“Is this a joke?”: the song Brian May has never forgiven Roger Taylor for writing
A Night at the Opera, Queen‘s fourth studio album released in 1975, is now celebrated as one of the greatest albums in music history, an achievement of musical versatility and complex production that took the band from slowly-building mainstream attention to rock ‘n’ roll icons.
But, at the time of its conception, Queen was in a worrisome state, having yet to make the money back from their hit records, released prior. “If A Night at the Opera hadn’t been a huge success, I think we would have just disappeared under the ocean someplace,” guitarist Brian May revealed in 1990, quoted in 2007’s Queen: Complete Works. “So we were making this album knowing it was live or die.”
From the sessions for A Night at the Opera came some of Queen’s most recognisable songs, from the John Deacon tune ‘You’re My Best Friend’, to Freddie Mercury’s ‘Love of My Life’ and, of course, the sensational ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Drummer Roger Taylor offered a song of his own: the polarising ‘I’m in Love with My Car’.
The unabashed love song was inspired not by Taylor’s relationship with his own car, but by one of Queen’s roadies, Jonathan Harris, who owned a Triumph TR4 sports car that, according to Taylor, was clearly the “love of his life”. In the song’s liner notes, the dedication reads, “Dedicated to Johnathan Harris, boy racer to the end.”
In near-disbelief that someone could be so passionate about their car that all else pales in comparison, Taylor wrote ‘I’m in Love with My Car’ through a humorous, yet still sincere, lens. He describes the car as “the machine of a dream,” their relationship as “automolove” and favours spending money on a new carburettor car part over his girlfriend. Overall, the song romanticises the thrill of driving the machine with not-so-subtle metaphors: “When my hand’s on your grease gun / Oh, it’s like a disease, son.”
The latter lines were referenced in the 2018 Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, when May (played by Gwilym Lee) says to Taylor (played by Ben Hardy), “That’s very subtle, Roger,” to which he replies, “It’s a metaphor, Brian!”
“Brian was like, ‘Is this a joke?’” Taylor recalled to Mojo. But alas, Taylor was wholeheartedly serious, playing the guitars in his original demo himself and recording the revving sounds of his then-current car, an Alfa Romeo sports car, to be played at the end of the song.
“I said, ‘Look at all those people out washing their cars on a Sunday morning, lavishing attention on them – they probably love their cars more than they love their wives,’” Taylor explained. “It’s a valid lyric, I think, but kind of tongue in cheek, too, obviously… cars and girls – what else is there?”
The drummer so believed in ‘I’m in Love with My Car’ that, when it came time to release the first single from A Night at the Opera, he went so far as to lock himself in a cupboard, refusing to come out until the band agreed that his song would be included as the B-side to their chosen first single, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.
Taylor’s insistence proved to be somewhat of a contentious one within Queen: because of the whirlwind success of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and, being that ‘I’m in Love with My Car’ was the sole B-side, Taylor’s song became one of the highest-grossing of all time. But, due to Queen’s mutual agreement that whoever wrote the lyrics to a song got the money for it, longstanding arguments over the band’s once-agreed-upon dynamic reached new heights.
“We were aware of the injustice of ‘I’m in Love With My Car’ making as much money as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’,” May explained. “It was a real sticking point for the band, and it’s good we got through it. I think our sense of humour saved us.”
Though May still admitted that Taylor’s success with the song left a lingering effect, reflecting, “How long did it take me to get over it?… Oh, quite a while.”
“He’s never forgiven me,” Taylor revealed. “And I’ve never stopped laughing about it!”
