Years in the Making
Freddie Mercury wrote the song in his home in London. It used a different method from the other songs he typically wrote in the studio. In fact, Mercury wrote the entire song on telephone books and scraps of paper (as only true creative geniuses do). According to Mercury’s friend Chris Smith (a keyboard player in the band Smile), Mercury first started developing Bohemian Rhapsody in the late 1960s, 1968, to be exact.
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He used to play parts of the songs he was writing at his piano. He came up with the opening line “Mama, just killed a man” but didn’t yet have a melody. He originally referred to this work in progress as The Cowboy Song… of all things.