One of the 20th century’s best-known lead singers, Mercury fronted Queen from 1970 until his death in 1991.
Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara in 1946) died on November 24, 1991. A prolific songwriter, arranger and music producer, a consummate theatrical entertainer and one of the 20th century’s best-known lead singers, Mercury fronted Queen from 1970 until his death in 1991.
Artistically, he challenged many of the prevailing pop and rock parameters, willing to take musical risks and happy not to be part of the mainstream. He fearlessly pushed artistic boundaries, believing in the spontaneity of live performance: every show was different.
The composer
As a composer, Mercury drew on an eclectic range of genres. He wrote songs with poetic and heartfelt lyrics, witty metaphors and memorable melodies, with Queen drawing influences from The Everly Brothers, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and the Beach Boys.
Mercury’s 1979 composition ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ pays homage to Elvis Presley. In the song, Mercury subtly models aspects of Presley’s vocal tone and rockabilly styling in the catchy chorus.
He gives us just a hint of his vocal range in the bridge, on the lyrics “she gives me hot and cold fever” where Mercury effortlessly uses an octave yodel.
In 1975’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, perhaps Queen’s most famous song, Mercury took genre crossing to a new level. This six-minute epic is unrivalled in complexity of form, lavish production, vocal layering and the sheer number of choral overdubs.
The song, which topped the British charts for almost nine weeks, was described by Mercury as a “mock opera” .
The singer
Technically masterful, Mercury possessed a voice that was powerful, agile, and highly expressive. A lyric rock tenor with over three octaves in range, Mercury could belt into his upper register with his signature fast vibrato, or use a controlled pure falsetto with smooth legato phrasing.
Strong musicianship, excellent pitch and vocal control enabled Mercury to draw on a broad array of note choices, dynamics, tone colours and vocal effects. His vocal timbre could depict a delicate vulnerability, especially with his falsetto, or use dynamic extremes to accentuate lyrics with screams and growls.
Mercury demonstrated his versatility, genre crossing and creative exploration on the 1985 song ‘Living On My Own’.
Here, he employs scat singing and the opening syncopated repetition of a single note hints at Ella Fitzgerald’s influence. It is a driving, high spirited and fearless vocal solo. Mercury solos again at the end of the song with a loose vocal reference to Duke Ellington’s ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’.
The performer
Queen’s appearance at the historic Live Aid Concert at London’s Wembley Stadium in July 1985 remains one of the greatest rock performances of all time.
Mercury and band were in stellar form, having just completed a world tour for their album The Works, recorded in 1984. When the entire crowd of 72,000 joins Mercury in beating out the rhythm to ‘We Will Rock You’, it is electrifying.
Further evidence of Mercury’s masterful stagecraft can be found in a bootleg video of Queen performing in Sydney in 1985.
Twelve minutes into the footage, Mercury slowly struts to the piano and improvises a segue into Somebody to Love in a gospel style with a call and response with the audience.
His years of touring experience provided him with an arsenal of stagecraft prowess: strutting, holding poses, dressed in his glam rock style, with white spandex.
Audiences adored his showmanship and flamboyance.
The influencer
Thirty years on from his death, Mercury’s incredible compositions are still part of the soundtrack of our lives.
‘Somebody To Love’ was used in the films Happy Feet (2006) and Ella Enchanted (2004). Lady GaGa coopted her name from Queen’s ‘Radio GaGa’.
Ceelo Green attributes his falsetto usage to his collection of Queen albums.
Kurt Cobain listened to Queen’s ‘News of the World’ on 8-track.
Katy Perry has acknowledged Mercury as a major influence, performing Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ during her Hello Katy tour in 2009. P!nk included the iconic stadium songs ‘We Are the Champions’ in her tour in 2019.
Many filmmakers have told his story: Bryan Singer’s film Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) is joined by a suite of documentaries. Next month, the BBC are releasing a new documentary, this time looking at his tragic death from AIDS at just 45.
Thirty years on, Mercury is remembered as a powerful songwriter, filled with on-stage magnetism, creativity and intelligence, a hard work ethic and a passion for perfection.
With ‘Coronavirus Rhapsody’ becoming an internet rage, it’s hard to ignore Queen’s musical legacy.
In this time of social distancing and a host of other concerns, some folks have been devising methods to cope with the stress. In my favourite instance yet, a Twitter user named Dana Jay Bein came up with ‘Coronavirus Rhapsody’ – the essential rock band Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, which has been tweaked to fit the current context.
“Is this a sore throat? Is this just allergy? Caught in a lockdown No escape from reality.”
If you’re a true-blue Queen fan, you sang that in your head in Freddie Mercury’s voice.
This rendition once again establishes ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as one of the most influential and memorable songs ever. The song is testament to the fact that Freddie Mercury – the bombastic and boldly erotic frontman of Queen – who wrote the song, is one of the best showmen in musical history. Even 27 years after his death, his work is still alive and breathing.
As such, Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ has once again proven to be a ray of hope and optimism in today’s dark times.
Musicians have the ability to jump the gap between popular culture and social activism when required. For instance, Queen’s lead guitarist Brian May recently disapproved of their iconic song ‘We Will Rock You’ (also written by Freddie Mercury) being used in one of Donald Trump’s political campaigns. May garnered popular support from artistes like Adam Lambert, who sings with the band now, and common citizens alike. Music, when fused with a social movement, has the ability to unite people with bonds rooted in emotions.
With ‘Coronavirus Rhapsody’ becoming an internet rage, it’s hard to ignore Queen’s musical legacy – which didn’t just win hearts with ingenious musical compositions but also because of Mercury. He personified the band’s identity, its victories and shortcomings, and he was the spirit whose loss it couldn’t endure.
Mercury’s range, histrionic mannerisms and that audacious roar – were all so powerful and yet so soulful. His songs include various harmonies, lyrics and even philosophy from the likes of Camus and Dostoevsky’s, among others. For instance, Dostoevsky was introduced to literature through fairy tales and later in his life, he went on to talk about human suffering with a whit of humour. Quite a few of Mercury’s songs were inspired by fantasies but he poignantly spoke of philosophy in his music when he sang songs about loneliness and the absurdities of the world.
Bohemian Rhapsody’ seems to also draw some inspiration in Albert Camus’ seminal work The Stranger. Using Camus’ ideas on existentialism, both their works feature young characters who unintentionally kill someone, fight a court case, and experience the same epiphanies. Getting enlightened by the idea that everyone is destined to die, and that life is meaningless, both characters face their executions unapologetically and peacefully.
What made Queen’s music a personal experience for fans was the messaging his songs imbued. He defied stereotypes and shattered conventions and encouraged people to break out of their moulds and embrace themselves.
For instance, ‘I Want to Break Free’ is an anthem for millions. The video featured band members dressed in women’s clothes and doing household chores. Mercury can be seen vacuuming the floor as he sassily performs the first stanza. Gender roles in the 1970s were far more rigid with women by and large assigned to the shackles of domesticity. Queen tried to break that stereotype with their get-up. It also included the very important message that everyone should be who they want to be without inhibitions, be it a drag queen, a gay person or a housemaid.
Similarly, ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’ fits today’s political situation fittingly, one where people are so obsessed about their ideologies that they seem to have lost the ability to see beyond their own deep-rooted privileges. The lines ‘you’re headed for disaster, cause you never read the signs’, among many others in the song make it a relevant admonitory ballad and depicts the human condition in the most poignant fashion.
Mercury spoke to everyone who found it difficult to own their individualities, it. Turns out, in life, you’ve got to face the music, just like he did because that’s the only way ‘this’ song ends.
Today, in a time when a pandemic plagues us while polarisation and politics divide us, Queen’s music is like balm for the soul.
Devika Sharma is a communications consultant during the day and transforms into a chronicler of all things culture by night. Follow her on Instagram @devikasharma13
The film glosses over the era’s homophobia and how Mercury, who tested HIV positive, dealt with it.
Millions of people tuned in to the Oscars to see Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, compete for best picture, which Green Book ended up winning.
There were a lot of people cheering against Bohemian Rhapsody. The film has been dogged by accusations of homophobia, and the film’s director, Bryan Singer, was accused of rape and sexual abuse.
But as a gay historian, I keep coming back to something else – the tragic history that’s glaringly absent from this movie.
Mercury, along with all the other men and women who tested positive for HIV in the 1980s, was a victim not just of a pandemic but of the failures of his own governments and of the scorn of his fellow citizens. The laughable initial response to the HIV pandemic helped seal Mercury’s fate.
None of that is in the movie.
Governments turn their backs
In the early 1980s, when an epidemic of HIV first struck a few population centers in the US, UK and elsewhere, governments mounted almost no public health response.
Doctors initially noticed the virus in groups of people who happened to already be stigmatised for other reasons: men who had sex with men, drug users and, due to racism, Haitians and Haitian-Americans.
The prejudiced initial public health response assumed that many of these people were getting the virus because of whatever was already supposedly wrong with them. Gay men, the thinking went, were getting it because of “risky” behaviors like having lots of partners. HIV was not, therefore, a threat to most straight people. The medical profession’s view of HIV was so coloured by the idea that it was intrinsically gay that at first they named the virus “GRID,” an acronym for “gay-related immunodeficiency.”
That was bad science, as we know now. Especially in the absence of good public health information about how to have safer sex, your risk of contracting any sexually transmitted infection goes up when you have more partners. But there was nothing about gay sex in particular that caused AIDS. Lots of straight people had multiple partners in the 1970s and 1980s, but initially, by chance, some communities of gay men were hit harder.
Governments and the general public quietly left people with HIV to their fate. As one activist pointed out, two years into the crisis, the US government had spent more to get to the bottom of a series of mysterious poisonings in Chicago that killed seven people than to research AIDS, which had already killed hundreds of people in the US alone.
The first report of HIV in the UK was in 1981. There was no test for the virus until 1985, and there was no really effective treatment until 1996.
In 1985, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher tried to block a public health campaign promoting safe sex; she thought it would encourage teenagers to have sex, and, she claimed, they were not at risk of infection.
All told, it was an absurd response to the major public health catastrophe of our time and to a disease that would go on to kill 36 million people around the world – about as many as died in World War I.
Glossing over the era’s homophobia
All this left Mercury and other queer men in a terrible place. Without good public health information, and with research lagging, they were unnecessarily exposed to the virus. Diagnosed in 1987, Mercury didn’t live long enough for the development of antiretroviral combination treatment that could have saved his life.
You won’t see this in the movie, either. No one in Bohemian Rhapsody is overtly homophobic; when homophobia appears at all, it’s in subtler forms. For example, a bandmate tells Mercury that Queen is emphatically not the openly queer disco act The Village People.
In real life, Mercury faced rampant homophobia – he never really came out publicly, and it’s easy to see why. In 1988, the UK passed a notorious anti-gay law that declared, officially, that homosexuality shouldn’t be promoted and that same-sex couples had “pretend” families, not real families. The law stayed on the books for over a decade.
The era’s glam rock and disco music scenes had queer moments, but it was all predicated on everyone being straight in real life. David Bowie told the press he was queer in 1972 and then loudly took it back in 1983, saying “the biggest mistake I ever made” was telling the press “that I was bisexual.”
The Village People were unique because they were unabashedly out and proud, but they weren’t a hit act because of that. They were a hit because the straight public either didn’t realize it or didn’t want to know.
Ask yourself: When you danced to “YMCA” at your high school talent show, did you know it was about gay culture? I’m going to guess the answer is no.
The same was true of Queen. How many of the rock fans who packed stadiums to see them play We Are the Champions knew that the heroic singer was not just a rock god, but a fabulous queer icon, too? Not many.
In the 1980s, Mercury ditched his glam rock look and cut his hair in a style popular in gay subculture, donning a black leather jacket and sporting an enviable, gorgeous mustache. Many fans hated it. In the US, they threw razors onstage.
No one to blame but himself?
When Mercury died in 1991, his bandmates felt it necessary to do a TV interview to dispute what the media was saying – that Mercury had brought AIDS upon himself with his decadent partying.
The movie also quietly makes it seem as if Mercury’s debauchery was to blame for his fate.
In the film, Mercury abandons the band to make a solo album in Munich with his diabolical boyfriend, who lures him into a shady queer world. His ex-girlfriend rescues him and he returns to the band. But by then, it’s too late: He has HIV.
In real life, Mercury didn’t break up the band, he wasn’t the first of the bandmates to make a solo album and, of course, partying doesn’t cause AIDS.
I hope someday, someone makes a better Freddie Mercury biopic, one that accurately depicts the historical moment he lived in and the challenges he dealt with. He deserves it.
Laurie Marhoefer is an associate professor of History at the University of Washington
The stand-out film is a delirious parody of royalty with a stellar performance by Olivia Colman. ‘BlacKkKlansman’ is another strong contender, but the critical darling ‘Roma’ is over-rated.
2018 was a good year for cinema but this is not reflected in the Oscar nominations for Best Picture. This year’s nominees are notable mainly for their mediocrity.
There are, of course, a couple of exceptions.
The best:
The Favourite
Yorgos Lanthimos’ most recent film, The Favourite, is an outlandish black comedy following the machinations of two ladies in Queen Anne’s court as they try to win and maintain Anne’s affection at each other’s expense.
Rachel Weisz, as Lady Sarah, and Emma Stone, as Abigail, the ingenue attempting to replace Sarah at Anne’s side, are clearly enjoying themselves. But Olivia Colman, whose extraordinary comic timing is once again on display, steals the show. She manages to portray Queen Anne as completely inept, and yet with a hint of pathos that enables the viewer to be moderately sympathetic towards her.
The whole thing plays like a delirious parody of royalty, and combines the delightful nihilism of Lanthimos’ earlier The Lobster – also starring Weisz and Colman (and a better film than The Favourite) – with the lurid sensationalism of something like Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. This is certainly the most engaging of the nominees, and receives my vote for Best Picture.
BlacKkKlansman
Spike Lee’s recent film marks a return to form for the director who, despite his legendary status in Hollywood, has always been hit and miss. The story on which the film is based – an African American police officer from Colorado Springs infiltrates the David Duke-led Ku Klux Klan – is so bizarre that it alone would be enough to make a fascinating film. Add to this the effortlessness of Lee’s craft and the excellent performances – including Topher Grace as David Duke – and the result is a very good comedy.
Still, the premise raises some ideological questions, as does the film’s claim that it is more than just a rollicking tale – evident in a closing credit sequence that attempts to situate this story in the contemporary milieu of racial tension in the USA. The notion that a policeman – whose role, by definition, is to defend the city (the polis) through the maintenance of power relations amongst its inhabitants – could be a progressive political activist is absurd.
Vice, in its combination of political critique and dramatic reenactment, recalls The Big Short, the earlier film from writer-director Adam McKay (of Anchorman fame) that featured many of the same cast.
Though not as impressive as The Favourite and BlacKkKlansman, Vice is, at least, formally ambitious. Ostensibly a biopic of Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) and his rise to power, it plays like a critical essay about the systemic and personal abuses of the American right in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In an industry dominated by sentiment and melodrama, it is nice to see a biographical film attempting a more intellectually engaged approach to its subject.
At the same time, its critique is fairly obvious – the atrocities of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib etc., are widely recognised as such – and its tone is, at times, rather smarmy. Still, it offers some insight into an often overlooked figure in the corridors of American power.
Roma
Laborious and unsatisfying, Alfonso Cuarón’s latest film – made for Netflix – plays like an homage to great European directors like Antonioni, Rossellini, and Fellini. But one of these masters Cuarón is not.
The story follows the difficulties encountered by an Indigenous American maid living with a middle class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s as she falls pregnant to an unwilling father who leaves her to fend for herself. A few things happen – not that much – but this isn’t really the problem (after all, Tarkovsky made some excellent films in which little happens slowly). Each image feels painfully rendered, we can sense the presence behind every long tracking sequence and detailed domestic tableau, and the result completely disengages us from the drama on screen.
Given we’ve seen it all before, done more effectively and with much more style, Roma feels a little redundant. This is the case even at the visual level, with the flat Netflix aesthetic failing to endow Cuarón’s panoramic vision with any clarity or depth. This feels like a long film-school exercise, and provides further evidence that shooting something in black and white doesn’t automatically endow it with artistic merit.
Bohemian Rhapsody
It is very strange that a film like Bohemian Rhapsody would be nominated for Best Picture. Don’t get me wrong, it is an enjoyable film, and features rousing renditions of some of Queen’s most popular anthems. Yet director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, X-Men) offers nothing of any note here.
Rami Malek, who is good in the TV series Mr. Robot, seems out of his depth, and his efforts to transform into singer Freddie Mercury are ever visible. This is the kind of film one might watch on a plane and find mildly inspirational – it offers the rare spectacle of artists succeeding, a fantasy seldom realised in real life – only to forget it all by the time you are collecting your luggage.
On a more negative note, it is at times moralistic in its vision of sexuality and desire, depicting Mercury’s time in the Berlin queer scene as decadent and destructive. Mercury is redeemed when he enters a monogamous relationship and reunites with his heterosexual band mates, all in time for Live Aid.
A Star is Born
Like Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star is Born is a sentimental melodrama about a singer’s rise to fame – in this case, in tandem with the increasing alcoholism and general decline of her mentor, partner, and husband. Lady Gaga plays Ally, the ingenue who wins the heart of grizzled rocker Jack (played by Bradley Cooper, who also directs the film).
Lots of people like Lady Gaga, which might account for this film’s popularity, but she, along with Cooper, seem to be straining hard to capture the viewer’s attention. They both lack the onscreen magnetism possessed by the two stars of an earlier version of the film, Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson.
That said, there is nothing very wrong with this film. It is engaging, in the sense that one watches it, doesn’t walk out of the cinema, and passes a couple of hours pleasantly – but there is also nothing notable here at a cinematic or technical level.
Green Book
Green Book is also a watchable, seamless film, anchored around the charisma of its two leads, Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali. The narrative follows popular pianist and entertainer Don Shirley (Ali) as he tours the segregated South with Tony Lip (Mortensen), a hardboiled East Coast Italian, as his driver and bodyguard of sorts. The title comes from the “Green Book” they use to book appropriate (black-friendly) accommodation and dining.
It is impossible to remain unmoved during scenes in which the talented Shirley is asked to use an outdoor toilet because he is black, and refused admittance to the restaurant of an establishment in which he is performing, and the relationship that develops between Tony and Shirley is an effective emotional centrepiece for the film.
However, its essentially paternalistic approach to race relations – it seems to take the magnanimity of Lip and his family to affirm Shirley’s humanity – and its unbridled sentimentality will raise the eyebrows of anyone with more than a rudimentary knowledge of recent American history and culture. But maybe I am expecting too much from director Peter Farrelly, the writer of inane comedies like Me, Myself and Irene, Shallow Hal and Stuck on You.
Black Panther
Perhaps the most disappointing of the year’s nominees, Black Panther is an average Marvel film – better than some (Spider-Man: Homecoming) and worse than others (Thor: Ragnarok). Its action sequences – critical to the success of a superhero film – are quite impressive, and the design is colourful, but the narrative is uneven and awkwardly paced, involving a revelation of identity that isn’t really a revelation at all, which occurs at an arbitrary place in the narrative.
The story follows two conflicting “panthers”, one good (Black Panther, played by Chadwick Boseman) and one bad (Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan) as they battle for control of the (mystically presented) nation Wakanda and its valuable resources. The film is rife with ideological contradictions in its presentation of the “good” panther as following a liberal model of black activism, and the “bad” panther as following a militant model.
It seems to suggest that politics can occur without violence (the liberal dream) without recognising perhaps the chief insight of the 20th century – that politics is always violent, in its management of the city, in its determination of friend and enemy, and in its administration of the human. Furthermore, historically, liberalism, as Domenico Losurdo convincingly demonstrates in Liberalism: A Counter-History was built upon the back of slavery.
The omitted
According to virtually every aesthetic criterion, Luca Guadagnino’s retelling of Dario Argento’s famous horror film, Suspiria, is one of 2018’s strongest films. It is stylish – incorporating several technical innovations – with lavish cinematography and design that, nonetheless, is effectively counterpointed with the cold edge of late 1970s Berlin.
The narrative interweaving of the horror story of young Jessica (Dakota Johnson) attending a dance academy run by witches with the political turmoil in West Germany involving the Red Army Faction, lends a historical weight lacking (for better or worse) from Argento’s version. The measured pace of the first three quarters of the film explodes into a dazzlingly colourful phantasmagoria of blood and bodies in the final extended sequence, with a surprising – and satisfying – last twist.
The fact that a film as interesting as Suspiria (including Thom Yorke’s hypnotic score) can be completely eschewed by the Academy is testament to the absurdity – and arbitrariness – of the whole Oscars process.
Similarly, American Animals, a hilarious, real-life dramatisation of an art heist that incorporates the actual people portrayed into the scenes alongside actors playing them, is another standout from 2018. There is no American film more intellectually and existentially engaging than American Animals – yet it didn’t receive a single nomination.
David Gordon Green’s new Halloween film is also exceptionally intense, and, arguably, one of the great slasher films. Mind you, horror films, like action films, are rarely nominated for Best Picture Oscars, unless they’ve been made by William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection).
Filmmaker Bryan Singer approaches important aspects of the film with strange disinterest making it seem as if Bohemian Rhapsody is content in accumulating information without interrogating its origins or effects.
There were a few things that Freddie Mercury didn’t want the world to know: that he, for instance, wasn’t born as Freddie Mercury. His parents, Parsis from the Bombay presidency, named him Farrokh. For the first 25 years of his life, Mercury was Farrokh Bulsara.
He was only attracted to men — a fact he hid from himself, so that it could be hidden from the world. His father disapproved of his views, lifestyle, and ambition; Farrokh was never good enough. Home, a default cocoon for most, felt like prison to him, a place where he “never belonged”.
Bohemian Rhapsody, starring Rami Malek as the British singer-songwriter, opens in 1970s London, where Farrokh formed the band Queen, changed his name, and left his house to find a home. This is a potent premise, which has enough elements for a riveting movie: a great hook, a poignant story and, obviously, memorable music.
But filmmaker Bryan Singer approaches this material with strange disinterest. The initial portion of the movie detailing the significant events in Mercury’s life — his first stage appearance, Queen’s debut album, his dizzying brush with fame — are dealt with quickly and cursorily, as if all these were a given. Mercury was a baggage handler at the Heathrow airport before becoming a rockstar. The new money and stardom must have affected him profoundly, but the film is indifferent to these events, perfunctorily ticking them off like items in a to-do list. As a result, Mercury is opaque and the film inaccessible.
In fact, this sense of detachment, caused by hurried cutting and static writing, persists till the first half. There’s enough scope for drama — Queen’s first US tour; Mercury proposing marriage to his girlfriend, Mary Austin, played by Lucy Boynton; the disagreements among the band members — that could have given this film energy and whimsicality – traits synonymous with a Mercury performance; instead, Bohemian Rhapsody seems content in accumulating information without interrogating its origins or effects.
It isn’t Malek’s fault, though, who plays Mercury with the right mix of hesitance and flamboyance — a man committing mistakes with the rashness of a teenager, as part of the boy is yet to become a man. Boynton plays Mary, a reservoir of patience and calm, with reassuring nuance, someone who knows Mercury more than he knows himself. And it is this relationship that lifts Bohemian Rhapsody from the abyss of forgettable generalities.
Freddie Mercury and Mary Austin played by Rami Malek and Lucy Boynton respectively. Credit: 20th Century Fox
Mercury and Mary dated for a few years but didn’t marry, for he came to terms with his sexual orientation. They still kept in touch and continued to meet. Their bond — transcending the straightjacketed notions of romantic and sexual relationship — reveals latent facets of Mercury: his aching desire for companionship, his hunger for acceptance, his searching questions about his identity – who he never was and who he was “born to be”.
Even the filmmaking is considerably better here — to the extent that it looks, and feels, like a different movie. Choppy scenes are replaced with ones that have a life-like rhythm, and diffidence gives way to candour, as Singer examines Mercury’s personal life, excavating old grievances and giving them much-needed closure.
It is also evident in the way he directs Queen’s last live performance in the movie – Live Aid at Wembley Stadium. Prior to this, all shows of the band, including the electric and collaborative ‘We Will Rock You’, seemed lacklustre, as they relied on rapid cuts and awkward camera angles, divorcing the band from its audience.
But the Live Aid performance screams a different language. Here the camera is alive and energetic, capturing and conveying the madness Queen inspired. When Mercury is playing the piano, the camera first shoots him in close-up and then circles around him. A few shots later it glides through his leg to reach the bass guitarist John Deacon, played by Joseph Mazzello. It soon dives deep into the crowd, a sea of one lakh Londoners losing their minds and voice.
It then frames Mercury against the sky — as if this world has space for only one man — and keeps going back to the audience, consuming and receiving their energy. You feel like you were there. You understand what great can do: demand complete submission.
On that afternoon in Wembley, no one was an atheist. It’s too bad that the rest of the film doesn’t do justice to the man behind the god.
The narrative serves as mere buildup for Queen’s biggest hits. But the best parts are seeing the lyrics, karaoke style, loom larger than life.
A Queen movie in India feels like such a significant thing. The band was so deeply important to so many people who grew up in the 80s, and generations after that inherited that love – and that music – in different ways. CDs in your parents’ car, old hit songs you just knew by heart without knowing how you knew them; the vision, the spectre of Freddie Mercury.
Bohemian Rhapsody does service to those memories – it plays like a jukebox movie, like the Mamma Mia films, an excuse for narrative build-up until the big hits. It also builds on the existing memory of the band in interesting, if not entirely satisfying, ways, and is an immersive and memorable watch.
The story embedded within Bohemian Rhapsody is one of accepting your roots and identity. The film begins Freddie Mercury’s journey by showing him watching musical acts at bars and pubs at night, rebelling against his parents, particularly his father. His father encourages good thoughts, good deeds, to which Mercury responds, “Where did that get you?”
He is also unequivocally uninterested in his Parsi heritage, being confronted with it at odd times in public and therefore denying it at home. When he performs with future Queen bandmates for the first time, one of them introduces him as “Fred Bul… sara.” The crowd is amused and confused and unwilling to listen to this name (they also yell out the slur, “who’s the Paki?”). All of that changes once he sings, of course; his mastery over the music and his initially flamboyant but then enrapturing stage presence means his name doesn’t matter at all. And that’s what he wants.
When his bandmates and girlfriend Mary visit his home, his mother (Meneka Das) brings out photo albums: Freddie looks at the camera in black-and-white, dressed as a boxer. Mercury is quick to deflect attention from these albums, from stories of why his parents left India for Zanzibar and then moved to England because they had to. He announces his name: Freddie Mercury. The camera here makes sure to linger on a shot of his father (Ace Bhatti), who looks, disappointed, at the photo of the boxer. “You can’t get anywhere,” his father says, “by denying who you are.”
The film, despite its directorial problems off-screen – Brian Singer was replaced, toward the end, by Dexter Fletcher – and its obvious partiality, given band members Brian May and Roger Taylor’s creative involvement in the film, still tells a good story. It tracks the newly baptised Freddie Mercury and his journey with Queen – their runaway success, their tour in the US, Mercury’s developing relationships with men and his alienation from Mary, the creation of Bohemian Rhapsody. It is during this creation that Mercury seems to own himself, in parallel with owning his roots. Studio executive Roy Foster (Mike Myers) is dismissing Bohemian Rhapsody, asking what all those funny words are – Galileo, Scaramouche… Ishmillah? –Mercury, looking ponderingly out of the window, replies only to the last one. “Bismillah.” He is literally uttering South Asia where he had not before.
After the success of Bohemian Rhapsody and its album, A Night at the Opera, Mercury changes, shifts. Things with Mary are tenuous; he is having more one-night stands with men, he is beginning a relationship with one of Queen’s managers Paul Prenter, which will then alienate him from his bandmates and launch him on a solo career. He grows increasingly more insufferable, and also more alone. When he finally fires Prenter, he utters that word again: “Home.” This is in marked contrast with how Prenter sees him: Mercury was always that frightened Paki boy, he says, illustrating exactly how little he understands.
The film is bookended by Queen’s iconic 1985 Live Aid performance. Mercury cuts off toxic influences, returns to his bandmates, and signs up Queen for this massive charity concert. It is when he comes back home to announce this to his father that he says the very words that first he dismissed: “Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.”
The film takes specific liberties with how it tweaks real events. Mercury’s HIV diagnosis, in particular, is revealed earlier on than he chose to reveal it in his real life. His bandmates are aware of it before the performance. The way the relationship with Mary is different from Mercury’s relationship with men is also a curious choice; his most lasting connection, on and off screen, was with Mary, but there is something slightly false in how Rami Malek and Lucy Boynton play these parts.
The music saves them again, though, and the music is inarguably the highlight of the film. It serves a dual purpose: as a ‘Greatest Hits’ playlist that will rekindle old memories for some, and bring the music alive for new, slightly unfamiliar listeners. A scene with Malek and Boynton in particular, that is set against ‘Love of My Life’, is beautiful and makes great use of a song that will become a classic all over again. The creation of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’; the use of ‘Somebody to Love’; even ‘I’m in Love with my Car’. All of these songs come to life and the best parts of the movie are seeing the lyrics, karaoke style, loom larger than life.
Creative liberties were taken in the making of the film, but it is a treat to watch for fans of Queen and its music.
While flying into Singapore on November 6, the in-flight announcement made it clear that passengers should be prepared for turbulent weather. And, so it was, a little high, a little low.
Indeed, it was an appropriate description of what was to come: an opportunity to see an IMAX screening of the film Bohemian Rhapsody. The film was the culmination of an eight year struggle by Queen’s band members, guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor, to bring the band’s story and, more importantly, that of deceased singer Freddie Mercury, alive.
Was it worth it? Without a doubt, yes, as Anthony McCarten’s story captures the pre-Queen beginnings of May and Taylor, as members of Smile, eventually having Farrokh Bulsara [Mercury’s previous avatar] join them, culminating in the formation of Queen with John Deacon on bass, going right to the epoch and memorable performance of the band at Live Aid in 1985.
In between, the movie depicts the building up of the band’s success across the globe, the recording of the storied title song and the reluctance of the band’s label, EMI (full disclosure: my one-time employer), of releasing it as a single, Mercury’s interactions with both sexes, his excesses, the impact of Mercury’s solo career on the band and a reunion of sorts following the disclosure of his AIDS diagnosis.
A hit at the box office
Negative reviews prior to the movie’s release firmly established, for me, that they were written by the critics for themselves. Keep in mind that Bohemian Rhapsody debuted at the US box’s office top spot, grossing $52 million, effectively recovering the cost of production during the first weekend. Since then, it gross more than $309 million globally, as on November 13, making it the highest-grossing musical biopic of all-time. In India, the movie is releasing today, November 16.
The making of the film was not without its own ups and downs. Principal photography commenced in London in September 2017, which included building an exact replica of the Live Aid set at Wembley Stadium. It was recreated by the same production team that had created the original set and brought to Bovingdon Airfield near Hemel Hempstead in England.
Actor Sacha Baron Cohen was originally signed on for the role, but stepped down. In December last, director Bryan Singer was fired as director, with about two weeks remaining of the shoot. Nevertheless, Singer still receives directorial credit due to a Directors Guild of America ruling that only a sole director can receive it. Singer’s replacement Dexter Fletcher has been given an executive producer credit.
The outstanding soundtrack supports the intensity of the film, and features several Queen songs and unreleased recordings, including several tracks from the group’s performance at Live Aid in 1985 (which was broadcast live by Doordarshan).
Freddie Mercury backstage after Queen’s Live Aid performance. Credit: Flickr/NicestGuyEver CC BY NC ND 2.0
The soundtrack album was released on October 19, 2018, across platforms (but not physically in India as I write this, compelling me to once again order my CD from the US), peaking at no 3, both on the US (which is Queen’s highest album chart position since 1980!) and the UK’s charts.
While actor Rami Malek – who is brilliant as Mercury – sang some parts in the film, music producers May and Taylor inserted vocal stems from Queen songs. Some parts were filled in with Canadian vocalist Marc Martel, a winner of the ‘Queen Extravaganza Live Tour’ audition.
The title song
Meanwhile, Queen’s 1975 single, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, re-entered the US singles chart for a third time this week and for the third separate decade. This was feat was previously achieved by Prince’s ‘1999’ and Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’.
It also buttresses the fact that Mercury was a very complex person; flippant and funny on the surface, as explained by guitarist May, but also with concealed insecurities and problems in levelling his life with his childhood.
The song is taken from Queen’s fourth album, ‘A Night at the Opera’, and was first released in October 1975, reached no 9 in 1976 in the US. It peaked at no 2 on the back of the success of the movie Wayne’s World in 1992, where it featured in a pivotal scene. In the UK, the song topped the charts when it released and also following Mercury’s demise in 1991.
The track probably helps understand Mercury as a person. It is obviously autobiographical, reflecting on his personal traumas. It also buttresses the fact that Mercury was a very complex person; flippant and funny on the surface, as explained by guitarist May, but also with concealed insecurities and problems in levelling his life with his childhood.
Mercury’s story
Mercury attempted to hide his Parsi heritage at the beginning of his professional musical life, the reasons for which only he could have made clear. What becomes clear in the movie is Mercury moving away from his family, attempting to gain musical and personal independence, and becoming part of a family that shifts from the personal to professional (Queen). Through this journey, the film effectively showcases Mercury’s emerging talent, confidence, amazing resilience and his wicked sense of humour.
Nevertheless, nobody goes to a movie expecting a history lesson, as Rolling Stone magazine succinctly pointed out. It manages to pack the entire narrative of a unique rock band like Queen into 2 hours and 14 minutes. This obviously necessitates a fair amount of difficult decisions, which would’ve been particularly hard for band members May and Taylor, who are also the executive producers, and their existing manager, Jim Beach, who doubles up as the producer.
While moments like Freddie Mercury’s first show with the band and Queen’s triumphant set at Live Aid undoubtedly needed to be shown, there is simply no room to delve into every album and tour of their two-decade long career.
So whether Bohemian Rhapsody is the real life, or just fantasy…it really does not matter to me as a fan!
Magnificent or cataclysmic? The biopic could go either way – films like this have a way of dodging the middle ground – but fans have their fingers crossed that it does justice to a band as legendary as Queen.
One of the finest and most unforgettable moments in music history was created by Queen at Wembley Stadium in London at the Live Aid concert on July 13, 1985. The band stood out like shining beacons at an event which was to raise funds to help the victims of a famine in Ethiopia, and one which had a line up for the ages – David Bowie, Led Zeppelin The Who, Dire Straits, Elton John, Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan.
A 20-minute set – an almost seamless medley of the band’s hits like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Radio Ga Ga’, and ‘We Will Rock You’ – is all it took for the band, Brian May’s screaming guitar, and Freddie Mercury’s infectious enthusiasm, to floor those in attendance. As Dave Grohl of The Foo Fighters reminisced about the day: “Queen smoked ’em. They just took everybody. They walked away being the greatest band you’d ever seen in your life, and it was unbelievable.”
Two billion people watched that performance on television around the world. Queen had forever been cemented in the annals of rock ‘n’ roll history.
In fact, if you run an experiment and ask people with even the barest knowledge of rock music as to who has the best voice in rock history, chances are that Freddie Mercury’s name will be high up on anyone’s list, alongside Chris Cornell, Robert Plant and Aretha Franklin, among other greats.
Skip to 33 years later, and Queen’s songs still remain embedded in our collective cultural conscience. Greatest hits still play in more than the occasional bar and find their way into the movies and television series. Which sporting event is truly complete without audiences belting out ‘We are the Champions’ or ‘We Will Rock You’?
Now, with the much-anticipated biopic of the band due for release in November, it’s more than likely that Queen will soon have a revival it very much deserves – much like the recent Stephen King resurrection across entertainment platforms.
Starring Mr Robot‘s Rami Malek (for the longest time, Sacha Baron Cohen had been pegged for the role) in the lead as Mercury, the trailer doesn’t actually dish out too many scenes unlike so many trailers these days where you practically get to see the whole film even though all you were looking for was a good tease.
What it does include is an epic medley of a few hits, and a glorious moment from Wembley where Mercury, in between songs, smoothly commands the audience to sing everything he does. It also includes the making of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, a masterful song that is so musically complex as it shifts from movement to movement. Let’s not forget the song’s lasting impact – it is, after all, the third best-selling UK single of all time.
“When I got this role, I thought… this could be a career defining performance. And two minutes, later I thought, ‘this could be a career killer,’” Malek said at Fox’s CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas in April.
The cast includes Ben Hardy as drummer Roger Taylor, Gwilym Lee as guitarist Brian May, and Joseph Mazzello as bassist John Deacon.
The trailer, which was released online this week, has already come under fire, as all things do these days in this overly politically-correct present day reality. The criticism pouring in hits out at the makers for allegedly ignoring Mercury’s sexuality. Some have called out 20th Century Fox of “heterosexual-washing”, including producer Bryan Fuller who’s credits include the Star Trek television series and American Gods.
ANYONE ELSE MILDLY ANNOYED (enough to tweet about it) THAT THE #BohemianRapsody TRAILER FEATURES GAY/BI SUPERSTAR FREDDIE MERCURY FLIRTING WITH AND TWIRLING WITH A WOMAN BUT NO INDICATION OF HIS LOVE OF MEN?
Well, to be fair, such scenes may have only been cut for the trailer, as it would be hard to explain just how Mercury died in 1991 of AIDS if the film became a prime example of being afflicted by what is called “queer-erasure”. Then again, even the official synopsis of the film has nothing to say about Mercury’s sexuality:
Bohemian Rhapsody is a foot-stomping celebration of Queen, their music and their extraordinary lead singer Freddie Mercury, who defied stereotypes and shattered convention to become one of the most beloved entertainers on the planet. The film traces the meteoric rise of the band through their iconic songs and revolutionary sound, their near-implosion as Mercury’s lifestyle spirals out of control, and their triumphant reunion on the eve of Live Aid, where Mercury, facing a life-threatening illness, leads the band in one of the greatest performances in the history of rock music.”
But perhaps it would be best to not really infer just how good or terrible the film would be without actually sitting down to digest it. In fact, it’s likely that it will be either utterly magnificent or cataclysmic – films like this have a way of dodging the middle ground.
Fans will hope it will lean towards being a stupendous affair, of course, and considering that the script, which focuses on a 15-year period from when the band got together, to Mercury’s illness and to that unforgettable performance at Live Aid six years before Mercury’s death, has been penned by Anthony McCarten of The Theory of Everything fame, we may just be in safe hands.
There was some drama with the filming: Bryan Singer, who was originally hired to direct the film, was fired for a wide variety of reasons including absenteeism, and Dexter Fletcher (Eddie the Eagle) was brought in to complete the project.
Fans will have their fingers crossed that the film does justice to a band as legendary as Queen, and to the musical prowess of Freddie Mercury, who holds the rare distinction of being a singer who could go over three octaves with great ease.
So after marking the November release on your schedules, here’s a few more songs to dive into for a glimpse of one of the greatest rock bands of all time.
Trying to decode this beguiling hit song, which was released more than 40 years ago.
Note: This article was first published on October 30, 2015 and is being republished on April 9, 2017.
Although Bohemian Rhapsody’s creator, the late Freddie Mercury, never explained the lyrics, declaring vaguely that they were ‘just about relationships’ with ‘a bit of nonsense in the middle’, conflicting theories about the song’s true meaning are as rife today as they have ever been. While Queen’s surviving members – guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor and retired bassist John Deacon – have always protected their frontman’s most closely guarded secret, intense speculation persists.
Forty years this month since Queen’s soaring, decadent, magnum opus was originally released, I can reveal the song’s true meaning. The ‘baroque’n’roll’ classic was not, contrary to popular belief, Freddie Mercury’s attempt at writing a song to upstage Led Zeppelin’s folk-rock epic ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Nor was it merely a fictitious fantasy, describing a random individual confessing a murder to his mother, pleading poverty at his trial, and resigning himself to a tragic fate – never revealing the identity of whom he had killed, nor why. It could not have been, as has been widely reported, Freddie’s lament about having become infected with the AIDS virus. He conceived the idea for the song in the late 1960s, and dabbled with it for years, only completing, recording and releasing it with the band in late 1975. He was not diagnosed as HIV positive until ten years later.
It wasn’t even a deliberate ‘showcase single’ of everything this superlative rock band was capable of, not only musically and lyrically, but also collectively and individually – as numerous music scholars around the world believe. The truth, though simply, is infinitely more personal.
A song with chart potential
The song was recorded originally for Queen’s studio LP ‘A Night at the Opera’. Realising its chart potential, the band drummed up support among radio DJs such as Kenny Everett and ‘Diddy’ David Hamilton for the unusually long (5:55 minutes) album track to be released as a single. It was, despite having broken every rule in the pop-hit-writing manual, an instant commercial success. It became the Christmas single of 1975, held its own at the top of the UK singles chart for nine weeks, and had sold more than a million copies by the end of January 1976. The single was accompanied by an avant garde promotional video directed by Bruce Gowers, which is still considered definitive and groundbreaking, and which kickstarted the MTV pop-video boom.
It reigned at number one again in 1991 for five weeks following Mercury’s death, eventually becoming the UK’s third best-selling single of all time – after Elton John’s ‘Candle In the Wind/Something About the Way You Look Tonight’ (reworked for the funeral of Diana Princess of Wales in 1997), and the 1984 Band Aid fundraiser ‘Do they Know it’s Christmas’. It was thus the first same-version song ever to reach number one twice in the UK.
It also topped the charts in various foreign territories, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and The Netherlands. In the United States, the song originally peaked at number nine in 1976. It returned at number two in 1992 after getting an airing in the smash-hit movie Wayne’s World.
In 2004, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Seven years later, BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs listeners chose it as their all-time favourite pop song. In 2012, it topped an ITV nationwide poll to find “The Nation’s Favourite Number One” over 60 years of music. It is reckoned that the song is still played somewhere in the world at least once every hour.
Despite Queen having released a total of 18 number one albums, 18 number one singles and ten number one DVDs worldwide, making them one of the planet’s best-selling rock acts, not to mention the fact that they are the only group in which every member has composed more than one chart-topping single, it remains the song that defines them, their most enduring work. Largely because of it, Queen have overtaken The Beatles to become the UK album chart leaders.
Although critical reaction was initially mixed, ‘Bo Rap’, the name by which it is known affectionately in the music business, frequently makes lists of the greatest songs of all time.
All this, without anyone, but Freddie, ever knowing what the song really means.
It was Freddie’s all the way
Lead guitarist Dr. Brian May has always acknowledged Freddie’s sole authorship of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, saying that when the singer first turned up with it, ‘he seemed to have the whole thing worked out in his head.’
It was, Brian said, “an epic undertaking”. The song comprises an acapella introduction, an instrumental sequence of piano, guitar, bass and drums, a mock–operatic interlude and a loaded monster-rock crescendo, before fading into its contemplative ‘nothing really matters’ conclusion. To the rest of the band, the piece at first seemed insurmountable.
“We were all a bit mystified as to how he was going to link all these pieces,” admitted Brian.
The song fetched to life a host of obscure classical characters: Scaramouche, a clown from the Commedia dell’arte; 16th century astronomer and father of modern science Galileo; Figaro, the principal character in Beaumarchais’ The Barber of Seville, and the Marriage of Figaro, from which operas by Paisiello, Rossini and Mozart had been composed; Beelzebub, identified in the Christian New Testament as Satan, Prince of Demons, and in Arabic as ‘Lord of the Flies’, or ‘Lord of the heavenly dwelling’. Also from Arabic, the word Bismillah is drawn: a noun from a phrase in the Qur’an meaning ‘in the name of God, most gracious, most merciful’.
In 1986, I found myself in a Budapest hotel suite with Freddie Mercury, during Queen’s ‘A Kind of Magic’ world tour. Having his undivided attention for a few moments, I put to him, not for the first time, my theory about these characters. Scaramouche, I ventured, had to be Freddie himself, with a penchant for the ‘tears of a clown’ motif. Galileo was obviously astronomer, astrophysicist and mathematician Brian May. Beelzebub must be Roger Taylor, the band’s wildest party animal, while Figaro was perhaps not the operatic character at all, but the tuxedo kitten in Walt Disney’s 1940 animated classic Pinocchio – a dead ringer for ‘pussy cat’ John Deacon. Well, Freddie did adore his feline friends.
Freddie’s face was a picture. He didn’t say a word. He looked even more perplexed when I asked him about the song’s inspiration. I suggested in so many words that it was, in fact, a thickly disguised confession about his sexual orientation. Having been raised in a close, intensely religious Parsee community, adherents of the monotheistic religion of Zoroastrianism dating back to 6th Century BC Persia (modern-day Iran), Freddie had never been at liberty to live a publicly flamboyant lifestyle. Not only would this have offended his parents, but their religion does not recognise homosexuality. He was never able to live openly as a gay man. He shared his life for seven years with devoted girlfriend Mary Austin, before admitting to her that he thought he might be bisexual.
“No, Freddie,” responded Mary, “I think you’re gay.” From then on, apart from a brief, intense affair with the late German actress Barbara Valentin in Munich in 1984, conducted at the same time as liaisons with two male partners, he had sexual relationships only with men. He did not refuse to discuss all this with me. What he said about these questions was ‘bad timing!’
Only after Freddie’s death from AIDS-related illness in November 1991, when I went to spend a week with his long-term live-in lover Jim Hutton at Jim’s bungalow in County Carlow, southeast Ireland, did the truth about ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ emerge.
One evening after supper, we took a stroll in Jim’s garden, where he proudly showed me his lilac ‘Blue Moon’ roses, which Freddie had adored. The conversation turned to his former partner’s most famous creation.
You were right about ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’,” said Jim.
“Freddie was never going to admit it publicly, of course, because he always had to carry on the charade about being straight, for his family. But we did discuss it on numerous occasions. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ WAS Freddie’s confessional. It was about how different his life could have been, and how much happier he might have been, had he just been able to be himself, the whole of his life. The world heard this song as a masterpiece of imagination, a great command of musical styles. It was this remarkable tapestry. It was so intricate and had so many layers, but the message, if hidden, was simple. Just as the management, the band, all of us in his life, never admitted that Freddie was even ill, not until the day before he died – because it was his business – he felt the same about this song.”
Couldn’t be bothered
“Not only that, but you’d have to say that he was a bit bored by the relentless interest in it. He didn’t ‘reveal’ what it was all about because he couldn’t be bothered. He had said all that he was ever going to say about it – which wasn’t very much. Others have stated over the years that it was better for the song’s true meaning never to be made public, because it would last much longer if its aura of mystique were maintained. I disagree. I don’t think that matters. The song has proved itself over and over. It has stood the test of time. It isn’t going anywhere. Freddie will be known throughout the world forever because of it.”
However convoluted and obscure, said Jim, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was “Freddie as he truly was”.
Jim died of cancer in 2010.
During the course of my research for my biography of Freddie Mercury, I discussed the song at length with arguably the UK’s greatest living lyricist, Sir Tim Rice. Having collaborated with Freddie on songs for the ‘Barcelona’ album with Montserrat Caballé, the co-creator of The Lion King and Evita knew Freddie better than most.
“It’s fairly obvious to me that this was Freddie’s coming out song,” Tim told me. “I’ve even spoken to Roger Taylor about it. There is a very clear message contained in it. This is Freddie admitting that he is gay.”
”Mama, I just killed a man’: he’s killed the old Freddie he was trying to be – the former image.
”Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead’: he’s dead, the straight person he was originally. He’s destroyed the man he was trying to be, and now this is him, trying to live with the new Freddie.
”I see a little silhouetto of a man’; that’s him, still being haunted by what he’s done and what he is.
“Every time I hear the record on the radio, I think of him trying to shake off one Freddie and embracing another – even all these years after his death. Do I think he managed it? I think he was in the process of managing it, rather well. Freddie was an exceptional lyricist, and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is beyond any doubt one of the great pieces of music of the twentieth century.’
There are further clues in a track from Queen’s fifteenth and final studio album, ‘Made In Heaven’, which was released in 1995, four years after Freddie’s death.
‘A Winter’s Tale’ was Freddie’s swansong. He wrote and composed the song in his Montreux apartment overlooking Lake Geneva, which he loved. The lyrics, describing all that he could see from his window, celebrate the peace and contentment he found there towards the end. The song’s title is an homage to William Shakespeare’s romantic play, and alludes to Freddie’s early songwriting inspiration. One protagonist of the Shakespeare play is Polixenes, the King of Bohemia, which is an ancient kingdom, which corresponds roughly to the modern=day Czech Republic. As such, it may have germinated ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. If, as presumed by many Bard scholars, this play was an allegory on the demise of Anne Boleyn, its character Perdita was based on the daughter of Anne and King Henry VIII, who would become Elizabeth 1st, England’s Queen …
The band’s original greatest hit laced through Freddie’s final offering? It’s not impossible.
Lesley Ann-Jones is the author of Freddie Mercury: The Definitive Biography published by Hodder & Stoughton
