‘Bijou’: The Queen song Brian May called “inside out”
The early days of the internet were wild. There was a strange equality in the days before PR firms ran social media accounts and celebrities were media trained to the point of rigor mortis. Everyone from your best mates to Wayne Rooney himself treated Twitter the exact same way. MySpace blogs were a microscope into the deepest, darkest thoughts of your favourite artists. Long before that, though, there was an early adopter of the internet that no one saw coming, Queen guitarist Brian May.
The truth is, if you know anything deeper about the man than “plays guitar” and “has a lot of hair” then you probably saw this coming. This is a man technologically savvy enough to have built his own guitar when he was still in his early teens (with his dad’s help but still), and smart enough to have a PhD in astrophysics. Not one of those honorary ones either, his thesis is online.
All this to say, May is a nerd the way that the sky is up, so he took to the internet a lot earlier than most. Personally, he has kept an almost alarmingly candid blog on his website since at least 2003, something he still does to this day. In amongst the behind the scenes snaps from the We Will Rock You press tour and some typically bilious thoughts on the state of the NME (the more things change), there’s one post in particular that nearly justifies the whole idea of people having this level of proximity to famous people in general.
In 2004, a fan wrote to his letters page saying that they’d heard the song ‘Bijoux’ from 1991s Innuendo was a solo Freddie Mercury composition, which went against what they’d heard previously. They wondered if May could clear this up and, since Bohemian Rhapsody proved that May has an almost bezerker-like fervour for protecting his own legacy, he was only too happy to do so.
On his blog, May wrote that the song was indeed written by him and Mercury as a collaboration, inspired mainly by Jeff Beck. He then went on to elaborate, saying, “The song has an unusual format – we wanted to make it a song “inside out” (with its heart on its sleeve). The main parts of the song are played on guitar instead of being sung, and in the middle, where the guitar solo would normally be, appears the short vocal section.”
The placement of this vocal section, in essence, a middle eight without verse or chorus on either side, inspired the name of the piece. May says, “The vocal is a succinct and very precise little verse, a little gem, a ‘Bijou’ – a jewel buried at the heart of the piece: hence the name of the song.” The whole song’s existence is a sign, if one was needed, of how forward-thinking and experimental Queen were as a group. No matter their reputation for crowd-pleasing theatrics.
More than that, though, I can see why May was so keen to clear this up. This is no self-effacing act of gatekeeping. Innuendo was a whole album made in dark times, with Mercury coming to the end of his life. Yet the band have surprisingly positive memories of the album’s creation, filled with creativity and collaboration. To me, this is an act of keeping Freddie’s memory alive, much more than any movie ever could.
