The 1976 Queen song Brian May always struggled to play: “So complex”
The moments in a show we eagerly wait for as fans are probably names on the setlist that bands nervously glance at throughout a gig. The ease of playing four open chords for a simple mid-tempo ballad is squashed by the oncoming fear of playing that sprawling solo that sends fans into bliss and turns fingers into blisters. So I wonder how Brian May felt when Queen‘s rock opera epic, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, raced closer to its opening note.
Ultimately, May will go down as one of history’s most accomplished guitar players and, therefore, doesn’t wince at the idea of a performance. But the nature of these iconic songs is their sheer level of technical density, which incites the relevant feelings of headbanging chaos and performance nervousness as the first chord is struck.
The difficulty of Queen’s arrangements is what made their discography perfect for big stage adaptation. The musical that was produced on the shoulders of their back catalogue needed little added drama to allow the songs to soar above the crowd and develop into something transcendental. But what it provided was a platform to create a band that overwhelmed the three founding members. With musicians packing the stage, crammed in the wings and stuffed in the orchestra pit, Brian May could finally realise the dream world of multilayered live arrangements.
“I had a lot of fun with We Will Rock You, our musical, because I have a couple of great guitarists and a keyboard player who can sound like a guitarist if we ask him to,” May told Guitar Player. He added, “I’ve had a lot of fun rearranging some of our stuff to be played live, in a way that I wouldn’t be able to do on my own. But obviously some of the stuff we did on record is so complex it would take ten guitars at once to actually reproduce it.”
When asked about a specific song in their back catalogue that induced more nerves than any other, May said, “Probably ‘Millionaire Waltz’, I don’t think we’ve ever managed to play that all the way through.”
In exposure terms, the song is the more understated sibling of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, but in terms of arrangement, it walks alongside it with relative ease. The theatricality in the track’s disposition is immediately apparent, fluctuating from the playful and powerful seamlessly, and the seamlessness of those moods can largely be attributed to the ethereal quality of Mercury’s voice, where he could make the deeply performative make sense in the studio.
However, the ability to showcase that is undoubtedly due to May’s ear for arrangement, which is deeply apparent in this song. It’s not just incoherent experimentation; it’s a razor-sharp exploration of grand and celestial melodies.
In 2008, May credited Mercury’s role by noting, “This was our greatest musical excess. It teems with baroque life and makes ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ look easy. Great piece of Freddie.” But Mercury himself was keen to express May’s role in creating a world where their opus is dwarfed, concluding, “Actually, I’d like to say that Brian did do a very good job on the actual guitars. He’s really taken his guitar orchestration to its limits, I don’t know how he’s ever going to outdo that one, actually.”
What ‘The Millionaire Waltz’ ultimately represents is the kind of ambition that defined Queen at their peak. While many bands were content to refine a single sound, Queen seemed determined to stretch every idea to its absolute limit, regardless of how difficult it might be to replicate outside the studio. That willingness to prioritise creativity over practicality is what set them apart, even if it occasionally left them with songs that were nearly impossible to perform live.
In many ways, those challenges became part of their mystique, reinforcing the idea that Queen were not just a rock band but a studio-driven force capable of building entire sonic worlds.
For May, the difficulty wasn’t a flaw but a byproduct of pushing boundaries, where each layer of complexity added something vital to the final piece. It also highlights the unique chemistry within the band, where Mercury’s theatrical instincts and May’s meticulous arrangements combined to create music that was as daring as it was enduring, even if it sometimes came at the cost of live perfection.
