containing some of the best songs from the amazing Freddie Mercury. Whether as the frontman of Queen or a solo artist, he made such an impact on the music world! On 24th November, it will be thirty years since we lost one of the greatest singers ever. A genius songwriter, incredibly charismatic and compelling frontman and staggering voice, there has been nobody like him since! There are a few articles that I want to mention, as they give us more depth and revelation about a showman and incredible artist who lived a very different life on stage and in private. Undoubtedly the most electric frontman who has ever lived, the man behind the scenes was very different. I want to start with the Los Angeles Times who, in 2019 wrote how Mercury changed the world:
“Freddie Mercury, a musical prodigy, was the lead singer for the band Queen, and arguably one of the most talented musicians of all time. Despite facing controversies for things such as homosexuality through his career, he thrived because of an uncanny passion for music, never letting anyone break him down. Furthermore, he was never afraid of anything, only revealing his severe condition of AIDS to fans one day before he died. Queen’s popular mix of glam-rock, opera, cabaret, and hard rock cemented its spot in music history, while Mercury’s onstage presence was the stuff of legends and his dedication to the craft vibrant until the very end.Mercury was the son of a British diplomat with real name Farrokh Bulsara. He lived much of his early life in India and returned to England for his university studies. His family often looked down upon his late night outings and homosexuality. However, he fully embraced his differences, changing his legal name to create the prodigal musician known today as Freddie Mercury.
The band itself began in late night clubs and pubs, when all the band members were still in college together. After their lead singer quit, Freddie Mercury stepped in to take on the role. His immense vocal range and employment of harmonics deemed him the title of being one of the greatest vocalists of all time. Freddie Mercury also came alive on stage, and engaged the audience with his enigmatic personality and mysterious charm.
Particularly well-known for his flamboyant stage performance and extensive vocal range, Mercury sparked waves in the music industry as Queen’s frontman through embracing femininity and dispelling any and all preconceived notions about rock music, like hyper-masculinity. He began working diligently with his band in the 1970s towards creating albums and soundtracks that forever changed the face of rock music. Even people who hate rock music cannot deny the catchy tune of songs such as “Another One Bites The Dust,” “Don’t Stop Me Now,” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Released throughout the 1970s, Queen attracted some of the largest crowds, selling out entire stadiums and always leaving fans begging for more. Freddie Mercury was even able to engage the audience with songs like “We Will Rock You,” creating the famed stomp-stomp-clap routine, where the entire crowd would repeat this motion and chant “We will, we will rock you!” He even included the vocal improvisation of “Ay-Oh,” which many audience members always repeated back to the band.One of their final performances together was at Live Aid, dual-venue benefit concert held on Saturday 13 July 1985, and an ongoing music-based fundraising initiative. Here, they performed some of their most well-known songs like “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Radio Ga”, “We Will Rock You,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” and “We are The Champions.” Overall, Queen will forever be remembered for their legendary impact upon the face of rock music”.I am going to have a playlist at the end that demonstrates the immense talent of the wonderful Freddie Mercury! I feel one of the most intriguing and discussed aspect of his life is how he never really hid his sexuality, though it was not common for a queer artist to be open and expressive. It is clear that Mercury is a national treasure. A complex and hugely magnetic person who brought so much to Queen’s records and their performances. The BBC asked, in 2019, who the ‘real’ Freddie Mercury was:
“Mercury’s approach to reconciling his private life with his public persona as the frontman of a rock band with a sizeable straight, male fanbase was playful and sophisticated. Because he never responded to rumours about his sexuality, it was easy for this fanbase to interpret his super-flamboyant and theatrical performing style as what Aston calls “a camp laugh” rather than something evincing queerness. Mercury’s solo song Living on My Own, originally released in 1985, but which reached number one in the UK two years after his death after getting a club-friendly remix, is a catchy expression of loneliness that paints Mercury as a bachelor, but not necessarily a “confirmed bachelor” in the now somewhat dated euphemistic sense. “He was so outrageously camp, it was almost like a double bluff,” Aston adds. Ryan Butcher goes further, describing Mercury as “almost a covert agent for the LGBT community, dropping these little seeds of queer culture into the heterosexual mindset”.In the ‘80s, Mercury was known for his tight white vests and moustache – his take on the Castro Clone look that originated in San Francisco’s queer Castro district and became popular in the gay underground, but which was less familiar to mainstream music fans. It could be argued that Mercury was effectively hiding in plain sight. Certainly, he didn’t let his massive fame stop him from visiting popular London gay venues like Heaven and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Actress Cleo Rocos wrote in her 2013 memoir that she, Mercury and comedian Kenny Everett even managed to sneak Princess Diana into the latter venue by disguising her in drag.
Perhaps one of the most daring ways in which Mercury expressed his natural campness was in Queen’s 1984 video for the single I Want to Break Free, in which he and his Queen bandmates dressed as female characters from the British soap opera Coronation Street, a decision which damaged their career in the US. Brian May recalled in 2017: “I remember being on the promo tour in the Midwest of America and people’s faces turning ashen and they would say, ‘No, we can’t play this. We can’t possibly play this. You know, it looks homosexual.’”
In Queen’s music, meanwhile, there were always clues about Mercury’s private life for fans who wanted – and had the knowledge of the gay scene – to spot them. On Queen’s 1978 hit Don’t Stop Me Now, Mercury sings that he wants “to make a supersonic woman of you” and “a supersonic man out of you”. In the video, he wears a T-shirt from Mineshaft, a popular New York BDSM gay bar of the time. Even the band’s name, Queen, can be seen as a winking allusion to its frontman’s identity. “It’s so obvious what ‘Queen’ is getting at,” says Kalyan, “but when I told my mum a few years ago, she couldn’t believe it. She said she’d always thought that ‘Queen’ just meant regal or majestic.”In a similar way, Kalyan says Mercury’s music contains signifiers of his South Asian heritage, citing the use of the Arabic word ‘Bismillah’ in Bohemian Rhapsody. “Only a person with an awareness of Islamic culture would have known that word, which is the first word in the Koran [meaning In the Name of God], and put it into a song like Bohemian Rhapsody,” he says. Kalyan adds that among the South Asian community, “it’s very common knowledge that Freddie was Indian and had been massively inspired by Bollywood singers like Lata Mangeshkar, who is known for having an incredible vocal range like Freddie”.
But when it came to both his sexuality and his ethnicity, Mercury favoured privacy over direct proclamations until the end of his life. As Kalyan points out, “he didn’t talk about going to school in India or his love for Lata Mangeshkar. That wasn’t part of his narrative”. Nor was his sexuality: on 22 November 1991, following what he called “enormous conjecture” in the press, Mercury finally released a statement confirming that he had been tested HIV positive, and had Aids, but made no mention of his relationship with Jim Hutton. Around 24 hours later, he died. “Think about the immediacy of that – one of the biggest stars on the planet announces he has Aids, then dies of the disease,” says Ryan Butcher, who calls it “a culture shock that seems almost unfathomable today”. Privately, Mercury had been diagnosed as HIV positive four years earlier, and Butcher suggests, speculatively, that his friendship with the late Diana, Princess of Wales while living with HIV and Aids could have been a contributing factor in her decision to promote better awareness of the disease. But this, like so much with Mercury, is something we’ll probably never know for certain.
Nearly 28 years after his death, the real Freddie Mercury remains cherished. “At this stage, he’s not just an icon, but a British national treasure,” says Aston. Kalyan calls him “a massive queer icon” and “a brown South Asian icon in western music”. Whether Mercury would have liked these terms or not, it’s hard not to respect what he achieved in his lifetime. In an era when homophobia and racism were far more prevalent than they are today, Freddie Mercury was the queer, South Asian frontman of the band who released one of rock’s most iconic singles, Bohemian Rhapsody, and the best-selling album in UK chart history, Queen’s Greatest Hits. However it’s also arguable that the mystique he cultivated around his identity, whether he felt forced into that or not, has only burnished his status as one of pop’s most captivating enigmas”.Just before rounding up, there is one more article that I want to mention. The idea behind this feature is to celebrate Freddie Mercury, learn more about the man himself, in addition to remember his legacy thirty years after his death. On 24th November, the world will remember an artist and public figure with no equal:
“Following his interests
After his family moved to the UK in the 60s, Mercury went to Ealing Art School, in London, where he earned a diploma in graphics. At first, he tried to pursue a career in that field and sought to use his education for work. “I got my diploma and then I thought I’d chance it as a freelance artist. I did it for a couple of months but then I thought, My God, I’ve done enough. The interest just wasn’t there,” said Mercury. “And the music thing just grew and grew. I realized music was the biggest thing in my life and I decided to try and make my living from it. It’s as simple as that. I’m one of those people who believes in doing things that interest you.”
Coping with the obstacle race of the music business
After spending time in some small bands, including Sour Milk Sea and Ibex, Mercury eventually hooked up with students Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon – and they decided to form the band Queen. Mercury has always been honest about the difficulties that faced them – in common with all young bands in the early 70s – when trying to start out in the music business. He called it an obstacle race.
“The moment we made a demo [in 1971] we were aware of the sharks in the business… once you are successful, all the baddies move in and that is when you’ve got to be really strong and try and sift them out – and that is a test of survival, really. You can’t afford to let anyone get away with anything. It’s like playing dodgems; it’s rock’n’roll dodgems.” Mercury later turned some of these experiences into the song “Death On Two Legs.”
Overcoming the traumatic experience of being a support act
One of the key experiences near the start of Queen’s career was their American tour in 1973, when they were the warmup band for Mott The Hoople. “Being the support act was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life,” said Mercury. “When you support another artist on tour, there are so many restrictions. You don’t get your own light show, your playing time, your effects. There’s no way you can show the public what you can do, unless you headline, and then you know the people have come to see you. The first time we went to America was as support to Mott The Hoople, and it acted as a ‘breaking the ice’ tour. We got a taste of America and so we knew what would be needed the next time we went.”
Pushing musical boundaries
Mercury admitted he was “a forceful character” and said he always had the feeling that “everything’s got to be new.” He said this spirit played a part in helping make Queen such a bold band in the 70s, as they pushed the limits on six albums, including 1975’s A Night At The Opera, which featured the rock masterpiece “Bohemian Rhapsody”. “We went a bit overboard on every album, actually, but that’s the way Queen is,” said Mercury. “It’s what keeps us fresh. A Night At The Opera featured every sound, from a tuba to a comb. Nothing was out of bounds. As soon as we made it, we knew there were no longer any limits on what we could do.”
Mastering world tours
When Queen played Bedford College in January 1972, there were reportedly only six people in the audience. Within 13 years they would be playing a single gig to more than 250,000 fans in Rio De Janeiro, by which time they had become the undisputed masters of stadium rock. Mercury believed that after a slow build across 1973 (they started the year playing the university circuit and ended it with sell-out gigs at the Hammersmith Odeon), the turning point was a global tour in 1974 that included Australia and the United States. “The successful worldwide tour, which we’d never done before, taught us a lot,” said Mercury. “It taught us how to behave on stage and come to grips with the music.” He said that by the time they went to Japan in 1975, “We were a different band… our playing ability was better. We also tend to work well under pressure.”
Coping with overzealous fans
Mercury interacted with his fans and loved the adulation he received on stage. There were only a couple of unfortunate incidents that stuck out. In Seattle, in 1975, a young fan got into his hotel room and “pilfered my jewels and bracelets.” He confronted the thief and wrestled the jewels from her. “Then, a year later, my very promising pop career nearly came to an untimely end when two young girls outside the theatre decided to claim my scarf as a souvenir,” added Mercury. “They quite forgot it was wrapped around my neck at the time, and nearly strangled me.”
Becoming a superstar showman
“I’d like the whole world to listen to my music and I’d like everybody to listen to me and look at me when I’m playing on stage,” Mercury said in the 70s. He always wanted to make his audience walk away from a Queen concert “feeling fully entertained.” “I have to make sure that I win them over and make them feel that they’ve had a good time… I know it’s a cliché to say, ‘Oh, you have them eating out of the palm of your hand,’ but I just feel that the quicker I do that, the better, because it’s all to do with me feeling in control. Then I know that it’s all going well.”
He brought all this to bear at Live Aid, at Wembley Stadium in July 1985, when he had 72,000 fans in London, and an estimated 1.9 billion people watching on television from 130 countries around the world, eating out of the palm of his hand with a stunning 21-minute performance.
Going solo and taking ballet to the masses
“I had a lot of ideas bursting to get out and there were a lot of musical territories I wanted to explore which I really couldn’t do within Queen,” said Mercury, talking about his 1985 solo album, Mr. Bad Guy. The album gave him the chance, he said, to be his “own boss.” “I find that when I’m my own boss completely, it’s easier for me. I make all the decisions.” One ambition the solo album enabled him to fulfill was showcasing his love for ballet, putting it into the videos he made to promote Mr Bad Guy. Arlene Phillips, who was the choreographer for his 1985 video “I Was Born To Love You,” said Mercury wanted “to take ballet to the masses.”
Never being afraid to take risks
One of the words that cropped up time and again in Mercury’s interviews was “risk.” “A risk element is always involved, and that’s the way I like it,” said Mercury. “That’s what makes good music. Queen have always taken risks.” Mercury described the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” as “a risk” – the same term he used for the “I Want To Break Free” video – and called Queen’s experimental 1982 album, Hot Space, “a big risk.”Mercury took another big risk in 1988 when he began working with the world-famous operatic soprano Montserrat Caballé, collaborating on the album Barcelona. “I knew I was taking a big chance doing something like that,” said Mercury, who was so proud of his successful combination of rock and opera. “I didn’t think I was capable of writing operatic pieces that would suit a world-renowned prima donna,” he said. “I really didn’t know I was capable of things such as that. I thought, What else is there left for me to do? I mean, I defy any other”.A man who, as the lead of Queen and solo, caught the world alight. I was alive when Queen played Live Aid in 1985 – though I was too young to remember it. I have watched their performance since and, every time I see it, I get goosebumps. Even though the 2018 film, Bohemian Rhapsody, was about the life and loves of Mercury, I feel there is a documentary that has yet to be made that gets to the truth of who he was (the film was accused of not really addressing his sexuality and wilder side, and not having all the facts in straight). Such a phenomenally inspiring artist, we will be cherishing his memory and music for decades more! Even though it is thirty years since the world lost his immeasurable presence, we will always remember and talk about Freddie Mercury. With such a huge personality, giant voice and enormous talent, Mercury’s name and music…