When Queen released their third album Sheer Heart Attack in 1974, the band had already begun sketching more multi-layered, orchestrated rock with the lush “Killer Queen” and the guitar-hurtling “Stone Cold Crazy.” For the next album, Queen was going to the opera.
Recorded between August and November of 1975, A Night at the Opera—titled after the 1935 Marx Brothers film of the same name—became the band’s mock opera, heightened by more progressive sounds and conceptualized themes, from Brian May‘s sweetly nostalgic and countrified skiffle “39,” John Deacon‘s pop ballad “You’re My Best Friend,” and Freddie Mercury‘s lovingly “Love of My Life,” along with Queen’s opus “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
A Night at the Opera was reportedly one of the most expensive albums made at the time and catapulted Queen into another stratosphere of rock.
On December 27, 1975, all their efforts paid off, and Queen finally earned their first No. 1 album on the UK Albums chart. A Night at the Opera also went to No. 4 on the Billboard 200.
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Nick of Time
In a sense, Queen was on some borrowed time with their label after the release of Sheer Heart Attack. Though they had a few hits prior, the band had to cut their first U.S. tour, supporting Mott the Hoople, short after May contracted hepatitis and was rushed into emergency surgery for a life-threatening ulcer. The band was also in debt and already one album past their three-album deal with EMI by the time they started working on A Night at the Opera.
Queen remained with EMI and followed A Night at the Opera up with another No. 1 album, A Night at the Races, in 1976, featuring the Mercury hit “Somebody to Love.”
Mercury’s ‘Letter’ to Management
Opening A Night at the Opera, Mercury addressed the band’s management at the time, which had left the band broke, with “Death on Two Legs.” Mercury’s lyrics were straightforward: You suck my blood like a leech / You break the law and you breach / Screw my brain till it hurts /You’ve taken all my money / You still want more / Misguided old mule / With your pigheaded rules.
“The words came very easily,” shared Mercury in a 1976 interview in the UK music newspaper Sounds. “Let’s say that song has made its mark. I decided that if I wanted to stress something strongly I might as well go whole hog and not compromise. I had a tough time trying to get the lyrics across. I wanted to make them as coarse as possible. My throat was bleeding, the whole bit. I was changing lyrics every day trying to get it as vicious as possible.”
First No. 1 Single
Along with earning Queen their first No. 1 album in the UK, A Night at the Opera also gave them their first chart-topping hit with “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a song that took them months to assemble.
Written by Mercury and released on Halloween, 1975, “Bohemian Rhapsody” went to No. 1 on the UK Singles chart, where it remained for nine weeks, and topped the chart in several other countries, along with peaking at No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100.
After the song appeared in the 1992 comedy Wayne’s World, it reentered the charts again, topping the UK chart and ascending to No. 2 on the Hot 100. Nearly three decades later, following the release of the 2018 Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, it also became the most-streamed song from the 20th century.
“I do think Freddie enjoyed the fact there were so many interpretations of the lyrics,” said May in 2015. “It’s an outlandish song. I think it’s beyond analysis. That’s not me trying to be evasive. I just think that’s why we love songs. They can do something to us that a piece of text can’t.”
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
