Released on 31 October 1975, Bohemian Rhapsody was recorded after a three-week rehearsal period in Herefordshire, with recording beginning at Rockfield Studio 1 near Monmouth on 24 August 1975. During the making of the track, Queen and producer Roy Thomas Baker also worked at Scorpion Studios in North London, SARM East, Wessex and the Roundhouse. The recording began as a basic three-part structure, but the opera section grew dramatically once the band and Baker began building the vocal arrangement on tape.
Freddie Mercury first played the song to Roy Thomas Baker at his apartment in Kensington. Baker recalled that Mercury played the opening ballad section and then stopped suddenly to announce, “This is where the opera section comes in.” Baker, who had worked with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company at Decca, immediately understood the idea, even if the scale of what followed was not yet apparent. The original plan was only to include a couple of Galileos, but the studio process expanded the section until it became the centrepiece of the record.
The basic backing track was recorded in three sections at Rockfield Studios. The first half, or ballad section, was recorded with piano, drums and bass. The opera section was not properly started at that point; instead, a 30-second length of tape was left on the reel for later use. The final heavy rock section was recorded as a separate song, with drums, bass, guitar and piano forming the foundation, then backing vocals added before the lead vocal. This was unusual because the lead vocal would normally dictate the phrasing of the backing vocals, but the production needed to preserve tracks for the dense vocal arrangement.
The recording relied heavily on 24-track tape, but the available machines created their own problems. Queen had recorded their first three albums on 16-track equipment, and Bohemian Rhapsody benefited from 24-track technology, although without synchronisation between machines. The recording started on a Studer 24-track at Rockfield, described by Baker as looking like “a huge fish fryer”. Vocal overdubs were later done at Scorpion Studios on a Telefunken 24-track machine, but the Telefunken format used wider edge tracks for tracks 1 and 24, making it incompatible with other machines. That machine was abandoned, and the team later used a variety of machines, including an Ampex 24-track that sounded very good but suffered transport tension problems. The mix at SARM used an MCI machine, jokingly called “Munchy, Crunchy and Intermittent” because it was unreliable.
The opera section became a major tape construction job. Every time Mercury added another Galileo, Baker added another piece of tape to the reel, which eventually looked like a zebra crossing as it passed through the machine. That section alone took about three weeks to record, which Baker noted was the average time spent on a whole album in 1975. The vocal harmonies were built by recording one harmony at a time and bouncing. Three tracks of the first part would be bounced to one track, three of the second to another, and three of the third to another, before further bounce-downs created three-part harmonies on a single track. Some background vocal parts ended up on fourth generation dupes, while one part reached eight generations by the time it was mixed with others. The making of Bohemian Rhapsody was, in Baker’s own words, “basically one continuous track bounce”.
The band’s positioning for the backing track was straightforward but carefully arranged. Roger Taylor sat behind his drum kit at the live end of the studio. John Deacon was placed against the wall, with his Marshall bass stack on the right-hand side as viewed from the control room window. Brian May was in a portable isolation booth, and Freddie Mercury was at the piano, close to the window.
The microphone setup was based largely around condensers. The snare drum used a single microphone, although the exact model is not identified in the supplied source. The toms and overheads were generally miked with Neumann U67s or Neumann U87s, depending on which models the studio had available. The bass drum was recorded with an AKG D12. John Deacon’s bass was DI’d using the kind of transformer-based studio-made DI boxes common at the time, and his bass cabinet was also captured using an Electro-Voice 666 and sometimes a Neumann U67 condenser to add air. Freddie Mercury’s piano was miked with two Neumann U67s, and a Shure microphone was set up for his guide vocal. Mercury did not sing the complete guide vocal through the backing track takes, instead giving the band only the first couple of words of each line as a reference.
Brian May’s guitar sound was built through experimentation. His Vox AC30 amplifiers were backless, so microphones were placed not only in front of them but also behind them and near the wall to capture ambience and the full spectrum of the guitar sound. The exact microphone models used on the AC30s are not named in the supplied material, but Baker stated that several different types of microphones were set up so that signals could be chosen or blended for each sound. May generally used AC30s, while John Deacon had also made a small amplifier setup resembling a Tandy Radio Shack speaker with a 3 Watt amplifier, which was tried with a treble booster. The team also placed microphones down metal and concrete tubes to create a more honky sound.
The consoles used across the sessions were equally varied. At Rockfield, Baker worked with a custom-built desk. At the Roundhouse, the team used a Cadac console. At Wessex, they used “an old, blue Neve with big knobs on it”. For the mix at SARM East, they used a Trident B console, the second B-series model delivered by Malcolm Toft. Baker described it as a great board with a unique sound. The mix also involved an Allison computerised mixing system, installed at SARM only days before the Bohemian Rhapsody mix. Gary Langan described it as the first automated system in the world, but said it never worked properly and required data to be stored on two tape tracks, reducing the available music tracks to 22.
That Allison VCA automation system became part of the sound, even where it caused problems. Baker said the VCA system was responsible for distortion at the end of the opera section. At that point, the meters were pinned so hard that the VCAs in the board could not take any more volume. The team turned the computer off, and the final rock section was mixed by hand in the traditional way, with each person controlling a fader or group of faders. The crashing snare at the start of the heavy rock section marked the point where the VCAs were turned off. Baker also pushed the level at that moment, creating the sudden clean, loud impact of the final section.
The distortion caused by track bouncing and VCA overload became part of Queen’s identity. Baker noted that on Queen II and on big Queen productions such as Bohemian Rhapsody, the generation copying caused so much distortion on Roger Taylor’s drum tracks that it became a trademark sound, later imitated with outboard equipment. This was not a planned effect in the modern sense. It emerged from the limitations of tape, bouncing, level and early automation.
The recording also carried forward several earlier Queen studio techniques. The gong at the end of Bohemian Rhapsody had made its first appearance on Queen II. Baker described Queen II as a “kitchen sink” of Queen effects, with backward cymbals, backward gongs, backward tom fills and hand-made phasing. Since there were no effects boxes available to do some of those jobs automatically, tapes were physically run around the room by hand to create phasing. Baker later reflected that some of those manually produced effects anticipated later studio technology.
Despite later assumptions, no synthesizers were used. Queen’s early albums famously included the phrase “Nobody played synthesizer”, because many listeners and record company people mistook Brian May’s multi-layered guitar parts for synthesizers. Baker said there was no moral objection to synthesizers, only a frustration that people could not hear the difference between a multitracked guitar and a synth.
The mix was assembled by Roy Thomas Baker with engineers Mike Stone, Gary Langan and Geoff Workman. Gary Langan, then an 18-year-old assistant engineer at SARM, worked alongside Baker, Stone and Lyons on the mix. One of Langan’s first tasks was to assemble a composite multitrack master from the three separate song sections. He recalled standing at the back of the control room and realising that he was hearing a major moment in recording history.
The final single also broke the expectations of radio and record company logic. Its six-minute length caused concern at EMI, where the assumption was that anything over three and a half minutes would struggle for airplay. Baker and Queen remained convinced it should be a single. Kenny Everett at Capital Radio was given a copy after promising not to play it, then proceeded to play parts of it repeatedly, eventually airing the track 14 times over one weekend. That airplay created demand before the single had even been released, and helped force the issue. The accompanying video, directed by Bruce Gowers, cost £4000 and became part of the song’s impact.
Bohemian Rhapsody was released on 31 October 1975 and spent nine weeks at number one in the UK. It was later honoured by the BPI as The Best Single Of The Last 25 Years in 1977, and returned to number one in 1991 after the death of Freddie Mercury. The fact that a record once dismissed by many critics as pompous and rubbish could become so enduring says much about the gap between immediate reaction and lasting musical impact. Its scale, structure and studio technique were all outside conventional single-making, but that was precisely why it survived.