Review of Queen's A Night At The Opera

Released 1975

"I watched as fear took the old men's gaze
Hopes of the young in troubled graves.
I see no day, I heard him say
So grey is the face of every mortal".

A Night At The Opera was actually the first album I ever bought, four or five years before I began my prog odyssey. Like many others, the ubiquity of Queen's most famous song around Christmas 1975, and the intense media interest that propelled then from a fairly successful entity into the stratosphere and the then history books, made me curious enough to part with a few weeks pocket money.

I was sufficiently taken with the album that it initiated a long and lasting love affair with their entire canon. Up to about 1980 anyway. I never thought of A Night At The Opera (and the rest of their seventies output) as anything other than pop/classic rock. It wasn't until my interest in prog rock was well established. that I noticed this particular album cropping up from time to time in the upper echelons of 'Greatest Prog Albums of All Time' polls. I decided to reappraise it in light of my growing prog knowledge.

The packaging, whilst grandly ornate and suitably regal, didn't really distinguish it as a prog artifact. In fact, it was proudly proclaimed that 'no synthesisers!" were used in the making of the album. No synths; surely this couldn't be a prog album? Also, Queen has been a huge singles band and wore spandex. So what was 'progressive' about this album? I put the headphones on and tried to listen with a fresh perspective.

Okay, so there may not have been synthesisers, but Freddie Mercury's fluid piano was obviously very much in evidence. Death On Two Legs... was not a standard pop song; bitter angry lyrics directed at former management were spat out with some aplomb. Whilst it wasn't pop, it couldn't see it as prog either. Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon, running in at under a minute, was certainly eclectic, but not much more than a whimsical ditty. No, I was still struggling to see why it was so highly rated amongst prog fans. The remainder of the first side of the album was a mixture of successful singles (You're My Best Friend) and well accomplished, but very mainstream pop and rock songs nonetheless.

But then, with side two it all became clear. The Prophet Song, with swirling wind sound effects, shifting time signatures, vocal only passages and a bombastic centre piece was truly magnificent; bonkers top drawer stuff, superbly enhanced at its peak by bouncing backwards and forwards between each ear, and fabulous when tuned up dangerously high under the headphones.

I hadn't fully appreciated the majesty (pun intended) of the song's segue into Love of My Life. Of itself, Love of My Life is a beautiful anthem, but when considered, if you like as 'part two' of The Prophet Song, it really is very cleverly conceived piece on a par with any pure prog experiences I had had up until that point.

Bohemian Rhapsody is so ingrained into the public consciousness that it is almost beyond comment and reproach. Its sheer eccentricity and audacity are legendary and, at the very least, nods with wry smile and tremendous good humour towards the often more serious prog bands.

Very few classic prog bands, which, in the end Queen were not, had enjoyed the same success and indeed public adoration with works of such diversity, scope and ambition.

Was it a worthwhile exercise, or an act of unnecessary pretension to reconsider the album from the prog angle? Actually yes; one way or another, I think I appreciated it's genius and it's madness all the more.