Seven years later, BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs listeners chose it as their all-time favourite pop song. In 2004, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
COME A LITTLE CLOSER SONG MEANING MOVIE
It returned at number two in 1992 after getting an airing in the smash-hit movie Wayne’s World. In the United States, the song originally peaked at number nine in 1976. It also topped the charts in various foreign territories, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and The Netherlands. It was thus the first same-version song ever to reach number one twice in the UK.
It reigned at number one again in 1991 for five weeks following Mercury’s death, eventually becoming the UK’s third best-selling single of all time – after Elton John’s ‘Candle In the Wind/Something About the Way You Look Tonight’ (reworked for the funeral of Diana Princess of Wales in 1997), and the 1984 Band Aid fundraiser ‘Do they Know it’s Christmas’. The single was accompanied by an avant garde promotional video directed by Bruce Gowers, which is still considered definitive and groundbreaking, and which kickstarted the MTV pop-video boom.
It became the Christmas single of 1975, held its own at the top of the UK singles chart for nine weeks, and had sold more than a million copies by the end of January 1976. It was, despite having broken every rule in the pop-hit-writing manual, an instant commercial success. Realising its chart potential, the band drummed up support among radio DJs such as Kenny Everett and ‘Diddy’ David Hamilton for the unusually long (5:55 minutes) album track to be released as a single. The song was recorded originally for Queen’s studio LP ‘A Night at the Opera’. The truth, though simply, is infinitely more personal. It wasn’t even a deliberate ‘showcase single’ of everything this superlative rock band was capable of, not only musically and lyrically, but also collectively and individually – as numerous music scholars around the world believe. He was not diagnosed as HIV positive until ten years later. He conceived the idea for the song in the late 1960s, and dabbled with it for years, only completing, recording and releasing it with the band in late 1975. It could not have been, as has been widely reported, Freddie’s lament about having become infected with the AIDS virus. Nor was it merely a fictitious fantasy, describing a random individual confessing a murder to his mother, pleading poverty at his trial, and resigning himself to a tragic fate – never revealing the identity of whom he had killed, nor why. The ‘baroque’n’roll’ classic was not, contrary to popular belief, Freddie Mercury’s attempt at writing a song to upstage Led Zeppelin’s folk-rock epic ‘Stairway to Heaven’. While Queen’s surviving members – guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor and retired bassist John Deacon – have always protected their frontman’s most closely guarded secret, intense speculation persists.įorty years this month since Queen’s soaring, decadent, magnum opus was originally released, I can reveal the song’s true meaning. Note: This article was first published on Octoand is being republished on April 9, 2017.Īlthough Bohemian Rhapsody’s creator, the late Freddie Mercury, never explained the lyrics, declaring vaguely that they were ‘just about relationships’ with ‘a bit of nonsense in the middle’, conflicting theories about the song’s true meaning are as rife today as they have ever been.