Queen opened their A Night at the Opera tour at Liverpool Empire on November 14, 1975. It was the first of two nights at the theatre, and the band's fourth studio album hadn't reached shops yet. The concert also marked the live debut of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” released as a single just two weeks earlier.
The opening night was itself an addition. In the Official International Queen Fan Club's spring 2016 magazine, Jim Jenkins explained that the originally scheduled show the following evening had sold out, prompting an earlier concert. He also described the band's visit to Liverpool station Radio City, where they heard the new album on a record player. Freddie Mercury received a copy of its sleeve and displayed it at that evening's show.
Getting the music in front of people meant more than booking concerts. Queen rehearsed at Elstree Studios, where they also filmed the promotional clip for “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The tour would make returning to London for Top of the Pops impractical, so the film gave them a way to appear on the programme while travelling. Onstage, the same song presented a different challenge: its elaborate studio arrangement had to work within a four-piece rock show. The tour's opening sequence used the operatic section on tape before Queen took over for the hard rock passage. Mercury appeared as a backlit silhouette behind a screen, making the band's entrance part of the drama. New costumes, lighting and stage effects accompanied the production.
Elsewhere in the set, “Bohemian Rhapsody” became part of a medley with “Killer Queen” and “The March of the Black Queen.” Its opening and closing ballad passages framed the older songs, while the operatic and heavy sections had already served as the concert's introduction. The single therefore appeared in separate pieces across the performance, rather than as one uninterrupted rendition.
Brian May explained the thinking in a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone: Queen had decided against trying to recreate all the layered operatic voices live. “You can't really pretend you're doing that on stage,” he said. The band treated those voices as a studio creation and built a concert arrangement around the sections they could perform themselves.
The album followed in late November, as the UK tour continued. “Bohemian Rhapsody” became Queen's first British No. 1 single and stayed there for nine weeks, spanning Christmas and the start of 1976. The UK run ended at London's Hammersmith Odeon on December 24, 1975, with a concert broadcast live on BBC television and radio.
Queen continued the A Night at the Opera tour in America, Japan and Australia during 1976. The British finale also left a recording that eventually became A Night at the Odeon – Hammersmith 1975, released in 2015. Its audio and film preserve different amounts of the performance: the television cameras stopped before the second encore, but the audio recording continued, allowing the audio editions to include material the cameras missed.
