I remember buying Queen’s 1975 album A Night at the Opera … obviously not in 1975, I was only four when it came out.
The stand out track for me on that album was never the one that hit number 1 for a total of 14 weeks.
A Night at the Opera was the make-or-break album that really catapaulted Queen into the stardom stratosphere, in a large part due to the success of its first single, a Freddie Mercury penned ditty by the name of Bohemian Rhapsody. That song spent nine weeks at number one in 1975–1976 and a further five after the death of Freddie Mercury in 1991.
Bohemian Rhapsody appears as the penultimate track on side two, just before their arrangement of the national anthem God Save the Queen. But it’s the opening track of side two that I always loved more, the Brian May penned prog epic “The Prophet’s Song”.
The Prophet’s Song opens with a plucked melody on a toy koto that May undoubtedly picked up on one of their Japanese tours and then explodes into a fantasy tale, Lyrically, the song paints a bleak picture of a world on the brink of destruction. A wise man warns of impending doom, he urges people to heed his message and seek salvation. The song depicts a society plagued by greed, selfishness, and a lack of compassion, leading to a catastrophic end, concluding with a plea for humanity to embrace love and compassion as the only way to avert the impending disaster. Heavy stuff, both metaphorically and in terms of the crunching riffs that May employs to conclude the repeating, echoing a capella section.
The Prophet’s Song is like the yin to Bohemian Rhapsody’s yang. It is a hidden gem on A Night at the Opera, a treasure waiting to be discovered by new Queen fans as they unlock this record. Hopefuly, I’ve just sped up that process for a few.
