Freddie Mercury’s Queen magnum opus, Bohemian Rhapsody, marks its 50th anniversary this weekend.
And to celebrate, the band has created an official 5-part YouTube miniseries on how the iconic song came to be.
Both active members Sir Brian May and Roger Taylor feature in brand-new interviews, which can be viewed below.
This week’s first episode examines “The Path to Bohemian Rhapsody”, which reveals how everyone except Queen were surprised by the song’s success.
In the new video, Sir Brian said of the singer’s work ethic: “You didn’t know where Freddie was coming from. He comes in and goes ‘There’s this bit, and there’s another bit we’ll do, and there’s the operatic and then there’s another bit we will do’. ‘Oh yeah, OK Freddie’. And basically, you have two choices, either going ‘Well we’re really not feeling it’, which we sometimes would do, or we all dive in, and the whole Queen machine swings into action.”
For the band, it seems, Bohemian Rhapsody was just part of Queen’s natural evolution. Sir Brian and Roger believe this goes all the way back to My Fairy King on their self-titled first album.
Roger Taylor said: “I think it was certainly part of Freddie’s journey. Obviously when we did Bohemian Rhapsody we didn’t know we were going to end up with that. Part of our thing was really experimentation, and it’s very much on our first album, the track My Fairy King, which I think is one of the more interesting tracks, it was complicated, had a lot of difficult vocals, and it had fantastic elements.”
This new series of Queen The Greatest will continue weekly throughout November.
