Melody Maker,
22nd November 1975
"I'm pissed off listening to the bloody album," mutters a weary Roger Taylor, confronted once more with hearing a new Queen album, four months in the making, which had been completed just a matter of hours before. Or so the band thought.
In another corner of the Rocket records office, where various Queenies have assembled, Freddie Mercury, typically eloquent despite the slog of the past weeks, is equally horrified at the thought of going back into the studio. "I'll never forget this album, dear," he proclaims. "NEVER." But we've got to have this playback, just to let friends hear what we've been up to. "The thing is that they'll never understand it with one listen. Later on, we'll all go out, get pissed and forget all about the dammed album."
John Deacon is hunched behind a desk fingering his way through a proof of the program which is being prepared for the British tour. He finds fault after fault and takes great pleasure in airing his grievances.
The three band members are gathered at their manager's office before heading for London's Roundhouse Studios where the new album, "A Night At The Opera," is to be played to various friends, hangers-on and members of the press. As befits the group's royal image, champagne is flowing freely. The playback reception is due to start at 7.00pm. Fifteen minutes after the hour, they're still at Rocket. Freddie is on the phone to America telling a journalist about "this incredible album we've just done." Roger and John blabber about how the new six-minute single, "Bohemian Rhapsody," has shocked everyone. They chuckle at the thought of it.
There's a certain amount of confusion about what has happened to the album's tapes. "I'm not leaving if the tapes aren't at the studio yet. How embarrassing." Freddie asserts. Eventually, we do leave for the Roundhouse in a chauffeur-driven limo. At the gate of the studio there's a placard: "Welcome To A Night At The Opera." John Deacon cringes. "Hope Joe Public's not going to be here." We're just nervous wrecks. I just want to get out on the road again." They have four days to assemble a live show that will be taken around the world. People line up in the studio lobby to shake hands and have a word with the band; it's just like the Royal Variety Performance. the playback goes smoothly. Everybody seems impressed. Many say it's the best thing Queen have ever done. After just one listen. As the album ends, the beautifully-toned guitar of Brian May, who is apparently too exhausted to attend, renders the national anthem. Everybody stays seated and Mercury gets angry. "Stand up, you ..........," But "thank goodness that's over," he remarks afterwards in the relative tranquility of the car, "some of those people really bore me." We speed off, chauffeur-driven, to an exclusive London restaurant, for food and conversation. There, Mercury exhibits the shortness of his temper. He hates being kept waiting. When his meal is late in arriving, he grabs a waiter and tells him in no uncertain terms that he is fed up. Finally, though, we talk about the new album. Easily Queen's best, he informs me. Also, their most outrageous. "It's really taken the longest to do out of all the four albums. We didn't really cater for it. We just set upon it and said that we were going to do so many things.
"It's taken us about four months and now we've really gone over the deadline with the tour approaching. It's more important to get the album the way we want it, especially after we've spent so long on it. "The last bits - piecing it together - are more important than any of the rest of it. "It's the most important album yet. To be honest, in a way the best judge we had was tonight when we listened back to it, because we just hadn't got the time to listen back to it before. "I think we've got the strongest songs ever. It's going to be our best album. It really is. "If I thought there was something wrong with it I would say so, but there are certain things on the album which we've wanted to do for a long time. "I'm really pleased about the operatic thing. I really wanted to be outrageous with vocals because we're always getting compared with other people, which is very stupid. If you really listen to the operatic bit there are no comparisons, which is what we want."
Why such a deliberate need to be outrageous?
"We don't want to be outrageous. It's in us. There are so many things we want to do which we can't do all at the same time. It's impossible. "At the moment we've made an album which, let's face it, is too much to take for most people. But it was what we wanted to do. "We could have done a few things that are on "A Night At The Opera" on the first album but it would have been too much to take for certain people. Really. "It just so happens that you can't cram everything on one album. It's a progression. "After the third album ("Sheer Heart Attack"), we thought, 'now we've established ourselves and we can do certain things.' Like, vocally we can outdo any band. "We just thought that we would go out, not restrict ourselves with any barriers, and just do exactly what we want to do. It just so happened that I had this operatic thing and I thought, 'why don't we do it.'
The song is the single "Bohemian Rhapsody." Did Mercury feel that Queen had sometimes gone overboard?
"We went a bit overboard on every album, actually. But that's the way Queen is. In certain areas we always feel that we want to go overboard. "It's what keeps us going really. If we were to come up with an album that people said: 'It's just like "Sheer Heart Attack" but there are a few bits on "Sheer Heart Attack" that are better, I'd give up. I really would. Wouldn't you?" Mercury thinks the band has greatly matured: "What really helped was the last tour. We've done a really successful worldwide tour which we've never done before. "It taught us a lot. It taught us how to behave on stage and come to grips with the music.
We started off in Britain and by the time we took that same stage act across to America and then to Japan, we were a different band. "All that experience was accumulating, and when we came to do this album there were certain things which we had done in the past which we can do much better now. "Our playing ability was better. Backing tracks on this album are far superior. We start off with backing tracks, and we felt that they were really closely knit and we seemed to feel each other's needs, which is very important for backing tracks. "I think Queen has really got its own identity now. I don't care what the journalists say, we got that identity after Queen II."
"After that, we got into our own thing. America saw that it was good, and so did Japan. Since then we're the biggest group in Japan. "I don't mind saying that. We outdo anybody. And that's because we've just taken it on our own musical terms. "Since Queen II" we've had our own identity. Of course, if we do something that's harmonised, we'll be Beach Boys, and if we do something that's heavy, we'll be Led Zeppelin, or whatever. "But the thing is that we have an identity of our own because we combine all those things which mean Queen. That's what people don't seem to realise. "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. "The title of the album, "A Night At The Opera," came at the very end of recording. We thought, 'Oh God, we've got all these songs, what are we going to call the album.' "It was going to be called all sorts of things, and then I said, 'look, it's got this sort of operatic content. Let's look upon it that way'. Then Roger and I thought of the title. It fitted, not only because of the high singing." It seemed that Queen were putting their necks on the line; "We've always done that. We've always put our necks on the line. We did it with "Queen II." On that album we did so many outrageous things that people started to say, 'self-indulgent crap, too many vocals, too many everything.' "But that is Queen. After that they seemed to realise that was what Queen are all about. We always have."
Why choose a six-minute epic as the latest single?
"We look upon our product as songs. We don't worry about singles or albums. All we do is pick the cream of the crop. then we look upon it as a whole to make sure the whole album works. "With Bohemian Rhapsody" 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 that we have to have a three-minute single, but we want to put across Queen as songs.
"There is no point in cutting it. If you want to cut "Bohemian Rhapsody," it just doesn't work. "We just wanted to release it to say that this is what Queen are about at this stage. This is our single and you're going to get an album after that." Mercury claims uniqueness for the band: "We're just very different. We do things now in a style that is very different to anybody else. But we haven't acquired that because it's different; it's just happened. "If tomorrow, ballet suddenly became the rage, or jazz enjoyed a new wave of popularity, we wouldn't change. We'd just be playing the same thing because that's what we believe in. "When "Seven Seas Of Rhye" was a hit everybody suddenly said that had made a market for us, let's stick to it. We don't want that.
"We go through so many traumas, and we're so meticulous. There are literally tens and twenties of songs that have been rejected for this album - some of them nice ones. "If people don't like the songs we're doing at the moment, we couldn't give a f**k. We're probably the fussiest band in the world, to be honest. We take so much care with what we do because we feel so much about what we put across. "And if we do an amazing album we make sure that album is packaged right, because we've put so much loving into it....."
The next day Queen went back into the Roundhouse Studios to "put the finishing touches" to "A Night At The Opera." The temptation was too much. They remixed the album. That's perfectionism for you.