Mercury still rising

We WILL rock you...

If you have even a passing interest in the music of Queen, I implore you to get along to your local cinema and see the Bohemian Rhapsody movie.

Don’t knock back a litre of cola in the first ten minutes though – at well over two hours, it’s a long watch. The good news is, it uses every one of it’s many minutes to the full.

Covering the period from the band’s formation though to their appearance at Live Aid in 1985, the film focuses on charismatic front man Freddie Mercury. That’s not to say the rest of the group are ignored, but come on – Fred’s flamboyant life certainly warrants the additional screen time.

Faithfully recreating the look and fashions of the various eras, the film is funny, sad, touching, poignant and exhilarating in various proportions. The family-friendly rating means Mercury’s promiscuity is alluded to, rather than writ large on the screen, but you’re given enough in the way of visual clues and implications to get the gist of what happened.

The film ends with a spine-tingling recreation of Queen’s widely-lauded appearance at Live Aid, with the viewer made aware that Freddie and the band knew of his AIDS diagnosis beforehand. This therefore deprives us of their output following that date, including 86’s “Magic Tour”, but under the circumstances this is understandable, with Mercury’s illness eventually leading to his death in 1991.

To cram so many events into a couple of hours, the film does put chronology and detail somewhat Under Pressure on occasion, and bassist John Deacon gets no back story.

A personal gripe is the micro-editing of Hammer To Fall in the finale. The gaps between lines and versus have been cut, presumably to save a few seconds here and there. As a lifelong fan, I certainly noticed. And why did the stage appear so high above the crowd in some of the shots?

Still, these are minor complaints. The scenes where Queen are creating monster hit Bohemian Rhapsody are joyous, the dialogue has some laugh-out-loud moments, and that Live Aid recreation at the end (despite missing a couple of numbers out) genuinely had me giddy. There must have been some dust in the cinema – I definitely had something in my eye during the last five minutes.

Like Queen songs? Ignore the critics and get to the cinema. Bohemian Rhapsody is magnifico, darlings.

This post first appeared as mt 'Awry look at the week' column, in The Mail, on Friday the 9th of November 2018. The version used on their website was re-titled as "Freddie Mercury's rocking the world again!"

I did wonder if I would like the film. I'm reasonably geeky about Queen, but in the end I was more than happy to take it as it was - a fun romp, based on their history and music. There's nothing quite like your favourite band's music playing through the sound system in a cinema, and it was clear there were some subtle differences in the pieces used in the scenes where the actors were 'playing live' or recording in the studio.

Presumably, someone had fun going through the alternative takes and demo versions of Queen's recordings to pick these bits out.

And if you didn't laugh at the rest of the band taking the piss out of Roger's "I'm In Love With My Car", then you clearly have no soul.

Lot's of fun, and I genuinely was fighting back the tears during the Live Aid section at the end. Music can do that to you - you should let it.

(CD A-Z: It's Top Of The Pops 1980-1984! Woo! Yeah!)

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