Learn English with "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen

Freddie Mercury wrote 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by fusing pieces of music he had been carrying around for years, then brought them to Queen's rehearsals in the summer of 1975. Recorded with producer Roy Thomas Baker across several studios that August, it was released as the lead single from the album A Night at the Opera on 31 October 1975, with the album itself following on 21 November through EMI Records in the UK.

The band pushed the recording technology of the era to its absolute limit. With only 24-track tape available, they had to keep 'bouncing' finished tracks onto new tape to free up space, running the master through roughly eight successive generations of copies. The operatic middle section alone — built from Brian May, Mercury and Roger Taylor singing the same few bars over and over — took about three weeks to complete and reportedly involved around 180 individual vocal overdubs, with the tape wearing so thin from repeated use that engineers said light could be seen through it.

At under six minutes, with no repeating chorus, the song behaves more like a suite than a single: an a cappella-style intro, a piano ballad, a guitar solo, a mock-operatic passage full of invented characters, a hard-rock section, and a slow, reflective coda. The operatic wordplay draws on opera and commedia dell'arte tradition, with references to figures such as Scaramouche and Figaro, and Brian May — later an astrophysicist — has said that Mercury's nod to Galileo was written partly with him in mind.

On 10 November 1975, the band shot a promotional film with director Bruce Gowers in roughly four hours on a budget of about £3,500, using a four-way close-up shot that echoed the cover of their earlier album, Queen II. First shown on Top of the Pops, it is widely credited as one of the earliest true music videos, helping establish the promo clip as standard practice in the record industry.

In the UK the single climbed to number one on 29 November 1975 — Queen's first chart-topper — and stayed there for nine weeks. It fared more modestly in the US on first release, peaking at number nine in 1976.

The song has had two remarkable second lives since. After Mercury's death, it was rereleased in the UK in December 1991 as a double A-side with 'These Are the Days of Our Lives', returning to number one for five weeks and raising money for AIDS charities. In the US, its use in a memorable scene from the 1992 film Wayne's World sent it back up to number two on the Billboard Hot 100, giving it hit status across three different decades. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004, named Britain's favourite single of all time by Guinness World Records in 2002, and — boosted by the 2018 biopic that shares its name — became the most-streamed song from the twentieth century, going on to be certified diamond in the United States in 2021.

In this catalogue, Bohemian Rhapsody stands apart simply because of its shape: six distinct musical sections in one six-minute track, running from tender ballad diction through full operatic projection to hard-rock shouting — a single song that works almost like a complete tour of British vocal styles.

If you liked this, we recommend:

• Every Breath You Take — The Police (British English, a very different kind of classic rock storytelling)
• Total Eclipse of the Heart — Bonnie Tyler (Welsh English, an 80s power ballad built for big voices)
• I Wanna Dance with Somebody — Whitney Houston (American English, pure 80s dance-pop energy)
• Should I Stay or Should I Go — The Clash (British English, the punk-rock opposite of an opera)