A Night at the Opera (1975) — Signed in Boston, 1976

The centrepiece of this case is a US copy of A Night at the Opera (1975), signed on the front cover by all four members — Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon — during an in-store signing session in Boston, ahead of a date on their US tour at the start of 1976.

On either side of the signed sleeve stand two coloured vinyl pressings of the album — a mauve/brown copy and a white copy — part of the small run of coloured test pressings that occasionally turned up alongside the standard black vinyl, flagged on the exhibition card as “A Night at the Opera — Vinili Colorati.” Laid flat in front of them are further pressings of the album from various countries.

This piece is part of “Keep On Rockin’ — the 2019 Exhibition.” See the full exhibition here.

Forty years on, the album was still drawing crowds: at Discodays in Naples in 2015, a body-painted model posed in front of a dedicated anniversary display, the wall behind her lined floor to ceiling with worldwide pressings of A Night at the Opera.