Queen’s Manager Recalls Elton John Telling Band ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Would ‘Never Be a Hit’

Fifty years after Queen dazzled audiences with “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the surviving members of the original lineup are as surprised as anyone.

Brian May, 78, and Roger Taylor, 76, recently spoke with Rolling Stone as they celebrated the single’s anniversary, opening up about some of the reasons why no one expected the song to get as big as it has become over the last five decades.

“It seemed to go on forever,” Taylor recalls. “ The way we would do it, all three of us would sing every part, which gave it a real thickness, a body.”

There was tension in getting the track down perfectly, but also in deciding what length it should be edited down to. Gary Langan, the sessions’ assistant engineer, recalled, “You had Fred, who was staunchly holding out for six minutes, of course.”

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“And a faction of the band going, ‘You know what, Fred? I think you’ve gone one step too far here,'” Taylor shared, remembering bassist John Deacon’s editorial suggestions, which the band didn’t agree on.

The four members of the band also wondered what their record label would make of the song, which ultimately clocked in at just under 6 minutes.

“There were two or three promotion men subscribing to ‘I’d say it’s way too long.’ In the end, they went with what we told them,” John Reid, Queen’s manager at the time, shared.

During his time working for Queen, Reid was dating Elton John, who shared his own two-cents on the song.

“He said, ‘Are you f—ing crazy?’” Reid recalls. “‘That will never be a hit. It’s too long!’ He was adamant.” 

In 1999, Roy Thomas Baker, one of the music producers behind the unforgettable song, spoke about working on “Bohemian Rhapsody,” calling it “basically a joke, but a successful joke,” per Mix Online.

“We had to record it in three separate units. We did the whole beginning bit, then the whole middle bit and then the whole end. It was complete madness,” he recalled. ”

“The middle part started off being just a couple of seconds, but Freddie [Mercury] kept coming in with more ‘Galileos’ and we kept on adding to the opera section, and it just got bigger and bigger. We never stopped laughing.”