‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is one of the most recognisable rock songs ever made, and also one of the strangest. No conventional chorus, no logical structure. Instead, the song shifts over six minutes through a ballad, an operatic section and a hard rock passage, as if it is trying to be three songs at once.

Radio stations in 1975 were not keen on long singles. Yet it became a massive hit.

The multi-layered operatic section was a nightmare to record. The band members had to sing their vocal parts over and over again to build up all those layers, and the result was something they could never reproduce exactly in a live setting. That kind of detail makes the song more interesting than it might seem on first listen: beneath all that theatrical bombast lies a recording that was technically quite ambitious for its time, at a moment when studio technology was nowhere near as advanced as it is today.

Decades later the song found a second life with a younger audience, partly through films and online videos. For a pub quiz it is a solid question: half the table knows it from personal experience, the other half has simply seen it everywhere.