TaraDeS — 6 months ago(September 29, 2025 10:22 AM)

Looooong and great article about Queen's wonderful masterpiece.
Simply Royal.
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Bohemian Rhapsody at 50!
Brian May and Roger Taylor on Queen’s Masterpiece
Making the most-streamed song from the 20th century
took ambition, hard work and a dash of opera.
Their real life was about to slip into fantasy, which was pretty much the plan. At the tail end of the 1960s, Roger Taylor and Farrokh "Freddie" Bulsara would lie on the floor together, head to head, getting lost in Electric Ladyland, talking about their future. Maybe they’d share a bottle of wine, nothing stronger.
"Freddie and I were no good at smoking weed,”
Taylor says, more than five decades later.
"I used to think my head was on fire at the back. It never did agree."
Even before Farrokh "Freddie" Bulsara joined the band that became Queen and renamed himself Freddie Mercury, he and Taylor shared a velvet-heavy fashion sense, a passion for Jimi Hendrix and some fat-bottomed ambitions.
"We wanted to be the best,"
says Taylor.
"We both really wanted success."
Queen’s drummer is, at the moment, sitting in a vast living room on his 18th-century estate in the British countryside, amid 48 wooded acres. He might not have made it here without the song we’re here to discuss, the moment Queen reached as far as any band ever dared, then went a bit further, and then added a few more
Galileos
for good measure: Bohemian Rhapsody, which is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Music never gets old
The track, first played on U.K. radio in October 1975 and squeezed onto a seven-­inch single at the end of that month, became the most-streamed song from the 20th century with more than 2.8 billion plays on Spotify alone.
"Incredible,"
Brian May says when I visit him the next day.
“Bohemian Rhapsody doesn’t get old, does it? And I suppose that’s the magic for us. We’re lucky that we don’t get old."
He pauses and makes a slight correction.
"The music doesn’t seem to get old."
The statistic leaves little doubt: Queen’s biggest song is on its way to become the rock era’s most lasting artifact, Figaro, Beelzebub and all. Bohemian Rhapsody is a five-minute-and-54-second remnant of a brief slice of time when musicians could afford to spend weeks slathering overdubs onto a single track, when engineers made edits with a razor on magnetic tape, when bands raced to push the limits of song structure and recording technology, and maybe when, as Taylor caustically argues,
"you actually had to be good at your instrument — that doesn’t seem to be a necessary requisite these days"
. Even as Queen laboured over the Bohemian Rhapsody and the rest of their fourth album
A Night at the Opera
, the clock was ticking. Two weeks before the album’s release, the Sex Pistols played their first show in London.
Fussiest Band in the World
The song is also, of course, an eternal encapsulation of the brilliance, wit and pain of its lead voice and composer Freddie Mercury, who died of complications from AIDS in 1991 when he was just 45.
"In certain areas, we feel that we want to go overboard,"
he said.
"It’s what keeps us going really, darling…We’re probably the fussiest band in the world."
On a pleasant late-spring morning, Taylor’s side doors are flung open to his sprawling garden. Somewhere out there, not quite in sight, is a 20-foot-high fiberglass statue of Freddie Mercury that once advertised the
We Will Rock You
musical. Taylor is positive his late friend would’ve found its new home hilarious. Elsewhere among the greenery is the very same 60-inch gong we hear Roger Taylor strike in the final seconds of the Bohemian Rhapsody.
"I remember Led Zeppelin had a gong,"
Taylor says with a smirk.
"So we had a much bigger gong. Pathetic one-up­manship, really."
His formerly blond hair is silver now, cropped short with a matching beard, and he dresses like a retired mogul these days in slim khakis and a gray button-down. Nearby is a grand piano with a piece of paper bearing a scribbled, in-progress chord progression; behind him are books on the Beatles and Bob Dylan.
In 1969, Roger Taylor played drums in a band called
Smile
alongside Brian May, a brilliant, meticulous, curly-headed fellow Hendrix disciple, while Farrokh "Freddie" Bulsara sang in the short-lived Ibex. The members of the two groups crammed into a series of London flats together and all the while, Bulsara was trying to make his way into
Smile
. He was by no means an obvious choice.
"The honest truth is,"
says Taylor,
"he wasn't a great singer at the time. He had this very powerful but uncontrolled sort of noise."
Queen at Ridge Farm in 1975: Brian May, John Deacon, Freddie Mercury, a canine friend and Roger Taylor
.
Freddie kept a Jimi Hendrix photo on his bedroom mirror, drew pictures of him in his ruffled stage outfits and saw him in concert at least 14 times. Jimi Hendrix was
"living out everything I wanted to be,"
he said later, not mentioning that Ji