. A dark and courageous way to kick off an album.
Making an abrupt musical turn, Mercury’s jaunty piano leads us into the whimsical Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon, in which his vocal affectionately channels Noel Coward, before Brian May’s multi-layered harmony guitars hove into view. May had deployed this effect extensively over the previous three albums, but here he moves to a different level of slickness with a short snappy section to close the track, with a pantomimic slap of the thigh. Considering this was the pre-computer era of analogue recording, and the click track and ProTools wouldn’t exist for a further decade, this is a remarkable feat of musical engineering.
If Roger Taylor had never picked up a drumstick he would probably have fronted a rock band with his distinctive three-octave vocal range, which he wheels out to excellent effect in I’m In Love With My Car, although if 1975 had an award for least-convincing rhyming couplet, Taylor would have romped home with “With your hand on my grease gun / It’s like a disease, son”. But I’m just nitpicking, in an album without the ‘Scaramouch’ song to overshadow it, this might have become a rock classic in its own right.
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