The Queen of Bohemia

2,021 words

The English rock band Queen needs no introduction. Unless you are so averse to rock and pop music that you have completely blocked it from your life, you will have heard the group, and their most famous song, the operatic “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

The latter was also the title of a 2018 biopic movie about the band, and while you may not recognize the name Farrokh Bulsara, you will doubtless know the singer by his stage name, Freddie Mercury. Stage names are sometimes forced on artists in the music business by the awkwardness of their given appellations. Bulsara’s parents were Tanzanian, where the singer was born in 1946 as possibly the only rock star ever to be born into the Zoroastrian faith. His given name didn’t seem right for his adopted country, nor for his chosen profession. Elton John might have struggled in the music business had he kept the name on his birth certificate – Reginald Dwight – and as for George Michael, Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou just wouldn’t fit on a T-shirt.

“Mercurial” is not a bad way to describe Queen’s rise to stardom, although Mercury’s was something of a tragic life, and death. He died in 1991 of pneumonia, although the ignorant still claim he died of AIDS. No one dies directly from AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), they die from the diseases their immune system is no longer able to defend itself against once compromised through infection via the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

But Queen still became one of the biggest bands in rock history. The traditional “big four” UK acts are The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and The Who, but Queen at their zenith were every bit as prestigious and popular as these rock giants. Their early albums were really heavy rock leavened with piano ballads, although later they turned to crafting pop singles of great variety and near-perfection. The only other band recording 45rpm records each with their own distinctive sound and form were 10cc. Queen had a lot of style, but no one particular style.

Whereas the music of the big four bands noted was rooted in rhythm and blues, and straight Memphis blues, Queen were more like a hybrid of light opera and heavy metal. Their first big single, “Killer Queen”, begins with finger-clicks before settling into the tale of a regal and seductive vamp, accompanied by a cross between a light rock-and-roll beat and a jaunty 1920s dance tune. The song also shows what an accomplished wordsmith Mercury was becoming, combining humor and erudition:

She keeps her Moët et Chandon
In a pretty cabinet.
‘Let them eat cake’, she says,
Just like Marie Antoinette.
A built-in remedy
For Kruschev and Kennedy,
At any time an invitation
You can’t decline.

Not standard lyrical fare for a pop record. Women have been described in any number of ways in pop music, but “fastidious and precise” is not usually a part of the lexicon. “Bohemian Rhapsody” famously has a middle section in which bizarre words and names are conjured out of the air:

I see a little silhouetto of a man.
(Scaramouche! Scaramouche!
Will you do the fandango?)
Thunderbolt and lightning,
Very, very frightening.
Galileo! Figaro!

This was not a case of rhyming “moon” with “June”, or describing a girl’s eyes, and it’s no surprise that Bohemian Rhapsody almost didn’t get released as a single at all. One of the movie’s best scenes is the struggle with a record company executive to get the song out. And it wasn’t just the freakish and bizarre lyrics that almost robbed the world of one of the most famous 45s in history.

There was “Bohemian Rhapsody”s length, for a start. At five minutes and 59 seconds, it breaks all the rules of pop singles (“’McArthur Park'” was seven minutes long!”, someone pleads in desperate defense of the single). Berry Gordy, the man behind Tamla Motown (and still going aged 95), never allowed a single from his stable to be longer than three minutes, usually less, and that became an industry standard. My second-favorite single of all time (although it wasn’t on Tamla), Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”, was 3:14 on Gaye’s album, but was clipped back to 2:59 for single release. My favorite single, Roxy Music’s “All I Want is You”, comes in at 2:58. As far as I am aware, the shortest single ever released on a major label is Buzzcocks’ (they were never called The Buzzcocks) “Love You More”, which will take up a mere minute and 51 seconds of your time. That may seem extraneous information now, but on the other hand it might earn you a point in a bar quiz one day, and you’ll thank me for it.

The Queen song itself is unique. Bohemian Rhapsody shows that the pop single need not be confined to low culture, while the film is a testament to a great rock band from a country which specialized in producing such groups. Both song and film are tragi-comedic operettas from a time before high-quality pop music became extinct.

There is a neat cinematic synchronicity to the episode of Bohemian Rhapsody in the film of the same name. The head of A&R (Artists and Repertoire) at EMI records, a bad-tempered, craggily-bearded Scotsman, informs Mercury that “people don’t like opera”. The vocalist looks dreamily out of the window and replies softly, “people do like opera”. I didn’t realize until the credits rolled that the actor playing the A&R man is Mike Myers, which is where the synchronicity comes in. A quarter of a century earlier, Myers had starred in his first big movie, 1992’s Wayne’s World. The very first scene shows Wayne and crew in a car. He suggests some music, and holds up a cassette tape (boy, does that date the film): “A little ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, gentlemen?”

This is followed by the boys’ version as they sing along to the tape. The head-banging scene when the mighty riff comes crashing in at the end is still funny today, although not advisable in practice should you be the driver.

Musically, Queen played at a very high level of proficiency, and apart from Mercury’s singular vocals, guitarist Brian May stood out. One scene shows him coming up with the famous “stomp-stomp-clap” introduction to the song We Will Rock You. Skeptical at first, Mercury soon realizes the power of what would become one of the greatest audience call-and-response songs ever. The guitar outro is also a May masterclass. After a football-terrace chant, the guitar suddenly crunches into a completely different key, and May has an unmistakable tone to his guitar-playing.

May is one of those guitarists who only ever used one guitar, like Sting’s Fender Precision bass or Rory Gallagher’s Stratocaster. The difference is that May’s famous guitar never had a scratch on it, whereas Sting’s bass and Gallagher’s Strat looked like they had been dragged backwards though a series of ditches and then had rocks thrown at them. Also, May’s famous cherry-red guitar is not a Fender, a Gibson, or any other famous make. May built the guitar with his father in their garden shed. A smart man, then, reinforced by the fact that May has a PhD in astrophysics.

The actors playing the band in Bohemian Rhapsody fit the bill as closely as could be desired (including a wig for May’s jungle of curly hair), and Rami Malek thoroughly deserved the Oscar he received for playing Mercury, even if the false teeth he wore for the part stop just this side of Bugs Bunny. Mercury was born with far too many teeth, something he claimed gave him his added vocal range. (This would have interested Queen drummer Roger Taylor, as an ex-dental student).

As the band get bigger and bigger, and he comes to terms with his sexuality, Mercury becomes engulfed by a lifestyle of eccentricity, hedonism, and decadence. It killed him in the end, and the UK more or less went into a period of national mourning. If someone had suggested he lie in state at Westminster Abbey, I don’t think anyone high up in the Anglican Church would have objected. There was even a memorial gig in his honor where everyone who was anyone showed up to play.

Unfortunately, the 1980s and 1990s were a period of “excess in all areas” in the music industry, and there were a lot of refugees. Elton John claims not to remember much of the 80s, such was the ferocity of his cocaine use, and David Bowie had to go to Berlin to try to get off the drug. It’s not clear that going to that city of decadence with Iggy Pop and Lou Reed was the best way to achieve that, but it was certainly a good move artistically.

Freddie Mercury became notorious for his drug-fueled parties, at which he would make a grand entrance in ermine and furs, a crown on his head every bit as impressive as that of Queen Elizabeth II, and wielding an even larger scepter. When a band member loses his temper, Mercury quips; “There’s only room for one hysterical queen in this band, darling”.

The climax of the film is the famous Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium, London. Mercury’s voice was not, strictly speaking, Malik’s – it was altered in several ways for the film – but his choreography shows long hours of practice with a dance coach to replicate Mercury’s sprightly stage presence. Queen’s performance is also poignant, as Mercury is aware that he is ill. The lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody” tell of a young man in a condemned cell. Metaphorically speaking, that is where Mercury was. As he plucks out the famous, six-note piano melody which opens the song proper after its acapella start, the lyrics hit home to him as much as to the audience.

In one scene, Mercury coughs blood onto a white handkerchief, and we are reminded of the English Romantic poet, John Keats, on having the same experience. Keats would die at 25 from tuberculosis, and his training as a medical student was enough for him to write, on seeing the handkerchief; “I know the color of this blood”. Mercury was also aware that the clock was running down. The singer had a famous vocal trick he used live, where would he replicate the old “Day-O!” line from the traditional Jamaican “Banana Boat Song”, and the crowd would follow him (well, as best they could once the arpeggios started to kick in). Shuffling out of an AIDS clinic, having learned of his fate, Mercury passes a young man who is clearly ill. The boy looks at the singer, and plaintively murmurs, “Day-O”. It’s quite a moment. One man is a rock god, the other just an unknown boy, but now the disease that ravaged the 1980s makes them equal.

Queen were an odd bunch who somehow clicked with one another. Mercury made waves within the band when he went solo, but musically they were four very different people who gelled in the recording studio and onstage. Whereas the other big bands were fairly strong collectives (well, until Yoko Ono turned up in John Lennon’s life and bed, and effectively broke up The Beatles), Queen had a curious self-image expressed by Mercury in the movie. An A&R man asks the singer who Queen are. “We’re a bunch of misfits”, the singer replies, “who play for other misfits”. Certainly, “Bohemian Rhapsody” the song seemed like a musical misfit, but in fact it went on to fit right in. It was number one in the UK for nine weeks following its release in 1975 (including the prestigious Christmas number one slot). After Mercury’s death, it reached the top spot again. The accompanying video also won plaudits for its ground-breaking visuals. Readers of America’s Rolling Stone magazine voted Mercury’s singing on the track the greatest vocal performance ever.

A peerless, utterly original band, a tragic but brilliant singer, a unique song, and a film well worth watching. It is a great pity, now that musical culture has been almost entirely occupied by hideous “music of black origin”, that it is unlikely we will see Mercury’s like again, or his band’s.

God save the Queen.