Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Queen fans
have been arguing the toss for years.
Although 'Bohemian Rhapsody''s creator, the late Freddie
Mercury, never explained the lyrics, declaring vaguely that they were
'just about relationships' with 'a bit of nonsense in the middle',
conflicting theories about the song's true meaning are as rife today
as they have ever been. While Queen's surviving members - guitarist
Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor and retired bassist John Deacon -
have always protected their frontman's most closely-guarded secret,
intense speculation persists.
Forty
years this month since Queen's soaring, decadent magnum
opus
was originally released, I can reveal the song's true meaning. The
'baroque'n'roll' classic was not, contrary to popular belief, Freddie
Mercury's attempt at writing a song to upstage Led Zeppelin's
folk-rock epic 'Stairway to Heaven'. Nor was it merely a fictitious
fantasy, describing a random individual confessing a murder to his
mother, pleading poverty at his trial, and resigning himself to a
tragic fate - never revealing the identity of whom he had killed, nor
why. It could not have been, as has been widely reported, Freddie's
lament about having become infected with the AIDS virus. He conceived
the idea for the song in the late 1960s, and dabbled with it for
years, only completing, recording and releasing it with the band in
late 1975. He was not diagnosed as HIV positive until ten years
later.
It wasn't even a deliberate 'showcase single' of
everything this superlative rock band was capable of, not only
musically and lyrically, but also collectively and individually - as
numerous music scholars around the world believe. The truth, though
simply, is infinitely more personal.
The
song was recorded for Queen's studio LP 'A Night at the
Opera'. Realising its chart potential, the band drummed up support
among radio DJs such as Kenny Everett and 'Diddy' David Hamilton for
the unusually long (5:55 minutes) album track to be released as a
single. It was, despite having broken every rule in the
pop-hit-writing manual, an instant commercial success. It became the
Christmas single of 1975, held its own at the top of the UK singles
chart for nine weeks, and had sold more than a million copies by the
end of January 1976. The single was accompanied by an avant-garde
promotional video directed by Bruce Gowers, which is still considered
definitive and ground-breaking, and which kick-started the MTV
pop-video boom. It
reigned at number one again in 1991 for five weeks following
Mercury's death, eventually becoming the UK's third best-selling
single of all time - after Elton John's 'Candle In the Wind/Something
About the Way You Look Tonight' (reworked for the funeral of Diana
Princess of Wales in 1997), and the 1984 Band Aid fund-raiser 'Do
they Know it's Christmas'. It was thus the first same-version song
ever to reach number one twice in the UK.
It
also topped the charts in various foreign territories, including
Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and The Netherlands. In the
United States, the song originally peaked at number nine in 1976. It
returned at number two in 1992 after getting an airing in the
smash-hit movie 'Wayne's World'.
In
2004, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Seven years later,
BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs listeners chose it as their
all-time favourite pop song. In 2012, it topped an ITV
nationwide
poll to find "The Nation's Favourite Number One" over 60
years of music. It is reckoned that the song is still played
somewhere in the world at least once every hour. Despite Queen having
released a total of 18 number one albums, 18 number one singles and
ten number one DVDs worldwide, making them one of the planet's
best-selling rock acts, not to mention the fact that they are the
only group in which every member has composed more than one
chart-topping single, it remains the song that defines them, their
most enduring work. Largely because
of it, Queen have overtaken The Beatles to become the UK album chart
leaders.
Although
critical reaction was initially mixed, 'Bo Rap', the name by which it
is known affectionately in the music business, frequently makes lists
of the greatest songs of all time.
All this, without anyone but Freddie ever knowing what
the song really means.
Lead guitarist Dr. Brian May has always acknowledged
Freddie's sole authorship of 'Bohemian Rhapsody', saying that when
the singer first turned up with it, 'he seemed to have the whole
thing worked out in his head.'
It
was, Brian said, 'an epic undertaking.' The song comprises an a
capella
introduction, an instrumental sequence of piano, guitar, bass and
drums, a mock-operatic interlude and a loaded monster-rock crescendo,
before fading into its contemplative 'nothing really matters'
conclusion. To the rest of the band, the piece at first seemed
insurmountable.
'We were all a bit mystified as to how he was going to
link all these pieces,' admitted Brian.
The
song fetched to life a host of obscure classical characters:
Scaramouche, a clown from the Commedia dell'arte; 16th
Century astronomer and father of modern science Galileo; Figaro, the
principal character in Beaumarchais' The Barber of Seville, and the
Marriage of Figaro, from which operas by Paisiello, Rossini and
Mozart had been composed; Beelzebub, identified in the Christian New
Testament as Satan, Prince of Demons, and in Arabic as 'Lord of the
Flies', or 'Lord of the heavenly dwelling'. Also from Arabic, the
word bismillah
is
drawn:
a noun from a phrase in the Qur'an meaning 'in the name of God, most
gracious, most merciful'.
In 1986, I found myself in a hotel suite with Freddie
Mercury, during Queen's 'A Kind of Magic' world tour. Having his
undivided attention for a few moments, I put to him, not for the
first time, my theory about these characters. Scaramouche, I
ventured, had to be Freddie himself, with a penchant for the 'tears
of a clown' motif. Galileo was obviously astronomer, astrophysicist
and mathematician Brian May. Beelzebub must be Roger Taylor, the
band's wildest party animal, while Figaro was perhaps not the
operatic character at all, but the tuxedo kitten in Walt Disney's
1940 animated classic 'Pinocchio' - a dead ringer for 'pussy cat'
John Deacon. Well, Freddie did adore his feline friends.
Freddie's
face was a picture. He didn't say a word. He looked even more
perplexed when I asked him about the song's inspiration. I suggested
in so many words that it was, in fact, a thickly-disguised confession
about his sexual orientation. Having been raised in a close,
intensely religious Parsee community, adherents of the monotheistic
religion of Zoroastrianism dating back to 6th
Century BC Persia (modern-day Iran), Freddie had never been at
liberty to live a publicly flamboyant lifestyle. Not only would this
have offended his parents, but their religion does not recognise nor
tolerate homosexuality. He was never able to live openly as a gay
man. He shared his life for seven years with devoted girlfriend Mary
Austin, before admitting to her that he thought he might be bisexual.
'No, Freddie,' responded Mary, 'I think you're gay.'
From then on, apart from a brief, intense affair with the late German
actress Barbara Valentin in Munich in 1984, conducted at the same
time as liaisons with two male partners, he had sexual
relationships only with men. He did not refuse to discuss all this
with me. What he said about these questions was 'bad timing!'
Only after Freddie's death from AIDS-related illness in
November 1991, when I went to spend a week with his long-term live-in
lover Jim Hutton at Jim's bungalow in County Carlow, south-east
Ireland, did the truth about 'Bohemian Rhapsody' emerge.
One evening after supper, we took a stroll in Jim's
garden, where he proudly showed me his lilac 'Blue Moon' roses, which
Freddie had adored. The conversation turned to his former partner's
most famous creation.
'You were right about 'Bohemian Rhapsody',' said Jim.
'Freddie
was never going to admit it publicly, of course, because he always
had to carry on the charade about being straight, for his family. But
we did discuss it on numerous occasions. 'Bohemian Rhapsody' WAS
Freddie's confessional. It was about how different his life could
have been, and how much happier he might have been, had he just been
able to be himself, the whole of his life. The world heard this song
as a masterpiece of imagination, a great command of musical styles.
It was
this
remarkable tapestry. It was so intricate and had so many layers, but
the message, if hidden, was simple. Just as the management, the band,
all of us in his life, never admitted that Freddie was even ill, not
until the day before he died - because it was his
business - he felt the same about this song.
'Not only that, but you'd have to say that he was a bit
bored by the relentless interest in it. He didn't 'reveal' what it
was all about because he couldn't be bothered. He had said all that
he was ever going to say about it - which wasn't very much. Others
have stated over the years that it was better for the song's true
meaning never to be made public, because it would last much longer if
its aura of mystique was maintained. I disagree. I don't think that
matters. The song has proved itself over and over. It has stood the
test of time. It isn't going anywhere. Freddie will be known
throughout the world forever because of it.'
However convoluted and obscure, said Jim, 'Bohemian
Rhapsody' was 'Freddie as he truly was.'
Jim died of cancer in 2010.
During the course of my research for my biography of
Freddie Mercury, I discussed the song at length with arguably the
UK's greatest living lyricist, Sir Tim Rice. Having collaborated with
Freddie on songs for the 'Barcelona' album with Montserrat Caballé,
the co-creator of 'The Lion King' and 'Evita' knew Freddie better
than most.
'It's
fairly obvious to me that this was
Freddie's coming out song,' Tim told me.
'I've even spoken to Roger Taylor about it. There is a
very clear message contained in it. This is Freddie admitting that he
is gay.
''Mama, I just killed a man': he's killed the old
Freddie he was trying to be. The former image.
''Put
a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead': he's
dead, the straight person he was originally. He's destroyed the man
he was trying to be, and now this is him, trying to live with the new
Freddie.
''I see a little silhouetto of a man'; that's him, still
being haunted by what he's done and what he is.
'Every
time I hear the record on the radio, I think of him trying to shake
off one Freddie and embracing another - even all these years after
his death. Do I think he managed it? I think he was in the process
of managing it, rather well.
'Freddie was an exceptional lyricist, and 'Bohemian
Rhapsody' is beyond any doubt one of the great pieces of music of the
twentieth century.'
There are further clues in a track from Queen's
fifteenth and final studio album, 'Made In Heaven', which was
released in 1995, four years after Freddie's death.
'A
Winter's Tale' was Freddie's swansong. He wrote and composed the song
in his Montreux apartment overlooking Lake Geneva, which he loved.
The lyrics, describing all that he could see from his window,
celebrate the peace and contentment he found there towards the end.
The song's title is an homage to William Shakespeare's romantic play,
and alludes to Freddie's early songwriting inspiration. One
protagonist of the Shakespeare play is Polixenes, the King of
Bohemia: an ancient kingdom which corresponds roughly to the
modern-day Czech Republic. As such, it may have germinated 'Bohemian
Rhapsody'. If, as presumed by many Bard scholars, this play was an
allegory on the demise of Anne Boleyn, its character Perdita was
based on the daughter of Anne and King Henry VIII, who would become
Elizabeth 1st,
England's Queen
…
The band's original greatest hit laced through Freddie's
final offering? It's not impossible.
Freddie Mercury: The Definitive Biography by Lesley-Ann
Jones is published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK, and in
numerous translations worldwide
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