What madness is this? Coming immediately off the back of the review of Born to Run, surely one of the most musically and thematically cohesive rock albums of the 1970s, Queen’s A Night at the Opera appears downright demented, a schizophrenic rollercoaster careening from experimental prog rock to choral singing to heavy metal to vaudevillian music hall, all in the space of three quarters of an hour, which is shorter than an episode of Homes Under The Hammer. The consistent sound of Springsteen’s rustbelt fairytale occasionally becomes oppressively monotonal, but A Night at the Opera is so disjointed as to be positively discombobulating. There’s an obvious reason for this; Bruce was the undisputed Boss of the E Street Band and his vision informed everything they did, whereas Queen was very much a meeting of unlike minds; a rather brilliant mind, in the case of the geek-become-rock demigod Brian May, who has a PhD in Nuclear Physics or something similarly arcane. Ultimately, this album is the sound of May’s autistic, Newtonian worldview vying for airtime with the strident campness of Freddie Mercury, surely the gayest man who has ever walked the face of the earth, while – surprisingly – the boring old bassist and the drummer come close to stealing the show with their contributions.
But more on that presently. The only logical way to structure this review is according to the identity of the songwriter. Mercury is responsible for around half of the songs here, and they’re a mixed bunch to say the least, but most of them offer – sometimes bizarre – variations on operatic campness. The opening song, “Death on Two Legs”, is one of the album’s highlights: a mordant, doomy, venomous diss track directed at Queen’s despised and estranged former manager. The lyrics articulate a viciousness worthy of Morrissey or Eminem. But then, after almost four minutes of braying bitchiness, it ends abruptly and we’re confronted by a jaunty little piano song, “Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon”, 90 seconds of scrumptious Vaudevillian dance hall music about the life of a London dandy who struts to the zoo and paints in the Louvre. Freddie repeats the latter trick on “Seaside Rendezvous”, except this time he sings about going to the beach with his lover, which climaxes with somebody getting “a new facial.”
This salacious double entendre aside, and despite Freddie’s mincing, these Vaudevillian songs are remarkably sexless, summoning to mind innocent children enacting an artificial imagining of romance, rather than anything genuinely erotic. This is of course typical of the syrupy high camp of the music hall, the ultimate glam forum, a world where little is truly real or authentic, rendering it uniquely appealing to homosexuals, who – especially in the 1970s – had been brutalised by and alienated from ‘the natural order’, or what was socially constructed as such. “Love of my Life” is similar – a kind of Hallmark Cards-esque contrivance of a romantic breakup, complete with maudlin, moonlit piano and lush harps. None of this feels sincere; all of it feels performative; a kind of pantomime rendering of human emotion. No wonder Queen were so big in Germany, where a culture of hyper-masculinity tips all too readily into homoeroticism, as is vividly apparent in the hysterical high camp of macho National Socialist pageantry.
And yet, amidst Mercury’s operatic and histrionic artifice, “Bohemian Rhapsody” feels genuine. Here, the rollicking high jinks of the music hall are replaced by palpable despair and encroaching psychological disintegration. It’s the centrepiece of the album, where opera, rock, metal, and choral singing meet in a single deranged epic – surely one of the most original songs in the history of rock music. But what’s it about? The band continue to keep schtum even today, and we obviously can’t ask Freddie, unfortunately. In any case, it’s eminently open to interpretation, because the song’s unorthodox structure mirrors the chaos of the unconscious mind – in this case, I would venture to suggest, the unconscious mind of the closeted homosexual. The lyrics are directed at the protagonist’s mother – the very archetype who, in classical psychoanalytic theory, the young queer has failed to detach from in order to enact a gender-forging identification with the father. The man that Freddie has just killed is, then, his own conventionally masculine ego ideal, the same-sex-identified version of himself. Though he implores Mamma-Mia to let him go, she won’t; the maternal remains dominant, the leap into the Oedipal struggle is aborted and, at the close of the song, all that’s left is despair over the failed paternal identification; nothing really matters. Perhaps if Freddie had been around twenty years later, in a more tolerant climate, his internalised homophobia would have been less acute, his despair and self-alienation less profound, and he thus wouldn’t have felt compelled to write this unhappy (though brilliant) song.
Indirect proof of this hypothesis is provided by the thoroughly and tiresomely heterosexual Brian May, whose meditations on time travel and the apocalypse punctuate A Night at the Opera like the wearyingly voluminous and intrusive academic footnotes of an otherwise fluently written work of fiction. Impressively, May manages to channel the two species of geekery that were perhaps most typical of the 1970s autiste; the futuristic fruitcakery of Bowie and Floyd, and the dungeons-and-dragons style buffoonery of Led Zeppelin and the early Marc Bolan. “39” is rooted in the former; it’s a folk song with incongruous lyrics about a man who travels to a far-off world where time slows down dramatically, and then returns to planet earth only to find that his loved ones have aged. It thereby prefigures the storyline of the 2014 movie Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, a man whose messianic pseudo-intellectual dweebery is oddly reminiscent of May’s, come to think of it. “The Prophet’s Song”, meanwhile, is more Tolkienien, or perhaps even biblical; a musical rendering of a fever dream that Brian had about the apocalypse, translated into a meandering 8-minute slice of prog rock. Fans of this kind of thing treat such things with po faced solemnity, whereas I tend toward Liam Gallagher’s interpretation that it’s a bunch of “dicks in tights” singing interminable songs about “dragons and wizards and all that bollocks.”
May also has more straightlaced moments, but they’re not necessarily improvements on his grad school flights of fancy. “Sweet Lady” is the most forgettable song on the album: an arsey and unremarkable heavy rock takedown of a love interest who calls him “sweet” like he’s a piece of cheese. Naturally, Brian can’t make it to the end of the song without inflicting his usual Wayne’s World-esque guitar solo on the defenceless listener. The acoustic tinniness of “Good Company”, meanwhile, sounds like something left over from a Beatles or Kinks recording session, although the lyrics have an interesting premise – they take aim at what Brian denounces as the basic insanity of the bourgeois lifestyle, of getting married and throwing yourself into the enclosed world of middle-class domesticity, only to be left alone and adrift in the twilight of life.
But what of the other two, Deacon and Taylor, trying to navigate like Jason and the Argonauts between the clashing rocks of May’s and Mercury’s egos? Actually, their songs are absolutely central to my enjoyment of this album. It is singularly hilarious how, after the hate-filled screed of “Death on Legs”, and the Vaudevillian fabulousness of “Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon”, the album suddenly darts off stage left into a four-minute heavy metal song about how much Roger Taylorloves his car. And this isn’t Bolan’s erotic likening of the automobile to the female form, or Springsteen’s dream of the car as the gateway to transcendence and freedom: it’s just Roger singing about how much he wants to buy a brand new carburettor while the hubcaps shine in the sun. It’s pure male obsessiveness, though of a different kind to that indulged in by the more cerebral Dr May.
Unexpectedly, however, the standout track on an album with no shortage of them is provided by Deacon. “You’re My Best Friend” is the most Queen-sounding song on A Night at the Opera: warm, dramatic, grandiose, with a futuristic-sounding electric piano and the sharpest of electric guitar solos. It’s a pop song, an obvious radio hit, and the lyrics are rather touching without being simple minded – the polar opposite of “Death on Legs”, basically. A girl I liked at school once included it on a mixtape for me, in order to send the subtle message that I was thoroughly and inescapably in the friendzone, which was a bit of a bummer and marked the end of my preoccupation with her. But I don’t hold it against the song.
In the end, though, the abiding impression of A Night at the Opera arises from the gargantuan clash of May’s and Mercury’s antithetical creative forces. Taken in isolation, there’s nothing particularly unusual about their contributions; we’ve seen them many times before already in the history of popular twentieth century music, from Vaudeville to Black Sabbath. What’s befuddling about A Night at the Opera is the way that these very disparate styles and mindsets are placed alongside each other; how the album transitions from Mercury catwalking up Brighton Promenade to May prog rocking about the Great Flood, and then back again to the heavy metal operatics of Freddie’s psychotic episode at the album’s culmination – with the occasional digression into Roger Taylor’s carburettor. All in all, it makes for a jarring, fairly entertaining, but highly uneven experience.
6/10
Highlights: “Death on Legs”, “You’re My Best Friend”, “Bohemian Rhapsody”