Queen’s smash hit Bohemian Rhapsody reached its fiftieth anniversary over Christmas and 2025 additionally marks one other turning level for the long-lasting British rock band.

Queen had been already one of many greatest bands within the UK once they launched their blockbuster 1975 album A Evening on the Opera. However that hit-packed assortment proved to be the document that cemented the band’s place in rock’s high tier.

A Evening on the Opera was showered with glowing opinions, with multiple critic praising it as the very best album of the yr. However not everybody was charmed by its wildly eclectic assortment of songs. 

Particularly the band’s former supervisor, Norman Sheffield, was stung by the lyrics of A Evening on the Opera’s opening monitor, Dying On Two Legs. 

Freddie Mercury‘s brutal lyrics, which in contrast the tune’s topic to “a sewer-rat decaying in a cesspool of satisfaction” appeared to be very a lot aimed on the man that had secured Queen’s recording contract with EMI two years earlier.

“It was some type of nasty hate mail from Freddie to me,” Sheffield wrote in his autobiography Life On Two Legs: Set The Document Straight.  

Queen had signed with Sheffield’s firm, Trident Audio Productions, in November 1972.  After months of labor, with the band honing their craft in in a single day classes when Trident’s studio wasn’t booked by industrial purchasers, Queen signed with EMI at the start of the next April.

However relations between band and supervisor soured over the next months. In response to Sheffield, some members of the group – particularly flamboyant frontman Freddie Mercury – had been unwilling or unable to grasp that recording royalties can take months and even years to make their method by the trade pipeline.

“Freddie demanded a grand piano,” Sheffield wrote. “After I turned him down, he  banged his fist on my desk. ‘I’ve to get a grand piano,’ he stated.

“I wasn’t being imply. We knew there was an enormous amount of cash as a consequence of come flooding our method from Queen’s success. I defined that a few of it was already coming in however the overwhelming majority of it hadn’t arrived but”

Freddie complained that the band was promoting tens of millions of data, and but he was nonetheless dwelling in the identical flat he’d been in once they began.

“The amount of cash we’d invested within the band was big,” Sheffield stated. “We’d superior them gear and salaries proper at the start and had continued to pour cash into them for 4 years.

“The very fact the band owed Trident near £200,000 (£1.75 million right this moment) didn’t appear to register with Freddie.”

However EMI executives noticed Queen’s aspect of the argument, and put the band in touch with lawyer Jim Seashore, who managed to free them from their Trident contract. By August 1975 Seashore had succeeded in extricating Queen from Trident’s grasp and the 4 musicians had the job of discovering new administration in addition to crafting what was to grow to be their breakthrough album.

“By late 1975 I used to be listening to that they had been making all types of derogatory feedback about Trident,” Sheffield stated. “Then I heard a monitor from A Evening At The Opera referred to as Dying On Two Legs. 

He added: “The opening two traces summed up what was to return – ‘‘You suck my blood like a leech/you break the legislation and also you breach’, then, ‘Do you are feeling like suicide?’ it went on, ‘I believe that you must’. It was some type of nasty hate mail from Freddie to me.”

Although he is by no means explicitly named in Dying On Two Legs, after listening to the tune for the primary time, Sheffield sued Queen and EMI for defamation.  He secured an out-of-court settlement.

Sheffield’s discomfort was solely sharpened when Bohemian Rhapsody, the lead single from A Evening on the Opera, stormed into the UK chart to start a nine-week reign on the high spot and turning into that yr’s Christmas Quantity One.

It was a “bittersweet second,” Sheffield stated. Ruefully reflecting on his – and Freddie’s – errors, he stated: “We must always have talked extra. And I ought to have been extra attentive to their emotions. By the point I realised issues had been badly incorrect, it was too late.”