On August 24, 1975, the beloved rock band Queen started recording their now enormously famous rock opera anthem, “Bohemian Rhapsody”. The band took to the Rockfield Studio on this very day in 1975 to record the tune in Monmouth, Wales.
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The process of recording this famous song was not easy, nor was it quick. It took about three weeks for the song to be completed. And weeks prior, frontman Freddie Mercury had to mentally prep the soon-to-be-legendary song. He would direct the members of Queen through the recording sessions, and the whole process was a hefty amount of work.
Mercury, Brian May, and Roger Taylor each had to sing and record their respective vocal sections for upwards of 12 hours per day. The result was 180 different overdubs that were eventually mixed together to produce the iconic harmonies heard in “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
The Origin Story of “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen
According to corroborations from Freddie Mercury’s friends, the development of “Bohemian Rhapsody” started years prior in the late 1960s. Bits and pieces of a tune Mercury would sing called “The Cowboy Song” eventually made it to the final cut of “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
When Mercury first gave May a taste of the song, the guitarist would call it “intriguing and original, and worthy of work.”
And boy, did “Bohemian Rhapsody” require some serious work. The band spent a month rehearsing the song at Ridge Farm Studio, located in Surrey, around mid-1975. The band would rehearse for another three weeks at Penrhos Court in Kington before finally hitting Rockfield Studio on this day in 1975.
Throughout the process of recording the anthemic rock opera, the band utilized the help of four additional studios. And as anyone with ears would know, “Bohemian Rhapsody” was such an elaborate and complex song to record, that it had to be recorded in several sections.
“‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was totally insane, but we enjoyed every minute of it,” producer Roy Thomas Baker said of the recording process of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. “It was basically a joke, but a successful joke. We had to record it in three separate units. We did the whole beginning bit, then the whole middle bit, and then the whole end. It was complete madness. […] We never stopped laughing. It started off as a ballad, but the end was heavy.”
Eventually, the song was finished with dozens of overdubs. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was finally completed and released on Halloween, 1975. And today, it’s considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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