Freddie Mercury passed away over three decades ago. As the charismatic frontman of Queen, his remarkable vocal range won the hearts and minds of fans around the world throughout the 1970s and ’80s, yet his presence seems just as potent today. For this, we have an enduring fanbase, Brian May and Roger Taylor’s tenacity and the 2018 blockbuster Bohemian Rhapsody to thank.
As Bryan Singer and Dexter Fletcher’s award-winning biopic revealed, Freddie Mercury’s path to stardom and life in the limelight was littered with tragedy. During his teen years, Mercury and his family had to flee Zanzibar to escape the aggressive uprisings of 1964. This early tumult had a lasting impact on the singer, but had it not occurred, he would never have landed in the UK, where he met his future Queen bandmates.Throughout his initial spell with Queen, Mercury soared as a glam-rock star alongside the likes of David Bowie and Elton John. Like these two stars, the Queen frontman struggled with the glaring light of fame and faced constant scrutiny over his sexuality. Sadly, the past is a foreign country, and the 1970s bore a much less accepting society where homosexuality was concerned.
Forced to conceal his bisexuality, Mercury’s first marriage to Mary Austin became fraught amid furtive sexual encounters and mounting press harassment. Following his 1976 divorce, Mercury became increasingly withdrawn. His heavy partying lifestyle served only as a veneer, disguising isolation initially of a social nature that began to drift into mental and physical realms.In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Queen’s output diverged from the early glam sound towards something a little more danceable. Funky 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 heights of popularity, but the band’s creative orientation had become increasingly diffuse, leading to tension between the members.
In 1981, while recording on Hot Space, Mercury began to work with his new assistant, Paul Prenter. He would later show his true colours when leaking controversial details about Mercury’s private life to the press, but even at this early juncture, the rest of Queen were dubious. Prenter sunk his claws in, encouraging Mercury to separate from his bandmates and make radical changes to his creative vision.
While the success of ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ inspired the funk-pop inclination of Hot Space, Prenter influenced Mercury’s submission of the controversial track ‘Body Language’. The song patently referred to sex, with seductive groaning from Mercury. It also became one of the first songs banned from MTV due to the video’s suggestive nudity.The song received mixed opinions from Queen’s fanbase, but intriguingly, it also met criticism from within the band. In the Days of Our Lives documentary, Taylor targeted Prenter for his hand in the song’s creation. “He wanted our music to sound like you had just walked into a gay club,” he revealed, “and I didn’t!”
‘Body Language’ seemed to coincide with a particularly debauched period for Mercury, which culminated in his comparatively lacklustre solo endeavours in the mid-1980s.