Queen are concerned our old management is deceased. They
cease to exist in any capacity with us whatsoever. One leaves
them behind like one leaves excreta. We feel so relieved!’ Queen’s
new management would be John Reid, who also handled Elton
John’s career at the time – an artist with whom the band would
collaborate later in their own career.
Considered by many to be the band’s strongest ever outing, ‘A
Night at the Opera’ featured what is also widely considered to
be the group’s strongest ever track in the massive worldwide hit,
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. No. 1 all over Europe, and even hitting
the Top Ten in the United States, ‘Bohemian Rhapsod y’ earned
Mercury an Ivor Novello award, was promoted by a revolutionary
music video, and is the second most played song on British radio.
Mercury would, years later, try to explain the appeal of the track:
‘It’s one of those songs which has such a fantasy feel about it. I
think people should just listen to it, think about it, and then make
up their own minds as to what it says to them,’ going on to add,
‘“Bohemian Rhapsody” didn’t just come out of thin air. I did a bit
of research although it was tongue-in-cheek and mock opera. Why
not?’
The album also featured another major hit in John Deacon’s,
‘You’re My Best Friend’. Peaking at No. 14 in America, it was
unlike anything Queen had done up to this point, and proved to
be a forerunner for the myriad hits that the band would become
famous for. Deacon later talked about how Mercury originally
hated the track, especially the Wurlitzer organ that the bassist
had composed it on, stating, ‘Well, Freddie didn’t like the electric
piano, so I took it home and I started to learn on the electric piano
and basically that’s the song that came out you know when I was
learning to play piano. It was written on that instrument and it
sounds best on that. You know, often on the instrument that you
wrote the song on.’
Throughout this period, the band would spend much of their
chris devlin
(Chris Devlin)
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