Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody is half a century old. In all that time, no other artist has ever created a rock song comparable with Freddie Mercury’s extraordinary operatic achievement – even Queen themselves could never repeat it. No one else has ever tried.

Rock opera was a concept much bandied about by rock musicians in the late 60s and early 70s, with the likes of Pete Townsend and Ray Davies both making claims for the form. But whilst their compositions may well have been operatic in construction, they didn’t go beyond the boundaries of rock music in terms of sound. And this is what sets Bohemian Rhapsody apart – unlike anything that preceded it, the song sounds, at times like a bona fide operatic work, yet is able to slide seamlessly between opera and full-on hard rock, without ever sounding contrived or incongruous. The song begins as a slow ballad, before reaching the operatic middle section, then exploding out into heavy rock, before settling once more into the gentle ballad form on which it bows out.

Over the years, many people have asked what it all means. A BBC documentary, made in 2004, even brought in a panel of Oxbridge academics who pored over the lyrics without reaching any definite conclusions. Yet the song is essentially easy to understand – it is a straightforward dramatic narrative concerning a young killer who confronts his guilt and wrestles with the demons of his own imagination. What follows is my personal interpretation of the song: 

Prelude: The narrator introduces himself and his personality. He’s confused and struggling to define the boundary between fantasy and reality, as he prepares to confront divine judgement (‘look up to the sky’) for the crime he has committed. At this stage in the song, we hear only the voice of the narrator. 

First section: In a flashback, the narrator gives a laconic account of his crime, apologising to his mother and friends. He knows he must face up to the reality of what he has done, whether through judicial process in the real world or in a nightmarish courtroom scene where his inner demons take substance and place him on trial for his life. 

Operatic section: The key to understanding this section of the song is delivered in the first lines of the lyric: ‘Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy.’ Up to now, the song has been grounded in the hard reality of a young man who has committed murder. Now, the boundary between reality and fantasy begins to blur. Are we in a court of law or inside the young man’s fervid imagination? Whichever is the case, this section of the song takes the form of a courtroom scene. For the first time, voices other than that of the narrator are heard: ‘I see a little silhouetto of a man’ – this is clearly a reference to the protagonist, a tiny shadowy figure against the titans who sit in judgement. He is fey, an almost clownlike figure (‘Scaramouche/ will you do the Fandango)’ – Scaramouche being a clown character from the commedia dell’arte.

In a sense, some of the lyrics here could be interpreted as a kind of ‘classical word salad’ intended to convey feel rather than specific meaning, although the repetition of Galileo’s name is interesting, Galileo having stood trial for his belief that the Earth revolved around the sun rather than the reverse. Here, our young man, with his nihilist belief that ‘nothing really matters’ seems to believe that the Earth revolves around himself. ‘Figaro’, on the other hand, is probably just an operatic red herring, while ‘magnifico’ suggests the protagonist’s self-aggrandising ego.

Now the protagonist pleads on his own behalf, supported by the Greek chorus. Having previously assured us that ‘I need no sympathy’, the defendant now falls back on self pity (‘I’m just a poor boy, nobody loves me’), his plea reinforced by the chorus (‘he’s just a poor boy from a poor family’). He pleads in the name of God (the literal meaning of ‘bismillah’) to be spared, whilst the titans who sit in judgement refuse his plea (‘we will not let you go’). Again, his ego bursts forth defiantly in another ‘magnificio!’ The tug of war between defendant and judgement continues, with the defendant arguing that his ultimate punishment will be to live with his guilt and his demons through all eternity (‘Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me’). With this shout of defiance, the fantastic courtroom scene collapses into a frenzy as the song finally rocks out.

Now our narrator kicks back at his accusers (‘so you think you can stone me and spit in my eye?’). He is determined to escape judgement, but his anger is short lived, and subsides as a softer intrumental passage takes over. Ultimately, the protagonist realises he is left with nothing more than his nihilist philosphy of life: ‘nothing really matters to me’, with the last word coming from the chorus (‘any way the wind blows’): he will continue to drift aimlessly through the world. The gong signifies that judgement has been delivered: the young killer will have to live with himself and his demons for eternity. The song ends where it began.

Does any of this even matter, though? Ultimately, the lyrics served as the props for Freddie Mercury’s grandiose ambition. He wanted to do a rock opera piece, and he needed a storyline on which to hang it. Their meaning is secondary to the effect of the song taken as a whole.

The famous video was as much of an innovation as the song itself. Taking its visual cues from the iconic sleeve of the Queen II album, it debuted on Top of the Pops on 20 November 1975, when the song stood at No.9 in the charts. It hit number one the following week, and the video duly appeared on every subsequent edition of TOTP until 22 January 1976, clocking up eleven appearances. Strange as it seems, I missed out on all of this, as I wasn’t watching Top of the Pops during autumn 1975 – it clashed with Space:1999 over on ITV. As far as I can make out, my first glimpse of the famous video came on Tuesday 23 December, in a special TOTP featuring the number one hits of the year. The song was, however, already very familiar from repeated plays on the weekly Sunday teatime chart countdown, and I didn’t think a lot of it. Queen’s theatricality and Freddie’s voice simply didn’t appeal to me at all back then. Given time, I got used to it, came in time to like it, and would even go so far as to work out Brian May’s guitar solos. Today, I would argue a case for it being impossible to dislike the song: sure, it’s grandiose, almost ludicrously so, and every phrase of words and music has become burned into the collective memory of several generations, but it’s the no holds barred, 100% commitment of the band that transcends mere personal opinion. Having an opinion about Bohemian Rhapsody is as pointless as having an opinion about Big Ben. It’s enormous, it's out there, it’s an icon, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Will anyone be celebrating its centenary half a century from now? Undoubtedly.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY in stats:

First week on chart 08/11/75

Reaches number one 23/11/75

Stays there until 18/01/76 (last week at number one)

Replaced at number one by Abba, Mamma Mia, pushing BR down to number 3

Last week on chart 28.02.76 (17 weeks in total)

From Squash to Lava...

 

It was in one of Birmingham’s department stores, sometime in the late 60s or early 70s, that I got my first look at a lava lamp. We were in the furnishings department where several of the lamps were on display, and switched on. I’d never seen anything like them before, and was immediately intrigued at the writhing blobs of coloured 'lava' inside them. Quite apart from the unusual nature of the lamps, I was struck by their shape. I’d seen something like it before...

In the mid 60s, I’d noticed bottles of ‘Tree Top’ orange squash on sale in our local supermarket, and seen the brand advertised on television. ‘Tree Top’ was sold in a distinctively-shaped glass bottle, wide at the bottom, tapering to a narrower top with a deep plastic cap. These unusual lamps looked exactly like those old squash bottles, right down to the shape of the cap, and I remarked to myself on the similarity. For some reason, the shape of those squash bottles had appealed to me, and I now found myself similarly drawn to these strange psychedelic lamps as much for their shape as for their shape-shifting contents. The resemblance wasn’t coincidental – it happened that Edward Craven Walker, inventor of the lava lamp, had tried out his idea using various empty bottles, in the process of which he settled on the ‘Tree Top’ bottle as being the ideal container for his novel idea. The squash bottle formed the basis of what later became known as the ‘Astro Baby’ lamp, with a larger version employed as the more popular ‘Astro’. It was these that I’d seen on display in that department store – but they weren’t around for very long.

Lava lamps belonged to a passing interior décor fad that might be characterised as ‘psychedelic kitsch’, covering everything from Ercol armchairs to the paintings of Vladimir Tretchikoff, and spanning a period from the mid-60s to the early 70s. The lamps themselves had gone on sale back in 1963, and were famously featured in the TV series The Prisoner, where they appeared in various niches within the dwellings of Number Six and Number Two, and were also employed as part of the ‘Rover’ birthing sequence that spawned huge malevolent balloons from the bottom of the sea. Craven Walker had been inspired by a novel egg-timer he’d spotted in a Dorset pub, where water and wax had been combined in a heated bottle, and after various experiments, managed to turn it into a feasible table lamp, setting up the Crestworth company with his wife to bring it to market. Original Crestworth lamps came in a variety of sizes: the popular Astro lamp was joined by the scaled-down, ‘Tree Top’ bottle-sized Astro Baby, and a cylindrical version. The lamp bases and caps were originally a shiny copper colour, before changing to silver.

I never actually saw a lava lamp in anyone’s home during the 60s or 70s. My parents were far too conventional to give one house room, and even my cool relatives with their Jensen Interceptor and groovy 1970s furnishings didn't have one. By the mid 70s, lava lamps were already beginning to fall out of favour as interior décor trends began to embrace ‘country cottage’ traditional styles where Laura Ashley and William Morris held sway. The last time I saw a lava lamp in action during the 1970s was in the sitcom George and Mildred (1976-79). The Ropers’ living room had been decorated in deliberately bad taste, including a small lava lamp which would be turned on now and again to annoy Mildred’s brother-in-law (Reginald Marsh). Thereafter, I saw no more of them, and assumed, wrongly, that they’d vanished from the scene.

In fact, the company never stopped making the lamps, although they scaled back operations during the 1980s as demand tailed off. I didn’t see them again until the mid 1990s, when I spotted one on sale in a shop in Walsall. It was in what I took to be the ‘traditional’ colour scheme of red lava in blue liquid, and was turned on, doing its ‘thing’. By this time, the company had been taken over and renamed ‘Mathmos’ (after a lake of lava in the film Barbarella), and the lamps were suddenly popular all over again, coinciding with a resurgence of interest in mid-century retro interiors. Chris Evans had them dotted around his studio set in TFI Friday, and their psychedelic appearance sat well with the Acid House generation, as well as being popular with older hipsters keen to revisit their youth.

My original orange lava lamp, doing its thing back in the late 1990s

I got my first example at Christmas 1997, orange lava in a yellow medium. I was surprised at first to discover that the famous bubbling lava effect took over an hour to get going. After being switched on for maybe half an hour, the wax in the lamp base began to grow into extraordinary stalagmites and spires. Was this how they were supposed to work? Another half hour or more saw the curious structures begin to collapse and melt, eventually coalescing as a large, writhing blob at the bottom of the bottle. As convection develops in the liquid medium, the wax slowly begins to rise up, breaking off in bubbles which ascend to the top of the bottle before sinking back and dissolving back into the blob at the bottom. After three or four hours, the bubbles get smaller and smaller, as the convection process speeds up (the instructions advised users not to leave their lamps switched on much beyond this stage). If left on long enough, the wax would settle back into a blob at the bottom of the bottle as the temperature of the liquid medium evened out, reducing the effect of convection. Something I didn’t realise until researching this article is that there is a small metal coil embedded in the wax at the base, in order to break the surface tension when the wax softens, thus allowing bubbles to form and break away.

Surreal shapes appear during the 'start up' phase of any lava lamp:
this 'Astro Baby' created a scarily convincing nuclear explosion effect.

That lava lamp I got in 1997 is almost as old now as the originals were when I first acquired it, and it still works. The coloured water can occasionally fade over time, but the yellow medium in my example still looks more or less the same as it did nearly thirty years ago. As the lamps age, there is a tendency for blobs of ‘lava’ to get stuck at the top of the bottle, and if the bottle is agitated while the lamp is working, it can cause the clear liquid to become cloudy. What does one do with a lava lamp bottle when it reaches the end of its life? Don’t ask me – the four examples I own are all still doing their thing after more than a quarter of a century… I just know that you should definitely not pour the contents down the sink...

According to the Mathmos website, the average life span of a lamp is in the order of 2000 hours. I’ve used my original Astro sparingly over the years, and until recently, hadn’t switched it on for a very long time. It took at least an hour to get started, but once it reached the right temperature, it performed exactly as it always had. Assuming one leaves the lamp turned on for around four hours on a typical evening (they’re seen to best effect under low lighting), that 2000 hours equates to some 500 days’ use – around a year and a half if the lamp is used every day.

When lava lamps became popular again in the 1990s, it was soon possible to buy examples in a wide range of colours, and a few variants including one that included glitter flakes within the medium. The patent had lapsed by this time, allowing other manufacturers to get in on the act, and a lot of cheap versions soon appeared in the shops, retailing at less than half the price of the Mathmos originals. Of course, they were nowhere near as good to look at, and luckily the sales of these knock-offs doesn’t seem to have affected Mathmos, who continue to thrive to this day.

Edward Craven Walker died twenty five years ago, but his invention continues to delight anyone with an appreciation of mid century aesthetics. In an age when so many manufacturers get their products made on the cheap in the far East, it’s nice to be able to report that Mathmos lamps are still manufactured entirely in Britain. One might even call them the last gasp of so-called ‘cool Britannia.’ 

Now if only someone would reinvent Tree Top squash…

They Aint Heavy, They're the Hollies

 

The mid 70s was a good place to begin exploring the music of the 1960s. Pop was in the doldrums – glam rock had sunk into rock and roll revivalism, and the charts were easy pickings for any bunch of session musicians who fancied a crack at number one. On the album scene, heavy and progressive rock ruled – and I've always hated heavy rock.

It was in the spring of 1974 that I began to look back at the music of the past decade, beginning with The Beatles. I knew most of their singles, but didn’t own any of their records. This was soon set to rights with the acquisition of the 1966 compilation A Collection of Beatles Oldies. Over the next twelve months, my brother and myself would gradually acquire their entire back catalogue, with the curious omission of the ‘White Album’ and the more understandable absence of Yellow Submarine (after all, who wanted half an album of George Martin intrumentals?)

Jimmy Savile’s Double Top Ten Show had introduced me to the music of The Shadows, a band whom I knew primarily for their 1975 Eurovision appearance, and I didn’t need much encouragement to begin exploring their back catalogue in greater detail. Fortunately, almost all of their original albums were still readily obtainable. But when it came to bands like The Hollies, it was a different matter altogether.

Skimming through the record section in our local branch of W.H. Smith, I turned up numerous Hollies LPs – but they were almost all recent releases in naff sleeves. The only item of any vintage was the late 60s collection Hollies Greatest, with a sleeve showing the band’s somewhat risible attempt to look psychedelic. They looked as if they’d got dressed in the dark, donning random items from a jumble sale. I would soon come to realise that ‘psychedelic’ and The Hollies were uneasy bedfellows… but I wasn't about to let their image deter me from delving into their back catalogue...

A school friend owned a double LP of their hits, which served as my introduction to chart singles like “We’re Through” (the band’s first self-composed ‘A’ side), “Yes I Will” and “Bus Stop.” The same friend owned a vintage LP that he’d discovered in a local junk shop. Dating from summer 1966, Would You Believe was a very listenable collection of well-chosen cover versions and intriguing original numbers. Revisiting it this week, I realised that it’s a contender for the band’s best album. The playing is tight, Ron Richards’ production work excellent, and the always superb vocals are backed up by some fine instrumentation. Lead guitarist Tony Hicks had recently acquired a Vox Phantom electric 12-string guitar, and its jangling tones are all over the album. Elsewhere, he plays a Gibson ES-345, a guitar with a 6-way tone control that he seems to have kept set permanently on position number three. When, years later, I acquired the same model, I immediately recognised position three as the ‘Tony Hicks sound’. 

Graham Nash’s influence was beginning to make inroads into the band’s songwriting, as was the influence of Bob Dylan – the second cut on side one is the decidedly Dylanesque “Hard, Hard Year”. Nash gets to sing lead vocals on a couple of his self-composed songs “I’ve Got a Way of My Own” and “Fifi the Flea.” The latter really shouldn’t work at all, being a sentimental/whimsical tale of unrequited love between two fleas in a flea circus – but somehow, Nash managed to pull it off after Allan Clarke refused to sing it.

The cover versions were amongst the best in the Hollies’ catalogue, including a reading of Paul Simon’s “I am a Rock” that if anything surpasses the original. For me, on first hearing this album way back in the mid 70s, the track that really stood out was “Don’t You Even Care (What’s Gonna Happen to Me?)” a song by Clint Ballard Jnr. who had previously supplied the band with their number one hit “I’m Alive.” The song sounds as if it had been intended as a follow-up single, with a great arrangement and stunning harmonies – surely the Hollies' hit that never was.

This album really convinced me that The Hollies were a band I should be taking more seriously – but tracking down their original album releases would prove to be a challenge, demanding of both time and money. The best I could manage at the time was a borrowed pre-recorded cassette of their 1967 album Evolution. Both title and cover design hinted that change was afoot – suddenly, The Hollies had gone a bit weird...

Back in the 1990s, the music magazine Mojo used to run a column called ‘Lance Corporal Nutmeg’, which investigated albums that had, in its own words, ‘missed being Sergeant Pepper by a country mile.’ One of the albums they featured was Evolution – and they weren’t kind to it. Evolution had the extreme bad luck to be released on the same day as Sergeant Pepper, and for all its endearing qualities, it really couldn’t hold a candle to what the Fab Four had been cooking up in the studio next door. The psychedelic Hollies sounded as daft as they looked on that greatest hits sleeve. Luckily, Evolution still leaned heavily on the pacey, harmonised pop that had become the band’s trademark, but where it deviated from the norm the results were mixed to say the least. “Heading for a Fall” included the drone of bagpipes (!) and “Water on the Brain” featured a tuba solo (!!) ‘Twee nonsense’ was how Mojo described the harpsichord-led “Ye Olde Toffee Shoppe”, which was as gruesome as its ‘olde worlde’ title suggests. But the worst cut by a long, long way – and arguably the worst recording in the band’s entire catalogue – was Allan Clarke’s “Lullaby to Tim”. It would have been mildly innocuous had it not been for the inexplicable decision to feed Graham Nash’s vocal through a Leslie speaker with the tremolo effect set to maximum. He comes out sounding like a gargling Dalek.

For all its 1967 trappings, Evolution was still, at its core, a great mid-60s pop album – but The Hollies were only halfway up their ascent of Mount Psychedelia, the summit of which would be attained with the album Butterfly, released a mere five months later. Back in the 70s and 80s, this album was hard to find, and for a long time, I didn’t even know it existed. I finally tracked down an original copy at a vintage record store on Birmingham’s Summer Row. The front cover was clearly influenced by the late 60s mania for Edwardiana, while the rear sleeve was a shot from the same photo session that provided the greatest hits cover, with the band in their carnaby street togs.

Before I got as far as Butterfly, I had to backtrack somewhat. I’d still not heard the band’s 1966 collection For Certain Because… notable for being The Hollies’ first album to consist entirely of self-composed material. It’s been described as the Mancunians’ take on Rubber Soul, and that’s not a bad summary. Nine of its twelve tracks are straightforward jangle pop, and it’s clear that the Clarke-Hicks-Nash songwriting team had upped its game, as there isn’t a bad one among them. Tony Hicks’ distinctive echoing banjo that had featured on the single “Stop, Stop, Stop” can be heard on two other cuts, and is a musical signature that no other band ever attempted. New arrival Bernie Calvert adds echoing electric piano to the song “Pay You Back With Interest” (a single in some territories) which also features Bobby Elliott on tubular bells, chiming in with Tony Hicks’ twelve-string.

Beyond these standard pop productions, the band took its first steps into the realm of orchestrated production, signalling the way towards future efforts like “King Midas in Reverse” and “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” The results are a mixed bag – “High Classed”, opening side two, aims at a kind of New Orleans style, while “What Went Wrong” pomps up an otherwise average song with histrionic brass and timpani. “Crusader” clearly displays the influence of Graham Nash, and again hints at a future musical direction – albeit one he would follow alongside David Crosby and Stephen Stills.

It wasn’t until the late 1980s that I finally netted Butterfly. Of all the Hollies albums I’d discovered to date, this one was perhaps the most disappointing. ‘Self indulgent piffle’ was Mojo's opinion of tracks like the sitar-drenched “Maker” at the time of the album’s CD reissue some years later. The trouble with psychedelia was that it tended to encourage bands into one of two camps – serious or whimsical. The Hollies aimed for the former with tracks like the Nash-influenced “Try It” and “Elevated Observations?” but landed in out and out whimsy with songs like “Wishyouawish” and Tony Hicks’ “Pegasus”. On first play, I hated most of Butterfly. The overtly psychedelic tracks just sounded derivative, and elsewhere the band were veering dangerously close to cabaret, a direction they would pursue more vigorously in 1968.

After the comparative failure of Nash’s ambitious, orchestrated single “King Midas in Reverse”, The Hollies reassessed their position and decided that they should return to straightforward, commercial pop. The result was the single “Jennifer Eccles” and another substantial hit. But Graham Nash still haboured ambitions to be taken seriously as an artist. When he offered up his breezy, pot-fuelled travelogue “Marrakesh Express”, the band were having none of it, opting to cut an album of Bob Dylan covers instead. Thus ended their ‘classic’ era, with Nash departing for America to team up with Crosby and Stills.

With Nash gone, the band still cut some fine singles: but songs like “Sorry Suzanne” were more suited to acts like Herman’s Hermits, and clearly labelled The Hollies as a family-friendly cabaret turn. My own personal exploration of their back catalogue ended with Butterfly, although I later chanced upon the 1969 album Hollies Sing Hollies when it emerged as a CD reissue and found it to be a decent if slightly bland collection of self-composed material.

Ironically, it was their post-Nash 1969 hit “He Aint Heavy, He’s My Brother” that had properly introduced me to The Hollies. I’d heard some of their singles prior to this, but had never quite put a name to the band. I missed out on hearing their subsequent singles until 1974’s comeback hit “The Air That I Breathe”, by which time Allan Clarke had left, tried to make it as a solo artist, and rejoined. By now, The Hollies felt very much like golden oldies, but I was impressed with Tony Hicks’ guitar work on the track. As a budding player myself, I was far more influenced by players like Hicks than any of the era’s rock gods. His work was always tasteful, interesting and to the point.

A 1988 CD collection, Rarities, gathered together some of the more obscure odds and ends from the Hollies' back catalogue, including their one and only movie theme "After the Fox", that saw the band, accompanied by vocal interjections from Peter Sellers, perform what must surely be Burt Bacharach's worst ever composition... it certainly contains one the most perverse chord changes in the history of popular music. Judge for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b4k91aGn_U

By the 1990s, the old Hollies albums were beginning to resurface as reissues, initially on vinyl, then latterly as CDs. To begin with, EMI licensed the albums to independent labels like BGO, but eventually put out a decent set of reissues that offered up both mono and stereo versions of the original albums on a single CD (it’s a pity they’ve never done the same thing for The Beatles). Alongside these, comprehensive collections like The Hollies at Abbey Road made every A and B-side available on CD, together with unreleased tracks and a few alternate takes.

I sometimes feel sorry for bands like The Hollies: they set out in an era of uncomplicated beat music and quickly mastered their art. Then along came The Beatles and the game changed. It was no longer enough to put out radio-friendly commercial pop – you had to demonstrate your credentials as a serious artist, and that meant making ‘statements’ in the form of albums. Yet there has never been anything wrong with a commercial, hook-driven, well-performed pop single, and few bands could do that better than The Hollies. If, like me, you choose to explore their albums, don’t look for artistic statements or cerebral concepts – you won’t find any. What you will find are some great collections of songs that could easily have been singles. And the beauty of those CD reissues is that you can skip over the embarrassing bits...