Songfacts®:

• This ambitious 8:42 minute mini-opera opened 10cc's 1975 album The Original Soundtrack, providing a template for Queen to make "Bohemian Rhapsody." "One magazine recently described it as 'an overreach,'" drummer and co-vocalist Kevin Godley told The Guardian November 22, 2012, "but we were constantly testing the waters of what we could and couldn't do."
• Kevin Godley and Lol Creme originally wrote this as a 20-minute piece. Eric Stewart told NME February 7, 1976 that they brought in Graham Gouldman and him after they said a large section of the song wasn't needed. "We started editing it down while they were actually playing it to us," he said. "Eventually we knocked it down to about eight minutes long.
  
  We worked on that song for about two weeks," Stewart continued, "filling it with every kind of instrument we could think of and then eventually scrapped the whole lot and went back to piano, bass and drums, which is all the song is. The lyric sheet was written as a script with the characters at the sides of the lines. And then we had to find the people in the band whose voice and voices would fit the characters. It was a really interesting project and I think it worked fabulously. But critically, when it first came out, it was passed off as a 10cc-trying-to-be-funny-again track."
• Creme commented of the song in the same interview: "It was macabre. It was about a murder, and musically we'd tried to stretch ourselves by setting up a new musical problem and then trying to solve it. It was one that took a long time to solve and it required the help of all four minds to get it to work."
• This was typical of the imagination of the song's original creators, Godley and Creme, whose Art School sensibility and cinematic writing made them the experimental half of 10cc. The pair left the band to release records under the name of Godley and Creme, before achieving significant success in the 1980s as the directors of a series of innovative videos.