[who came up with the idea for the vocal harmonies] We always were keen on that kind of thing. That was something which we wanted to do from the beginning. We wanted to be a group that could do the heaviness of hard rock, but also have harmonies swooping around all over the place. We thought there was some real power and emotion in that combination.
[difficultness of the first solo] No, that was pretty much off the cuff, except I think I had plenty of time to think about that one. I remember playing along with it in the studio for a while when other things were being done. I knew what kind of melody I wanted to play.
I think "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a great piece of work and it's really all Freddie's thing. It's Freddie's baby more than anything else and whatever was in his mind at that point was something pretty bizarre. And I feel very proud of it as a piece of work and I was very happy to see it voted as the song of the millennium. We went and received our award for that, which is very nice.
[did you feel it is something special during the recording] It would pretty odd. I mean this is really Freddie's brain child. You know he came in here with most of it formed in his head and he was just trying to get it across to us, which was difficult. And he was going "Da d-da da da", then it stops, you know, and then we go "Why, why's it stop?" (laughs) and he's say, "No, this bit goes in here", you know the acapella bit. "And then there's..." and we'd go "Okay Fred, yeah", you know, and it was all done in bits and it sounded very weird cos there was no vocals on it. It was just bits of backing track, urm, and he had all the vocal parts written out on these little pieces of paper, which came from his Dad's work - all written in A's and B's and C's - not dots, 'cos we don't do dots really (laughs) very well, but in, in the names of the notes. All the chords, every note that everyone was gonna sing. And some of these things were sort of 9-part harmonies, as you can tell, you know, plus we sing it 16 times each, over the 3 of us, so there's a colossal number voices on there by the time you stop, by the time you've finished. Um - and we thought this is either something which is (laughs) gonna be completely incomprehensible, or else it will be the biggest thing ever, I suppose.
Freddie used to come into the studio armed with sheets and sheets of paper with notes scribbled all over them in his own particular fashion. It wasn't standard musical notation, but A's and B's and C's and sharps in blocks - like buses zooming all over his bits of paper. He had the song all worked out when he came in. We played a backing track which left the gaps. And he would go, 'bum bum bum bmm, that's what hap- pens here....' He knew exactly what he was doing all along. It was Freddie's baby. He had It in his head'. We Just helped him bring it to life. We were stretching the limits of technology in those days. Because 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was entirely done on 16 track, we had to do a lot of bouncing as we went along; the tape got very thin. This 'legendary' story, that people think we made up. Is true: we held the tape up to the light one day - we'd been won- dering where all the top end was going- and we discovered was virtually a transparent piece of tape. All the oxide had been rubbed off. It was time to hurriedly make a copy and get on with It.
I think Bismillah is more of, more of an expletive than a character. As far as I know.
Bohemian Rhapsody was, although it is, I think it's a wonderful song and it's quite serious in some ways, its got a tremendous sense of humour about it, especially in the, obviously in the central sort of pastiche section, you know. That sort of mock operatic section. I mean, we thought it was hilarious when we were doing it. In fact, great, you know, quite exciting, and fun and big and quite funny. We did think it was special and it was worth spending literally weeks on recording it.
There were only the three of us singing, um, it was something like 128 voices heard at one point, you know, but we were really pushing the limits of the studios. The massive multi-tracking and layering and the machines weren't really capable, the tape wasn't really capable of taking it. Um, you know cos of the massive overdubbing and recording, bouncing the tracks down, and the tape would go almost, you could almost see through it in places.
I had quite a bit of input to the heavy part, um, although Fred did have a pretty good image of how that should be. He wasn't sure that there should be a solo in there, I think, and I said that I would like to have a verse-type solo which would gradually lead into something else, and so he built that portion of the song in there.
I remember the Beatles had made some film for Rain and for Strawberry Fields - little filmettes, you know, on 16 mil, but no one had used the medium of video really. I mean cos video was quite new, very new, there were no video production companies, for instance, and what we used was actually an outside broadcast unit used usually for Sports, which happened to be owned by our management company and we thought, well if we filmed, if we just made a little film of this using one of their trucks, then we could go on tour and be on Top Of The Pops.
Videos were weren't really around, we just happened to be managed by a company that had an outside broadcast facility, which was mainly sort of leased to ITV for sports coverage. And er.. we sort of had the bright idea of using it to film or video, tape our.. the end of our rehearsal for the Night at the Opera tour. And I suppose that really became apparent after it was on Top of the Pops etc when we were on tour, that it was a really incredible marketing tool a way of getting to people.
With Rhapsody, we've squeezed to our vocal limitations for four octaves and not slowed down the tape!
I'm really pleased about the operatic thing. I wanted to be outrageous with vocals - we're always getting compared with other people, which is very stupid. A lot of people have slammed Bohemian Rhapsody, but if you listen to that single, who can you compare it to? Tell me one group that's done an operatic single. I can't think of anybody. But we didn't do an operatic single because we thought we'd be the only group to do it. It just happened! We just thought that it was a very strong song and so we released it. But there were so many arguments about it. Somebody suggested cutting it because the media reckons we have to have a three-minute single, but there is no point in cutting it - it just doesn't work. We just wanted to release it to say that this is what Queen are about at this stage.
I'm going to shatter some illusions: It was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it, but then it grew. We started deciding on a single about halfway through. There were a few contenders - we were thinking of The Prophet's Song at one point - but then Bohemian Rhapsody seemed the one. There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety. We knew it was very risky, but we had so much confidence in that song - I did anyway. I felt, underneath it all, that if it was successful it would earn a lot of respect. People were all going, “You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out.” We had numerous rows. EMI were shocked - “A six-minute single? You must be joking!” The same in America - “Oh, you just got away with it in Britain.”
It was terrible, because Freddie was too shy to say “Ere play this” and I'm also frightened to hear people's new records because if I don't like them then I've got to say so and that tends to make the evening go clunk. So I wasn't looking forward to it even though all of their past records have been fantastic. I had the feeling that maybe this might be the one that is going to be no good as the others have been so amazing. So anyway eventually we took this six minute epic into the studio, plonked it on the machine and I reeled back in amazement. I think my first words were “you'll never get Tony Blackburn to play that, it's too long and weird.” He did eventually though, after it became popular, but I was really knocked out with the single and immediately started to play it on the air. I played it that weekend, twice on the Saturday, and twice on the Sunday, and on Monday I had more calls on the hit line for Bohemian Rhapsody than for any other record throughout the full week. I knew then, that it was going to be a monster, because of the hit line gauge. If something's there, you can be sure that it is well liked. Of course this was the day after Freddie played it to me and everyone was ringing up and asking about a copy but the thing hadn't even been pressed into records by then. It was about three weeks before it hit the shops. I think Bohemian Rhapsody will eventually be guarded as a pop classic. On some of the albums Fred plays some really lovely little bits on the piano on the quiet tracks, and the phrasing is so classical. I think he just might do an album pure and simple classical music next. It will be all of them with perhaps tons of quadruple tracking and that little band will produce a major symphony, a modern symphony. The Beatles were the last people to have combined really big talent and I think Queen have that as well. But the Beatles have already done the big swappo world bit, so Queen don't have to do that now, they can sit down and do something a thousand times better than Abbey Road and it will become the Beethoven of our times.
It was just something that I'd wanted to do for a long while actually. It wasn't something that I'd given much thought to in the previous albums but I just felt that when it came to the fourth album… “Oh well, I'm going to do it.” And it needed a lot of thought. I did a bit of research, y'know, but I still wanted it to be very much a Queen thing. I wasn't trying to say that it was the authentic opera or whatever, I just wanted it to be opera in the rock ‘n' roll sense.
Something like Bohemian Rhapsody didn't just come out of thin air. I did a bit of research, although it was tongue in cheek and it was mock-opera. Why not? I certainly wasn't saying I was an opera fanatic and I knew everything about it.
From my point of view, OK, Bohemian Rhapsody, big hit, but I think a song like Somebody to Love is in my estimation, from the writing aspect, a better song.
It was a big risk, and it worked, because I think with a song like that it was either gonna be a huge success or a, or a terrific flop, and you know it was. It was quite a mammoth task, because it was basically done in three definite sections and just pieced together, and each one required a lot of concentration. The opera section, the middle, was the most taxing I think, ‘cause we just wanted to recreate a sort of huge operatic sort of harmony section, between just the three of us, and that involves a lot of multi-tracking and things, and I think between the three of us we sort of, we recreated a, a sort of 160- to 200-piece choir effect between just the three of us, that's Brian, Roger and myself just singing it. There was like a section of “no, no, no,” and we had to sort of do that in sort of different escalating things and we just sat there going “no, no, no, no, no, no, no” about, I don't know, a hundred and fifty times.
There's a tremendous range of harmonies, and it involves doing it again and again and again and again to make it sound bigger and bigger and bigger. Each little bit though has to be done that many times, and you have to learn all the very different parts.
That was really Freddie's baby from the beginning - he came in and knew exactly what he wanted. The backing track was done with just piano, bass and drums, with a few spaces for other things to go in, like the tic-tic-tic on the hi-hats to keep the time, and Freddie sang a guide vocal at the time, but he had all his harmonies written out, and it was really just a question of doing it. He even knew pretty much what he wanted in the way of guitar, although there's always a bit of freedom to do what I want on the guitar side, and I could do the solo as I wanted really, but it was very much Freddie's thing which was mapped out. It took a week just to do the vocals, and that was efficient working as well - we already had our methods well worked out, where the three of us would sing a line, then double- or maybe triple- track it. There were nine parts to some of those vocal pieces.
After Bohemian Rhapsody, it was like, people were saying, “How are they gonna top this?” I mean if you go sleep at nights thinking about how you're gonna top what you did, that is gonna be your downfall, you know you've just got to say, “OK, it's done!” That's the way I look at it. I mean, music is just a big consumer thing. As far as our music is concerned, people should just listen to it and discard it and - that's what people do - wait for the next one. I don't like harping on, of course they keep coming back, you know Bohemian Rhapsody always comes back, We Are the Champions, all that was, and people have to take note of that, but I mean as far as I'm concerned, all those days are over, that era is over, that type of music is now over, and I don't wish to even think about it or write about it.
It was a very strange song to record in a way because we actually did it in section, it was Freddie's idea, I think. I remember doing one recording session in Rockfield where Freddie was saying, “These are the notes”, and he goes “dum, dum, dum, dum, dum”, and it seemed to have no connexion with anything, but he had all the ideas of what he wanted to go on top.
I remember lots of people telling us not to release Bohemian Rhapsody because it was commercial suicide, because: one, it would never get played on the radio, because it wasn't suitable; and two, it would never get played on the radio, because it was too long, and we stuck to our guns, and we didn't cut it down, and we released it as it was, and luckily it sort of went, the story went the right way, but it could have gone the other way, you know, we could have disappeared.
Someone asked me [if I'd sung that note] the other day. Yes. It's the very high one at the end of the mock operatic section. I can't get there now - I'd need a pair of pliers. We didn't have synthesisers - it was, it was genuinely sung. We used to be able to get higher, but I think as a natural - your voice does get lower as you get older.
What always happened when we went into recording an album was that we all brought in our ideas and kind of plonk to on the table, and from that some would get thrown out, some would get developed, new ones would come in, and gradually there was a feeling of what kind of atmosphere on the album we were aiming for, and I remember I was beavering away on Prophet's Song and the things that I was trying to write, and Freddie was beavering away working out his piano parts. I remember hearing Bohemian Rhapsody at that time, thinking, “Bloody hell! That's pretty unusual!” There were a lot of passages where something would happen and then there'd be silence and a count and then it would still start up again, so there are long gaps in the recording, and we said, “What goes on there, Freddie?” He said “Oh, that's the operatic bit!” And I do remember a moment when Freddie came along and said, “and I'm gonna call it Bohemian Rhapsody!” And you never knew quite whether Freddie was joking or what, but it turned out to be serious. Some of his ideas turned out to be not serious, but that one stuck. We had some discussion about what the solo would be like and whether there should be a solo, and Freddie was always very amenable to what I would like to do, so having gotten used to hearing them playing it for a while, I kind of knew in my head what I would like so I asked for the chord sequence which was the verse chord sequence. Freddie was actually pretty good on the guitar, and the heavy bit is actually all Freddie's idea. This is not my riff, this is Freddie's riff, the famous head-banging riff.
Freddie said, “I've got this thing.” I immediately thought the melody was beautiful - in the verse, “Mama, just killed a man”, it's a very beautiful melody, and that in itself is enough to sell it to me. As we added the central sections it became more and more outlandish and ridiculous but I always liked the core of the song, and the core of the song is essentially the verses. All the elements were in Freddie's mind. He literally had them all lined up like soldiers in his mind, so it really was all there, and all the harmonies - he wrote that in little blocks at the back of a telephone directory.
We'd normally do things anything up to about a dozen times before they would be ready, and there wouldn't be any repairing. Nowadays you could get into the hard disc and start repairing things but in these days the take was the take and, apart from very few little things, nothing could be done to it, so you use the take. You might hear the odd little glitch on the piano or whatever, but it would stay that way, that's the human way it was. We've now listened to a lot of this in the retrospect, and the quality of the backing tracks that Freddie and Roger and John would put down is just stunning. The precision and the feel, the energy. They were all great musicians and it was a great combination. I think Freddie was an exceptional pianist. He didn't actually rate himself very much, but he had such a unique style, that no-one else could quite do. He didn't have the huge chops of the concert pianist but he would learn things in his own way and play them immaculately with incredible attack and precision. It's almost like he had a metronome inside him, very few piano players that I've met have that ability to do that - a lot of them are very technically great, can do wonderful things, but they haven't got that wonderful sense of drama and the precision, I mean, it has to be said, he's almost like a drummer playing piano. And he played [lowering his wrists] at his own style; there was a lot of force there. It's totally like a metronome - he's not playing to a click or anything, that's just the way he plays. We have three different bass tracks: they're all the same part, but it's recorded three different ways - one is direct from the guitar, the DI; one is direct from the amp, I think; and one is out of the speaker into the room, so you get sort of a little bit of ambience on the bass if you want. So the bass sound is a mixture of all three. That was a favourite technique of Roy's, who wanted to get the most out of the bass. He would also play around with the phase switchers to try and get the most out of the three different signals for the bass, which makes a huge difference, again for different colours. Again, you can hear how locked in they are. I mean, John is completely locked in to Freddie's left hand, which is more or less doing the same thing. The sound of the drums changes in the heavy bit. It starts off quite a tight sound for the verses but, when it gets big and becomes live, the drum sound changes to a live drum sound. So that, and the addition of the extra instruments, really makes a huge colour change, and that's partly why the song goes through all these different moods. Partly, it's the way the music's arranged, but partly it's the sounds as well. Ambience, of course, is the room sound, and if you don't have the room sound in there, everything sounds very small. If you put in loads of room, everything sounds very big and, if you're lucky, it doesn't sound echoey - it shouldn't echo, it should just sound big and like you're in the room with it. We had a big thing about ambience, it has to be said, because we were signed to Trident Studios for our first record, and the Trident Studios drum sound was something legendary, and it was very tight. You could hear it on Carly Simon records, everything was so tight and small, very clear for a certain kind of recording, but it was the absolute antithesis of what we wanted and we had this big argument with Roy, I remember, on one of the first days we were in there, and we said, “No, we don't want this kind of sound; we want the big, roomy drum sound.” We didn't really know how to achieve it - we were just boys, but I remember Roy saying, “Oh, it's alright, we can do it with echo later on.” Well, folks, you can't! It has to sound right on the night or else it's never gonna sound right. So we very quickly - precocious boys that we were - forced everybody into recording the drums the way we wanted, which was in the middle of a big studio with mics everywhere, and not too many mics close to the kit. So, mostly, when you hear Roger's kit, it's not like a mic on this, and mic on that, a mic on that, the way it's very often done even these days - it was really down to a few mics strategically placed at certain distances to get the bigness on the kit. There would be mics on the snare, you could add the close stuff in, but mainly it's an ambient drum sound, that's why it sounds so big - it just needed mixing and there it was! This sort of orchestrating with guitars [near the end] was something that I did as an adornment but totally with Freddie's approval and co-operation. I remember wondering how far I could go in terms of sort of orchestrating it, and also how far I could go towards the end of the song ‘cause it's very big in the middle, this song, and it goes very tiny here. I remember thinking, “Maybe that should be just piano, maybe I shouldn't be doing guitar on it,” but Freddie liked just coming down to a little solo guitar. I think the first thing that we overdubbed was normally the guitar, and there would be a lot of different guitars with different sounds on this. There's a lot of colours quite deliberately - I used all different pick-up settings and different amps even to get different sounds, almost like you were building up orchestral sounds using different instruments. The guitar joins in on Verse 2 and it starts off with little harmonics and it goes “shivers up my spine” and we were very into deliberately doing little colours. There's a little “prrring”, which I managed to make by scratching the strings behind the bridge. There's a little echo of that in mix to make it sort of ethereal. I was always keen that the guitar solo should not be just like playing the tune again, because it's kind of lame, it's kind of weak, so this guitar solo, like a lot of them, is kind of a separate tune, it's a little counter-statement. I don't know where [the melody] came from, but I could hear it in my head from the moments when they were practising, and I thought that would be a nice little counterpoint to what's going on. So, it's a Verse structure, but the tune is completely different. There's three little runs [at the end of the rock section] and they all have completely different sounds, so you get these different colours, different textures coming in the whole time. The last run is double-tracked in octaves to get again a different sound and is followed by the sort of big triumphant piano run-up. So [near the end] you have what is kind of, in my mind - my fevered brow, a trumpet section, and for that I have a special little amp, which John Deacon made, and it's just very good at being overblown and making those kind of trumpet noises, pretty much a fanfare kind of thing, and it's a bell effect because they overlap each other and the notes are held so they add up, and it's a very different sound from the rest of the guitars on the track. It almost sounds like a trumpet when you first hear it, I think. Part of building up the whole orchestra sound in the middle was the percussion, obviously, so Roger's played a whole kit for the backing track, but he's now gonna overdub other stuff, so there's an extra snare and there's some timps, very nicely tuned, and Roger actually did go on to play timps quite a lot - we had timps with us on tour and he used to do a whole timp solo at one time, when we were at our most self-indulgent. I can talk, because I used to do about a fifteen-minute guitar solo. There's [a snare-drum] overdub [in the rock section] for emphasis, and there's a big riff on top of that, the guitar riff. The harmonies at the beginning of this song are not all of us, they're just Freddie multi-tracking himself, and of course he's singing to his guide piano, but the guide piano is taken out in the end because all you want is that a cappella [bit]. He's on his own, that's quite beautiful, I think. Some of these lines [in the operatic section] are kind of strange tunes, and that's what happens when you're doing complicated harmonies. That's not an easy line to sing. These things are quite tricky, ‘cause that's not the kind of tune that you would normally sing. It's moving around little semitones at a time, very tricky! Three of us would sing the line once, double it, do the same thing again, and then probably triple it, so you have three tracks of us all singing the same line, and only then do you move on to the next part. So all these would've been [bounced on a separate track], although some of them would've disappeared because other things got written over them, but they would've been bounced. It sounds like a lot of people singing, and part of it is luck because our voices blended very well - as soon as there was three of us singing, it sounded like quite a lot of people, really, because we were lucky that we had different kinds of voices, the three of us - John opted out, John is not a singer. He took care of the low end. The “let him go” is another section of choir, and Roger is on the top, and there was a particular effect, I don't know if it happened by accident or not, but Roger was sort of carrying on longer and we thought that sounded nice, so the choir sings “let him go,” but the top line - which is just Roger, ‘cause he's got the highest voice, he's the one who can make those top notes really cut - sings longer than anybody else. We're using the ranges of our voices because generally Freddie and I can sing quite low and Roger could sing very high. We can all kind of stay in there up to a point, but there's a certain point where Roger could just make those top notes count, so we're using all the range that we've got. Freddie had this amazing razor sharp top end to his vocals, real crystal sound. He's double-tracked [on the rock section]. In the beginning, I remember it was gonna go [lower] but he changed it towards the end, it went [to a tenor c"], which is a lovely little touch, he takes it way up there. It's not perfectly double-tracked: Freddie could've done that if he wanted to, it's just there's a bit of different expression from track to track, very much like John Lennon used to do with The Beatles. The Beatles were our Bible, it has to be said, in a lot of ways, although we were able to take some things further than The Beatles ‘cause we had better technology and we had the benefit of their experience, but The Beatles just did so many things right, and John Lennon double-tracking stuff would normally make it just a little bit different so you could feel the humanity of the two voices, it wasn't just like an automatic double-track. Freddie was able to double-track himself so precisely that it would actually phase: there's another track on this same album, Love of My Life, where he sings in parts; he sang it three or four times, and they are so close it sounds like one voice but just has extra breadth. In this case it's not - it's a rock ‘n' roll thing, just very, very powerful.
‘His bony fingers would whack it out and the backing tracks, if you listen to them now, are immaculate. Freddie and Roger and John are absolutely together - it's totally live, it's totally real, there's a feel there. I wanted to make a little tune [for the solo] that would be a sort of counterpart to the main melody, I didn't wanna just play the melody. I can remember singing it to Freddie, and him going, “Oh yeah, that will be good.” And I think, certainly, my best stuff is born that way - it's much better for me to hear it in my head and then try and play it, than sit down with the guitar and sort of let the fingers do it. The fingers tend to be a little predictable unless they're being led by the brain.
He just said, “Look, I've got this very strange thing, you're gonna have to be very patient when we do it, ‘cause there'll be a lot of gaps and stuff.” As soon as, really, we'd mapped it out, we all sort of understood what was happening, but it was a bit confusing at first. I remember the first time I heard the melody, the main sort of melody, I loved the melody. Freddie was a great person to be in a band with, really, because he was such a great rhythmic piano player, and it sort of made the backing tracks really easy to do. We would sort of knit it together and it sort of swam well. We were sort of getting off on how far could we take this, and how big could we make those harmonies, and make a wall of sound, we were sort of quite interested in seeing how far you could actually go before it became totally ridiculous or the limits of the technology stopped you.
‘The original mix, when we were doing it manually, it was a case of I was controlling the drums, bass, piano, guitars; then, Freddie had control over the vocals - he would be switching vocals on and off and doing it that way. The piano was actually done live by Freddie as we were doing the track, so when you listen to the piano tracks, you can just about hear some of the drums in the background, because it was all done in one room.
We were all huge Beatles fans. I don't know if A Day in the Life was a conscious influence, but I'm sure there are threads there. At the time, I thought of it as being our Stairway to Heaven, because it goes through so many different atmospheres.