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Brian at the baritone ukelele in Tokyo
April to May 1975
Screenshot from ANATO DVD

Brian at the baritone ukelele in Tokyo
April to May 1975
Screenshot from ANATO DVD

Fred at a white Bechstein grand piano
Rockfield Studios, Wye Valley, Wales
August or September 1975

Brian with a Burns Bison
Rockfield Studios, Wye Valley, Wales
August - September 1975

John with Fender bass in natural finish
Rockfield Studios, Wye Valley, Wales
August - September 1975

Rog lighting a fag at his temporary flat
Rockfield Studios, Wye Valley, Wales
August - September 1975

Freddie at the Bechstein piano
Rockfield Studios, Wye Valley, Wales
August - September 1975

Freddie, Roger and Roy Thomas Baker
Unknown location, probably 1975

Multi-Track tape:

- Seaside Rendezvous
- Bohemian Rhapsody
- People of the Earth
- Love of My Life

Sarm Studios, Tower Hamlets
October 1975
Screenshot from DVD

Tracksheet for Bohemian Rhapsody
Sarm Studios, Tower Hamlets
October 1975

Tracksheet for Bohemian Rhapsody
Sarm Studios, Tower Hamlets
October 1975

Roger the Gongman
Elstree Studios, Borehamwood
November 1975

Original track-sheet for Good Company

Fred and John playing live
Empire Theatre, Lime St, Liverpool
Friday 14th November 1975
Photo by Les St Clair

John Deacon at his gorgeous bass
Hammersmith Odeon, London
Saturday 29th November 1975
Photo by Mick Rock

Brian playing the Birch replica
Hammersmith Odeon, London
Monday 1st December 1975
Photo by Mick Rock

Fred at a Steinway grand-piano
Caird Hall, Dundee, Scotland
Saturday 13th December 1975

Fred at the white Bechstein
Hammersmith Odeon, London
Wednesday 24th December 1975

Fred at the white Bechstein
Hammersmith Odeon, London
Wednesday 24th December 1975

Fred at the white Bechstein
Hammersmith Odeon, London
Wednesday 24th December 1975

In the Lap of the Gods ... Revisited
Hammersmith Odeon, London
Wednesday 24th December 1975

Eddie Howell and Freddie Mercury
Sound And Recording Mobiles
January 1976

Roger at his huge Ludwig drum-kit
Elstree Studios, Hertfordshire
April 1976

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14/11/1975 - 22/04/1976
77 concerts in 161 days
1 gig each 2 days and 02:10:54.54

John Deacon

If Queen were freshers by the time of their début album, sophomores by the second and juniors by the third, A Night at the Opera is when they graduated. This album is arguably their most pivotal effort and definitely their most complex. It's got loads of different styles combined or alternated and features some of their best work on both vocals and instruments.

At the time Sheer Heart Attack was released, the band had just embarked on a successful world tour that would include visits to twelve countries in three continents. In between the European and American legs, John married his long-time girlfriend, and soon the band went to the States for some gigs, after which Freddie met with both Robert Plant (his favourite singer) and Alice Cooper (another big influence on him).

Queen then went to Japan for the first time and after the tour was over in May they had a well-deserved holiday in Kuai. Back in London, John became the first Queen member to become a father, Freddie found room in his flat for the Yamaha piano he'd bought in Asia, Brian did some work on his PhD thesis (which would remain unfinished until late 2000's) and Roger started working on writing some songs.

A planned US tour for the summer got cancelled as the band and John in particular didn't feel like travelling again. In August they went to Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, to rehearse the new songs so that by the time they recorded the backing tracks they'd already learnt and mastered all parts. Such backing track sessions took place at Rockfield Studios in Wales (the same they'd used for Sheer Heart Attack), where Freddie had hired a huge white Bechstein concert grand piano he'd use for the album sessions.

Welsh recordings, which began on Sunday 24th August 1975, spawned a short untitled piece (christened Fred's Thing by the producer) that Mercury'd written during the summer break and which at one point was in risk of being dropped but eventually grew. Later on, it'd be the main piece in the album and the reason why Freddie and Roger decided to name it A Night at the Opera, as the middle section was a tribute to the genre. The track in question would eventually be their lead single, first #1 hit and best-selling song ever. You've probably heard about it: it's called Bohemian Rhapsody.

After some weeks in Wales, the band returned to London for the long painstaking process of overdubbing layers and layers of things on the songs. Several studios were booked, sometimes simultaneously, and at some point band members were in different places doing their thing. Freddie lived a couple of blocks from Lansdowne, which he could visit anytime he felt like it and add some vocal or piano ideas; Roger was close to Olympic in Barnes; Scorpio in Camden (also used at the same time by Supertramp for their Crisis album) were a favourite for recording vocals, and they were in the same building where Kenny Everett worked (Kenny would be instrumental in bringing the public's attention to Bo Rhap). The Roundhouse, also in Camden, were perfect for live backing tracks; Sound and Recording Mobiles, owned by John Sinclair, were used as the main suite and for mixing; last but not least, Rockfield and Elstree were still being hired, the former for some overdubs (e.g. the fanfare in Good Company) and the latter to build the lightning rig they were going to introduce on tour.

Such amounts of money-spending wouldn't have been possible without the band's new manager, John Reid, who conviced EMI to invest a lot in the band. Hadn't the album been a big seller, it would've been the end of their career. Fortunately, it was the other way around. Opera took them four months but was finally released on Friday 21st November 1975. It became their first LP to top the British charts and has, to this day, sold over eleven million copies, which makes it the band's most commercially-successful album. The band became international superstars as well as multi-millionaires and from then on money wouldn't be a problem again.

* Wessex Studios, employed for both the previous and subsequent albums, weren't used for A Night at the Opera as they were being remodelled. Trident Studios, though not credited, were where Brian and Roger laid down God Save the Queen back in 1974.

* The urban legend about Bohemian Rhapsody having 138, 160, 180 or 200 simultaneous voices is completely false. It stemmed from a comment made by Freddie on Christmas Eve 1977 (BBC 1) where he said they'd recreated a 160-200 choir effect. But of course that's a figure of speech: it's like thinking he was a murderer just because he said 'I dress to kill'. In an extreme case of real life being harder to believe than fiction, the rumour's been growing for decades and many people are convinced the song's actually got over a hundred voices. The truth is, most of the time the operatic choir has between six and ten, peaking at twenty-two on the last 'for me'. Still impressive, still something unable to be reproduced on stage, but not even close to 138, 160, 180 or 200.

* At the end of I'm in Love With My Car there are car sounds. Those are in fact the exhaust from Roger's Alfa Romeo Alfetta, added to the record. Likewise, the aircon was taped for the Prophet's Song intro.

* The band's longest-serving roadie, Peter Hince, started working for them during this album sessions. He'd worked for many other musicians before including Mick Ronson and Mott the Hoople, and he'd met the band back in 1973. He'd remain in the crew until 1986.

* For this album, John stripped the paint off his Fender bass and left it natural. It would be that way until 1985.

* A Night at the Opera is one of the few albums not featuring John Deacon playing guitar in addition to bass (he usually played rhythm or acoustic in at least one song). Likewise, the final cut doesn't feature Brian on piano at all (he usually played on one track per album up until Hot Space in 1982). However, John does play keyboard for the first time (Best Friend) and Brian played piano (later edited out) for the God Save the Queen guide-track.

* This is the first record to feature Brian singing lead on two tracks instead of one: '39 and Good Company. Freddie sang backing vocals on the former and only co-produced the latter.

* While there are no varispeed effects for Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon. Instead, the vocals were effected through a resourceful collection of devices: the vocal went to a pair of headphones which were inside a metal can, and another mic got the signal from there, simulating a megaphone.

* Roger wrote I'm in Love With My Car about the band's head roadie, John Harris, who owned a Triumph TR4 and was virtually 'in love' with it. When he first showed the song to Brian, the latter thought he was joking.

* Speaking about jokes, '39 was originally intended to be done with electric bass pretty much in the same way they played it on stage at the Hyde Park. However, Brian jokingly suggested John that he should try recording with an upright double-bass. Surprisingly for him, John showed up in the studio a couple of days later with the instrument and, as can be heard in the song, he'd already picked up enough technique to play his part.

* You're My Best Friend was originated when at one of the studios (possibly Scorpio) there was a Wurlitzer EP200 electric piano, which Freddie refused to play as he considered it 'tiny and horrible'. So John took it home instead, learnt a bit and that's how he ended up composing Best Friend and playing the piano on it. Live, however, it was Freddie on acoustic grand.

* '39 was, for some reason, speeded up one semitone for the record. It resulted in Roger's high G# being transformed in soprano A.

* At a Q&A, Roger Taylor mentioned Sweet Lady as the most difficult drum-part he ever had to record, as what Brian had written for him was complex and hard to understand.

* The highest note sung in Bohemian Rhapsody is a soprano Bb (932.33 Hz), hit by Roger Taylor. However, that's not the highest note in the album: on Seaside Rendezvous, while imitating a trumpet via vocal onomatopoeia, Roger hit a soprano C (1,046.50 Hz). However, that's not the highest note he recorded that year: for Fox's Survival off the Tales of Illusion album, Roger hit soprano D's an E's (1,174.66 and 1,318.51 Hz respectively).

* Brian's Prophet's Song was originally titled People of the Earth, as shown in the multi-track sheets. It was at some point considered for a single release, but Bohemian Rhapsody eventually earned the post, being both more complex and more radio-friendly. But rather than causing a rift between Brian and Freddie, it brought them closer: most interviews have them praising each other's compositions. Besides being fantastic musicians, they were both true gentlemen.

* Rather than actually playing a harp on Love of My Life, what Brian did was plucking a chord per take, and then the engineers copied and pasted until an illusion of a continuous part could be created. Sources claiming Brian could indeed play the instrument (including Wikipedia, of course) are wrong and misleading. May's displayed many great abilities through the years, but playing harp is not one of them.

* On Good Company, Brian didn't play a ukelele-banjo (the instrument he uses in the 2005 documentary) but instead an Aloha baritone ukelele he bought in Hawaii. Both the album liner notes, the multi-track sheet and the sound of the record itself confirm it. The '05 incident was merely a memory slip, or he meant he wrote the song on a ukelele-banjo, not that he recorded with it.

* In early 2008, content from the original multi-track tapes of Bohemian Rhapsody surfaced on-line and is still being illegally distributed, shared and downloaded all over the cyberspace. Amongst the many interesting details, there are loads of vocal takes that never made it to the final version as well as some isolated overdubs almost impossible to notice in the stereo mix, including a second snare-drum for the hard-rock section. It also shows how Freddie was conducting John and Roger while laying down the backing track, counting at some point during the 'no no no' bit.

* God Save the Queen had been recorded at Trident Studios on Sunday 27th October 1974. As the Sheer Heart Attack album was already being pressed, it coudln't be included there. However, when sequencing the order of tracks for A Night at the Opera, it was decided that the National Anthem was the perfect candidate to close the record as it gave the listener the illusion of attending an actual formal event. The album was a journey that way.

* In the media (including of course the internet), the electric piano used by John for Best Friend is often listed as a Fender Rhodes, including by Brian May on a 2005 documentary about the album. However, what John played was a Wurlitzer EP200, as evidenced by the characteristic 'bark' of the low C-note. There's also a YouTube video where a person plays the song on that model and the sound is exactly the same. The confusion for Brian and others may stem from Fender Rhodes being used as a generic name for all electric pianos, even those that were manufactured by other brands. Off-music examples of trademark erosion include people calling all playing consoles Nintendo or calling all petroleoum jelly product Vaseline.

* Retrospectively, it's rather trendy amongst pseudo-historians and scholars to claim Bohemian Rhapsody was an illogical choice for lead single because of its length, multi-tracked backing vocals and elaborate nature. While the latter's true, the others aren't: loads of hit singles were long back then (e.g. Hey Jude in 1968) and all of the songs that topped the British charts in 1975, except for one, made heavy use of layered backing vocals. One of them, 10cc's I'm Not in Love, actually features more vocals than Bo Rhap.

* Speaking about Bo Rhap, its massive success is worth mentioning in detail: 7.5 million copies sold worldwide so far (counting both the original release and the one after Freddie died), #1 in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan (international charts), The Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland and the UK; #2 in the States (in '92) and South Africa; top 10 (but not top 3) in Norway, Spain, France, Argentina ('92) and Austria; top 20 in Sweden.

* The album's second single, You're My Best Friend, was a very big success as well: it peaked at #2 in Canada, #3 in Ireland, #6 in the Netherlands and #7 in the UK and sold around 1,800,000 copies world-wide, making it the tenth best selling single the band ever released.

* It was never officially cleared to whom was Death on Two Legs dedicated. It's been insinuated that it was a former manager or maybe the Sheffield brothers who'd been involved with the band on financial levels but then broke up acrimoniously. Still, nothing's been definitive about it.

* According to what Freddie told NME on 27th September 1975 (while the album was being in progress), Brian was going to use a guitar he'd got bespoke (presumably the Birch one in natural finish) on The Prophet's Song. Whether that eventually happened or not hasn't been confirmed.

* The fate of the famous Bechstein white piano is still unknown. It was hired from Jacques Samuel in Edgware Road, Westminster, and used for the Bohemian Rhapsody video, the Hammersmith Odeon concert and then again in 1976 for the A Day at the Races album as well as the Hyde Park gig, but then it wasn't required anymore. For the record, it's not the one used on the 2004 BBC documentary about Bo Rhap.

* Photographs taken at Rockfield Studios show Brian playing a Burns Bison guitar while the Red Special is on a stand. Also in the background, there's what appears to be an Epiphone Crestwood. Whether either instrument was used for the album or not, and whether what was recorded (if that was the case) made it to the final version or not are still unsolved matters... yet.

The album is called A Night at the Opera. We've finished all the backing tracks and it's beginning to sound better than we expected. There are a lot of things we wanted to do on Queen II and Sheer Heart Attack but there wasn't space enough. This time there is. Guitarwise and on vocals we've done things we've never done before.

We haven't even reached the halfway stage yet but from the things I hear we have surpassed anything we've done before musically. We should have a single taken from this album out in October. The album comes out in November when we start our world tour.

Freddie Mercury, New Musical Express, 27th September 1975, page 13

We came back from Japan thinking, 'Great, we're going to finish the writing and then record it,' but the whole thing with Trident blew up at that point, and we spent the next three months being businessmen, which is the last thing we wanted to be. But now it's all sorted out -- all the emotions came out in a big flood -- and I think it's going to be really good.

It's been coming for a long time. It's difficult to know what to say without being libellous. Mostly I feel less annoyed than disappointed. They're a company which started out in a small way, but recently I think their holdings got too big for them and got on top of them. If we hadn't got out we would have been trampled on. I think we saw it just in time.

We knew we were in a difficult position management-wise, but we were in a good position overall. So we went around and saw everybody that we could, and it just turned out that the only situation that was suitable for us, really, was John Reid. The whole framework suited our framework. It's a difficult situation, being halfway in your career.

(The album) is more extreme. It's varied, but it goes further in its various directions. It has a couple of the heaviest things we've ever done and probably some of the lightest things as well. It's probably closer to Sheer Heart Attack than the others in that it does dart around and create lots of different moods, but we worked on it in the same way we worked on Queen II. A lot of it is very intense and very ... layered.

Brian May, Sounds, 27th September 1975

It's really taken the longest to do out of all the four albums. We didn't really cater for it. 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 wanted, especially after we spent so long on it. The last bits - piecing it together - are more important than all the rest of it.

It's the most important album yet. I think we've got the strongest songs ever. It's going to be our best album. It really is. 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.

Freddie Mercury, Melody Maker, 22nd November 1975, page 3

Take vocals, because they're my forté - especially harmonies and those kind of things. On Queen II we've gone berserk. But on this album I consciously restricted myself. That's brought the songwriting side of it across, and I think those are some of the strongest songs we've ever written.

Freddie Mercury, Sounds, January 1976

The album wasn't really supposed to go in the direction that it did, it was just the songs we had. While we were making it we were thinking, 'Yeah, it is getting a bit light,' but rather than fighting against it we decided to do it properly and then think again afterwards. So instead of trying to heavy up the lighter things, we pressed on. We had a few things we didn't use, but we're getting more demanding of ourselves. There are a few heavy things kicking around, but we may use them on the next record.

Sometimes I feel that Freddie and I are going in different directions, but then he'll come up with something and I'll think, 'My God - we do think alike.' When I'm working on one of his things I can tune in very easily to what guitar part he wants, and vice-versa. In terms of what we're trying to do in songs, we are moving in different directions, but I think that could be a good thing.

This album, at the very least, negates all the comparisons to Led Zeppelin that we've been living with for the past three years. I think Physical Graffiti is amazing, by the way. I saw Zeppelin at Earls Court, and I met Pagey afterward, for the first time. It was great, he was very nice and gentle.

Brian May, Circus, April 1976, page 59

I suppose we started off as sort of a heavy group with harmonies. That's what I always call it. We always felt that we had the basis to try anything we wanted. On all the albums there are excursions into different sounds. After the first few albums, we began to do some more ballad-type things and some more acoustic numbers. On Night at the Opera we got into the real big production; that was actually mapped out on the second album on which we did a couple of things that were more complex and operatic. Night at the Opera and Day at the Races were really the most-arranged period.

Brian May, International Musician & Recording World, November 1982

IThe first album I ever bought was Queen's A Night at the Opera.

Axl Rose, The Days of Our Lives, August 1991 (2:22 - 2:27)

For A Night At The Opera, we sort of returned to the Queen II um philosophy. We had our confidence, because we'd had a hit. We had a kind of almost desperation about us too, because we were totally bankrupt at that point. You know, we had made hit records but we hadn't had any of the money back and, if A Night At The Opera hadn't been the huge success it was I think we would have just disappeared under the ocean someplace. So we were making this album knowing that its, its live or die. A bit of competitive edge as well, I think - we wanted it to be our Sgt Pepper, I think, and we each individually wanted to realise our potential as writers and producers and everything.

Brian May, BBC Radio 2, 6th November 1999

A Night At The Opera has a very perfect feel about it, I have to say. It all dovetails together so well, and the colours all set each other off so well, and musically, there was an enormous jump in complexity. All the things which we’d started on Queen II we brought to fruition on A Night At The Opera.

Brian May, Record Collector, January 2009, page 66