When Bryan Singer and Dexter Fletcher’s awe-inspiring biopic Bohemian Rhapsody arrived in 2018, Queen gained a new generation of fans entranced by the band’s unequalled showmanship. The Academy Award-winning film also consolidated Freddie Mercury’s immortal legacy almost three decades after his tragic demise. It seems that the music Queen created in just a couple of decades in the late 20th century will outlive us all.
Critical to Queen’s appeal as a recording act was their ability to create progressive rock music that was equally accessible. The layered epic ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, like The Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’, proved that pop music didn’t have to conform to well-trodden paths. As he showed off his impressive vocal range and projection, wailing “Scaramouche” and “Galileo” at Queen’s packed-out arena concerts, Mercury had the audience in the palm of his hand.Following their initial chapter of heavy glam rock through the mid-1970s, Queen gradually embraced a more conventional pop-conscious sound infused with disco and funk. Rhythmic, danceable hits like John Deacon’s 1980 songwriting contribution ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ and 1984’s ‘I Want to Break Free’ lifted Queen to new peaks of popularity. Despite the commercial success of the early ’80s, the band’s creative orientation had become less coherent, leading to tension between the members.
In 1981, while recording on Hot Space, Mercury began working with his new assistant, Paul Prenter. The controversial collaborator influenced the singer greatly, encouraging him to further embrace contemporary trends for financial gain. Naturally, this alienated Mercury’s bandmates, contributing to a fractured decade for Queen. While the band maintained a steady presence in the charts with The Works and A Kind of Magic, their influence as a rock band chipping at the vanguard had begun to falter.With solo side projects providing some much-needed breathing space in the ’80s, Queen toured less frequently. However, the band was revitalised by their historical performance at Live Aid in 1985, which drummer Roger Taylor described as a “shot in the arm”.
He said: “Queen were absolutely the best band of the day,” organiser Bob Geldof said of the show. “They just went and smashed one hit after another … it was the perfect stage for Freddie: the whole world.”
The undeniable high of Live Aid put the wind in Queen’s sail for a few more years, but tragedy was just around the corner. In 1987, Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS. He decided to keep the news to himself for a couple of years before informing his bandmates, figuring that morale would be best unhindered. As his health declined, he recorded one final album with Queen, 1991’s Innuendo. Nine months after the album’s release, Mercury confirmed to the public that he had been suffering from AIDS. He died just one day later, on November 24th, 1991.Although the Innuendo sessions birthed enough material for a final, posthumous album, Made in Heaven, Innuendo is usually regarded as the bookending LP for Freddie Mercury’s career. Not only was the album much more coherent and critically revered, but it ended on a fittingly poignant note, ‘The Show Must Go On’. Guitarist Brian May wrote the enduring anthem in response to Mercury’s stoic response to adversity, understanding that it could well be the band’s final discographic entry with their beloved leader.
Speaking on the BBC documentary Freddie Mercury: The Final Act, May remembered that, alongside the outpouring of love from Queen fans after Mercury’s death, there was a surprising degree of unsavoury response in the press. “There were some people who were very nice, but there were people who were unbelievably unsympathetic,” he said. “There was this talk of ‘Well, you know, he was gay, he kind of deserved it, he lived that kind of promiscuous lifestyle, it was going to happen.’ We thought, ‘You people have no idea of what this disease really is. And no feeling about the morality of what you’re saying.’”
Presumably, Mercury foresaw such a reaction and decided to keep the news to himself and a tight circle of loved ones until the very end. The negative responses helped Queen understand the struggle of life as a gay man in the 20th century, which supposedly set Mercury up with the strength of character required to face the adversity of terminal AIDS. “He never moaned, he never said, ‘My life is shit, this is terrible, I hate it,’” May remembered in Days of our Lives when discussing ‘The Show Must Go On’. “He had an incredible strength and peace.”