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Brian May still listens to Bohemian Rhapsody, but his air guitar days are over

By | Published on Thursday 29 October 2015

Queen

This Saturday will mark the 40th anniversary of the release of Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. But is Brian May bored of it after all this time? Hell no.

“I’m not sick of it”, he tells the BBC. “You can’t complain that people want to talk about it all these years later. I still enjoy hearing it. If it comes on the radio, I’ll turn it up and listen. But no air guitar. I’m too old for air guitar now”. Aren’t we all?

Though there are other ways to enjoy ‘Rhapsody’ other than playing air guitar of course, because mimicking that famous scene in ‘Wayne’s World’, that never gets old, does it? And, as it turns out, headbanging along in the car is more of a Queen thing to do anyway.

“Mike Myers … 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 to hear it?'” explains May. “So he sent me a cassette and I took it around to Freddie, who was not in a good state at that time. He was confined to his bed, but I took it round and played it to him and he loved it. Strangely enough, the humour 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!”

OK, we get it, you listen to your own music in the car a lot. But how did a six minute mini rock opera become a hit in the first place? “We were told it was going to be a hard sell, but it ended up being easy because Kenny Everett stole the tape from a playback session we had to launch the ‘Night At The Opera’ album and took it upon himself to go out and play it to death. That made everybody else sit up. All the rest of the radio outlets thought: ‘Oh God, we’d better get on this quick or else we’ll be left behind!'”

So, there you go kids. Theft is to be encouraged if you want a hit. Read more of May’s insights into ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ here.



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