A Night at the Opera
Queen's record company did not want to release "Bohemian Rhapsody" as a single. At nearly six minutes it was more than twice the expected length for radio play, and the label felt it was uncommercial. The band was unanimous: it was the single. A DJ named Kenny Everett was handed a tape copy of the unreleased track and started playing it on his radio show before it officially came out. The phones lit up immediately. EMI relented. "Bohemian Rhapsody" spent nine weeks at number one in the UK. Bjorn Ulvaeus of ABBA later said he was green with envy when he heard it, calling it a piece of sheer originality that took rock away from the normal path. He was not wrong.
The album was reportedly the most expensive rock record ever made at the time of its release, produced across seven different London and Welsh studios between August and November 1975 at a cost approaching £40,000. The band had spent three weeks beforehand rehearsing in a rented house in Herefordshire, and the intensity of that preparation is audible in every track. "Bohemian Rhapsody" alone required nearly 200 individual tracks of overdubs because the band had to bounce the recordings across multiple generations of tape to layer the operatic vocal sections. Producer Roy Thomas Baker has said the end rock section had to be mixed entirely by hand because the board's automation literally could not handle any more volume.
The album's range is almost reckless: "Death on Two Legs" opens with one of the most vicious hard rock performances on record, "You're My Best Friend" is a pure pop song written on a Wurlitzer, "The Prophet's Song" runs eight minutes, "39" is a finger-picked acoustic folk ballad, and "God Save the Queen" closes everything with an a cappella arrangement of the national anthem. The band had explicitly forbidden the use of synthesizers throughout, insisting every sound be made by guitars, bass, drums, piano, and voices. The liner notes say "No Synthesizers!" and they meant it. A Night at the Opera is Queen at their most limitless, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" is the song that announced to the world that the rules of pop music were negotiable.