‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ – political style

“Trump and May should remember rock-star brinkmanship can kill

Freddie Mercury was a man who believed in going all the way to the brink. Watching the film Bohemian Rhapsody on a long-haul flight last week, I was reminded of what an extraordinary risk-taker he was. As a rule, I am not a great consumer of rock band biopics. In fact, I used to think that This Is Spinal Tap had killed the genre for ever. Yet somehow you can’t stop watching Bohemian Rhapsody, mainly because of Rami Malek’s mesmerising performance as a rather-too-toothy Freddie.

Brinkmanship was the way Mercury lived his life — not only his bisexual love life, but also his musical life. Bohemian Rhapsody was as revolutionary a pop song as anything since the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper. I vividly remember becoming obsessed with it over the 1975 Christmas holidays. Borrowing a cassette recorder from my parents, I bootlegged it from Radio 1 so that I could explore over and over again its strange six-part structure and mock opera libretto.”