Rock band Queen used to love head banging to their own music while driving in their cars.
Guitarist Brian May has opened up about the creation of the band’s famed song Bohemian Rhapsody, which turns 40 on October 31. In received a new lease of life when it was featured in Mike Myers’ 1992 movie Wayne’s World and Brian has laughed that the scenes showing the characters going wild to the rocky chorus were incredibly lifelike.
“I didn’t know Mike Myers (who wrote and starred in the film) but he rang me up out of the blue and said, ‘We’ve done this amazing sequence in our new film – can we have your approval? And can you get Freddie (Mercury, singer) to hear it?'” he told bbc.co.uk.
“Strangely enough, the humor in it was quite close to our own. Because we did that kind of thing in the car, bouncing up and down to our own tracks!”
Even now the 68-year-old star can’t help getting excited when he hears the song on the radio. He might not start rocking out in quite the way he used to, but he always turns it up and lets it play.
One of the most interesting things about the track are the lyrics, which don’t appear to make much sense. They were penned by Freddie, and Brian is sure his bandmate took pleasure in how “outlandish” segments like “I see a little silhouetto of a man/ Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?/ Thunderbolt and lightning/ Very, very frightening me” were.
“I think it’s beyond analysis,” he said. “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. I have my own ideas and feelings about Bohemian Rhapsody – but I hate talking about it, and I generally refuse.”
He also explained the iconic video, which sees the bandmates as floating heads, was basically made with a music TV show aimed at children, called Top of the Pops, in mind. “It always seemed like a bit of a travesty,” he said of the series. “If your music had any meaning, it seemed to trickle away when you were standing on a box in a studio with lots of kids around. But you could hardly knock it because it was the way that records were sold.”
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