Freddie Mercury 30th Anniversary Tribute
Freddie Mercury 30th anniversary tribute
"When I can't sing anymore darling, then I will die. I will drop dead." (Freddie Mercury to Anita Dobson).
Just days before he died, Freddie Mercury met his manager to discuss how to announce to the world that he had Aids. Sections of the press insist on using the word 'admit' here, but the statement was the very opposite of an 'admission.' Freddie had kept his condition secret precisely to avoid such politicking. It was no-one's business but his own. But it was a huge statement at the same time, Freddie expressing his hope that the world would come together in the fight against this 'terrible disease.' With the wording agreed, thoughts turned to his legacy and he might be remembered. Freddie was none too precious in this respect: "You can do what you want with my music," he said, "but don't make me boring." Freddie Mercury was many things. He was never boring.
I love Freddie's own description of himself as a 'Persian popinjay.' It wasn't too well known at the time, but Freddie's real name was Farrokh Bulsara. That name is getting more mentions these days, so we shall wait to see how that may alter the public perception of the man. It is worth remembering that the fact that Freddie was gay hardly surfaced in public consciousness until the 1980s. Looking back, it seems obvious, but it was also easy to put the flamboyance down to showmanship. I go back to 1974 with Queen, and continually wrack my brains to remember what we thought of Freddie in the seventies. For the life of me, I cannot really recall much comment on or interest in Freddie's origins and identity. To the best of my recollection, I don't think it was anything of an issue. We were all interested in the music and nothing else. Freddie seemed exotic, slightly dark, but it was his very 'different' behaviour and style that really held our attention. He was certainly unusual, and so were the band. I don't recall anyone being remotely interested in the questions of Freddie's sexuality, still less his race and nationality. In many respects, he seemed the quintessential English eccentric. Or it was easier to assimilate him as that. And that's how things were to the end. Queen were never a 'political' band, putting themselves at the head of causes and promoting issues and awareness. Their influence came indirectly through culture; they were crowd pleasers, and had their greater influence by reaching the masses, maybe changing attitudes indirectly. Queen reached a lot of people; I am sure that very few among the people that the band touched were remotely worried about Freddie's origins and identity.
Queen's final album, 'Made in Heaven' (released in 1995) features the last songs that Freddie wrote and sang. "He knew that there was only one way that it was going to end," says Dan Hall, producer of the BBC documentary 'The Final Act.' (To be aired Saturday Nov. 27 at 9pm on BBC2). "He had wanted to beat it but at that time there was still no real prospect of a cure. That was the tragedy of it."
In 'The Show Must Go On,' the last single released whilst Freddie was alive, Freddie sings: "Inside my heart is breaking, my makeup may be flaking, but my smile still stays on." I wonder how many, watching the video containing great footage of the band in their pomp, had any idea of how close to home those words fell. Technically tough to sing, the words were even tougher emotionally. The lines spoke very clearly of the end that was sure to come. The weight must have been enormous on Freddie. I'd seen and heard it all before, though. By this time, I had complete faith in Freddie's ability to defeat the constant rumours of his imminent end. I didn't believe it, not least because Freddie was carrying on (almost) as normal. In retrospect, 'The Miracle' album from 1989 looks very clearly as though it was recorded in anticipation of it being the band's final album, ending on the song 'Was it All Worth It?' (The answer being the predictable 'yes'). Either the obviousness of the message didn't strike us or, more likely, we didn't want to believe it. We thought that if Freddie was that bad, he wouldn't still be recording records in the studio. That's what made Freddie's death such a shock, however predictable it was in retrospect. When Freddie issued the statement confirming that he had Aids, I took this to be a declaration of his retirement, nothing more. I remember the day distinctly. And I remember reassuring myself that this statement was the beginning of Freddie's coming to terms with Aids, a fight that may go on for a few years yet, with treatments making it possible to survive the disease being discovered in the meantime. I wasn't alone in holding that view. 'I think there was a part of him that thought the miracle would come,' Brian May has said. 'I think we all did.' I was up late on Saturday night and learned the horrible truth - Freddie was dead.
The clear signs of how serious Freddie's condition was had been there all along. We had already lived through the period of Freddie coming to terms with his diagnosis. Queen, one of the great live bands who had toured constantly since their formation in 1970, had stopped touring and, unfathomably, had done so at the peak of their popularity. When the band received the BPI award for outstanding contribution to music in February 1990, Freddie was unusually quiet and reserved at the podium, and quite visibly drawn. That appearance provoked comment and speculation, with even close friends ringing band members to ask whether Freddie was OK. They lied to protect his privacy, in respect of his wishes. The single 'Innuendo' was released in 1991 with a video in which Freddie's image was pencilled in. On 'I'm Going Slightly Mad' he was heavily made up, his head covered in an enormous wig. The press being vile, we listened to the stories they peddled only to deny them. It was easy not to believe the press. Seriously, who pays any attention to people who write articles headed 'is this man dying?'
Hideous to read. But the horrible truth is that Freddie Mercury was, indeed, dying, and the band knew it; they concealed the fact to allow Freddie to focus on working and singing to the end. That was Freddie's choice, something that gave him a purpose, a mission even, to carry on through the pain. Freddie has attracted some criticism here and there for not being public - and political - with his condition and leading the campaign for tolerance and understanding against bigotry and hatred. This is grossly unfair. People are different and can only do what is right by their own character and conscience. Freddie Mercury was never political in this respect and openly declared that he could never be comfortable, as John Lennon was, in writing songs with political messages and leading campaigns on issues. He would have found that too much of a strain and, frankly, uninspiring. In the final time he had left, Freddie needed inspiration. It was only natural that he would pour all his remaining energy and creativity into his music, the thing that moved him the most. It was working on songs that gave Freddie a purpose, a meaning, a mission, even. It gave him a pleasure that transcended the pain. I doubt anything else would have done, least of all martyrdom to a political cause. It wasn't his way and it is unfair to have expected him to have changed right at the very end. As it is, Freddie delivered some of the best music of his life, packed with an emotional charge far deeper than any political statement could have yielded. He changed the world - and people - this way, by touching them deep in the heart and moving them from within. When the press turned on Freddie in death, the backlash from the public was huge, something which, in my view, created a sea-change in opinion on Aids and homosexuality.
Brian May recalls the final scenes of Mercury the singer's life. Such was his debilitating pain that Freddie would struggle to stand whilst recording those final vocals, downing shots of vodka and propping himself up against the microphone barely able to move.
"When he came in he wasn't in a great state. He was finding it hard to walk, even finding it hard to sit because he was in a lot of pain. I played him the stuff ['The Show Must Go On'] and he said, 'It's brilliant... I'll f****** go for it. Bring me the vodka!'
"I brought him the vodka and he pours himself a shot, knocks it down and then props himself up, pours another one, knocks another vodka back and says, 'OK, go for it' - and he went for it."
"Those notes came out of him... I don't know where they came from," May recalls. Those are very high notes even for Freddie, who had an operatic section to his voice.
"His voice has that high, wonderful edge that Freddie's voice always has but it has this different kind of timbre underneath. You can hear it."
Freddie nailed it, he completely lacerated the vocals, tough even for great singers in the best health. "I'll face it with a grin," he raged against the dying of the light, "I'm never giving in, on with the show."
"And [Freddie's] voice on The Show Must Go On is incredible. I never heard anybody sing like that in my whole life." (Brian May).
There was more great singing to come. Freddie didn't just rage at the end at all. He was entirely without self-pity, determined to carry on with the show until it was no longer possible for him to do any more. There is an acceptance and a peace in the very last songs that Freddie recorded.
'Mother Love' was the final song co-written by
Freddie Mercury and Brian May, and was Freddie's last vocal performance. He
recorded two of the three verses before having to take a rest. As May takes up
the story, "Freddie at that time said 'Write me stuff... I know I don't
have very long; keep writing me words, keep giving me things I will sing, then
you can do what you like with it afterwards, you know; finish it off' and so I
was writing on scraps of paper these lines of 'Mother Love', and every time I
gave him another line he'd sing it, sing it again, and sing it again, so we had
three takes for every line, and that was it... and we got the last verse and he
said 'I'm not up to this, and I need to go away and have a rest, I'll come back
and finish it off...' and he never came back."
The song contains an extraordinarily
spine-chilling, heart-rending passage of such incredibly searing intensity in
the middle. It is a superb vocal, both technically and emotionally, hitting
some tough top notes.
The last words in 'The Final Act' are spoken by Freddie's sister Kashmira, as "A Winter's Tale" plays out:
"Although his body was failing him, his voice was so strong. It must have been hard when you know you are going to die. How do you cope with that? By writing a lovely song - and it is lovely - he has left this legacy for us all."
Brian May takes up the song's tale in Mojo:
"Freddie wrote the song in Montreux, in a little house on the lake ... The extraordinary thing is he's talking about life and its beauty at a time when he knows he hasn't got very long to go, yet there's no wallowing in emotion, it's just absolutely purely observed."
I would also like to make special mention of Bijou, a gem that hasn't received anything like the acclaim it deserves. The song is the product of a one-hour session between Brian May and Freddie Mercury. Freddie wrote the lyrics and orchestral parts (on keyboards) whilst May contributed the remarkable guitar parts. The song was written 'inside-out,' with the musical instrumentation were the verses would normally be, and vocals in the sections were the guitar solos would normally go. Typically in a song (rock and pop songs, certainly), the singing of the verses in the beginning and at the end is broken up by a guitar solo or instrumental passage. But in this track, the guitar part is where the vocals normally are, and the vocals in the place of the instruments. It wasn't a new idea, having been done by Pink Floyd and Yes (on the song "Soon," for instance). May himself credited Jeff Beck's "Where Were You" from 1989 as an inspiration. But a great song is more than its influences and technicalities. It's not where to take things from that matters but where you take them to. And why.
The song is something of a hidden gem. It was first issued in much shortened form in order to fit on the 'Innuendo' album. It's quality was apparent even then. In expanded form, with Brian May's crystalline guitar work, it emerges as a masterpiece.
As you reach the point in the guitar part where you think you heart can't be broken any more, Freddie enters to deliver his goodbye into all eternity.
May's guitar work is stunning, not merely technically - there are many guitarists who impress by way of technique - but emotionally. There is a precision to the whole thing. May's timing and pauses between the notes are perfect. The effect is heart-wrenching. The track possesses a harrowing beauty. The lyrics aim at ultimate reassurance after the anguished guitar, but then May returns with all the heartache and the sadness unresolved. This is one of the most emotionally intelligent tracks in rock history. If the lyrics aim at some kind of resolution in eternal peace, Brian May's guitar is weeping at imminent and irredeemable loss. It's just one of the most emotional pieces of guitar work you could ever hear, both raw and precise.
As a budgie fancier, I also like the little personal story attached to the song - 'Bijou' was the name of a budgerigar that was given to Brian May's mother after his father had passed away, the bond with the bird helping her with her grief. Budgerigars are bright and chirpy little birds, introducing you to a world of song in colour (actually, they chatter rather than sing, but you know what I mean).
Freddie was such a creative talent, possessing a fertile brain that flew at one hundred miles a minute, but yet was incredibly disciplined in maintaining focus on any idea he happened to be pursuing. I remember when the 'Barcelona' album came out and having that 'what on Earth' feeling I knew well from years of following Queen. (Have we recovered from 'Body Language' yet?) I usually came round in the end and did this time. This was the album he did with superstar soprano Montserrat Caballé. It seemed a most unlikely pairing at the time and I wasn't quite sure. Then again, I never was, but I had become accustomed to surviving the 'whatever next?' feeling. To be fair, the critics weren't sure either. Freddie had ventured into areas they didn't know about. It sounded opera, but was it? I have heard Tim Rice in interview say that, being Freddie, you wondered if it was a send-up. But, he continued, the songs were musically rich and strong. Rice himself contributed lyrics to a couple of songs on the 'Barcelona' album. The critics in review didn't know what to say. They didn't want to write the usual and condemn it as awful because they knew Montserrat Caballé to be the worlds number one soprano. It was easy enough for them to ridicule the pop and rock of Freddie and Queen because they thought they knew about such things. They were clueless on opera and so evaded the question by describing the album as 'different.' It was certainly different. But that was the least that could be said. Freddie and Queen had been 'different' from the first. The hard question lay in identifying the nature of that difference precisely. When I listen to the album now, I indulge my little fantasy that had he lived Freddie would have kept dabbling and delving into classical and operatic music, mixing and matching disparate unlikely things, and writing and performing some wonderfully entertaining theatrical pieces in the process. It's a view that Tim Rice, too, holds, saying that Freddie had the scope and the talent to branch out of rock and pop. This claim rings entirely true. Freddie's musical interests were always broader than rock.
I am reading what people are saying about 'The Fallen Priest' from 'Barcelona.' 'Thunderous and mighty song!! It is powerful yet soft, breath-taking and beautiful. This song grabs you from the first strike of those piano keys and doesn't let go. No wonder Freddie was determined to make his dream of singing with Montserrat come true. Pure pleasure to our senses and soul. You can hear every ounce of emotion in their voices. Infinite joy.
That's about right. The same could be said about any number of the other songs on the album. Listen to 'The Golden Boy,' for example, encompassing so many styles and moods in the one piece, opera and gospel in one. (We shouldn't be surprised, since Freddie had done likewise on 'Somebody to Love,' taking it to #2 on the UK charts). 'Barcelona' is remarkable album - thunderous and mighty, yet soft and tender, breath-taking and beautiful. Let's have 'Ensueno' from the album.
Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe - Ensuenost
But is it 'real' opera? I can't help laughing
out loud whenever I come across people daft enough to controversialize about a
musical form as daft as opera in the first place. Opera is so unreal that notions of reality are redundant. I think Kenneth Clark's
description of opera in Civilisation encapsulates
the genius of Freddie Mercury and Queen every bit as much as it does opera:
"Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process. Dr Johnson's much quoted definition, which as far as I can make out he never wrote, 'an extravagant and irrational entertainment', is perfectly correct; and at first it seems surprising that it should have been brought to perfection in the age of reason. But just as the greatest art of the early eighteenth century was religious art, so the greatest artistic creation of the Rococo is completely irrational...
What on earth has given opera its prestige in western civilisation - a prestige that has outlasted so many different fashions and ways of thought? Why are people prepared to sit silently for three hours listening to a performance of which they do not understand a word and of which they very seldom know the plot? Why do quite small towns all over Germany and Italy still devote a large portion of their budgets to this irrational entertainment? Partly, of course, because it is a display of skill, like a football match. But chiefly, I think, because it is irrational. 'What is too silly to be said may be sung' - well, yes; but what is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious - these things can also be sung and only be sung. When, at the beginning of Mozart's Don Giovanni, the Don kills the Commendatore, and in one burst of glorious music the murderer, his mistress, his servant and the dying man all express their feelings, opera provides a real extension of the human faculties. No wonder that the music is rather complicated, because even today our feelings about Don Giovanni are far from simple. He is the most ambiguous of hero-villains. The pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of love, which had once seemed so simple and life-giving, have become complex and destructive, and his refusal to repent, which makes him heroic, belongs to another phase of civilisation.' (Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 1969, pp 241-43).
Irrational entertainment, like a football match: that sums up Queen in a nutshell. Along with the emotional range and intelligence, the willingness to venture into the silly in order to touch the roots of the serious, the deeply felt, the subtle, the mysterious. The cluelessness of many in this respect can be gleaned by the extent to which they still raise the question of the meaning of the lyrics of 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' and the tendency to dismiss Queen as 'silly.' The easiest thing to do is to parody the lyrics of 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' and so many do it. That's fine as a bit of fun. But there are other places you can go with this music. If all you can see is the surface and literal truth then yes, Queen are silly. They are still entertaining enough at that level to earn them a huge and enduring popularity. But there are other layers.
For what it's worth, I think Freddie has an incredible vibrato (although he didn't like it) and amazing phrasing. He also possessed an amazing stylistic range. He certainly doesn't have a typical rock voice, always singing his lines. I also like that Montserrat made Freddie sing as a baritone, revealing the full richness and range of his voice. More than that, though, it's the attack, the aggression, and the passion that always strikes me about Freddie's vocal delivery.
The 'Barcelona' album was recorded between January 1987 and June 1988. It's possible that Freddie threw himself into the project not only because he was working with the singer he admired the most (and the opera he loved the most) (which is reason enough for enthusiasm) but because he knew it could be his last blast as a creative artist. It's a remarkable album. I was as baffled as the critics when it came out, opting for 'different' as a neutral description. Musically, I had no idea whether it was good or bad. I didn't know the standards to apply. My initial reaction was that it is an album of bonkers mad brilliance. It is hugely entertaining, with Freddie at full-tilt with the world's leading soprano. In this context, the word 'different' merely means 'don't know.' Rather than seek external validation, I'll simply trust my instincts. This is pretty much what Freddie did, paying scant regard to the arbiters of truth and taste. It's called creativity. I tend to see it as both 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and 'Somebody to Love' combined on an even grander scale, if such a thing could be imagined. Freddie was like an alchemist.
I like the story behind "A Kind of Magic." The song was written by drummer Roger Taylor for the 'Highlander' movie and in original form is more of a slow rock song, all very earnest but not particularly inspired. Freddie got hold of it and turned it into something wondrous. (I swear I can hear Donna Summer's 'Try Me' in the bassline, and Freddie worked with its writer Georgio Moroder, of course. He also liked Donna Summer, most unusual for a rock singer. Freddie was never one of the 'disco sucks' rock dogmatists. And I remain one of the 'Hot Space' diehards of the dance floor. The idea died something of a death with Queen but to this day I maintain that the band, driven by Freddie and John Deacon, were on the right lines, if only they could have found that blend of disco/dance/R&B with hard rock guitar. This was before Michael Jackson's Thriller, remember). Freddie added a little disco/dance beat and rhythm to 'A Kind of Magic' and, hey presto, the song took flight, becoming a huge hit single. I love the video too, (directed by Russell Mulcahy), in which Freddie appears in the form of a theatre ghost returning to the old abandoned theatre where he was once a star. The theatre is now occupied by the down-and-out, who are promptly turned into musicians, as the room is turned into a concert hall, for a little while. After a little show, he leaves, and everything goes back to as it was. It's very charming, bright, and funny. It sums up Freddie. He was a kind of magic, brightening the world up for a wee while. I rather like that cape in the video, too. My mum loved this one.
I have a book by Peter Hogan entitled 'The Complete Guide to the Music of Queen.' The book is far from being complete and not much of a guide at all to what it does cover, being full of predictable and lazy judgements. But the conclusion is nearly true:
'I'd say that Queen were occasionally pompous, tedious, and pretentiously self-indulgent; occasionally revolutionary; more often than not amusing, intelligent, and charming ... and nearly always idealistic, optimistic, and generally positive. I'd say that maybe we should remember them - and him - that way.'
I'd say the band were pompous in the best and true sense of the word, and thoroughly professional in the studio and on stage. They were meticulous in planning, preparation, and production, determined to get things right. Those values were derided by critics, but showed their worth Live Aid when Queen eclipsed all and sundry by a country mile and more. But the rest of that passage is true. But let's resist the temptation to take it all too seriously. (It's best to leave that kind of thing to rock and pop journalists).
How would I characterise Queen? Overblown, huge swathes of sound, the utterly ridiculous inflated to the nth degree, but never po-faced. That's why they always put a smile on my face. And then there's the complexity, the range, the diversity, the dynamics, the vocal and guitar harmonies, the multi-layered sound. Bravery and adventure. Flair and imagination. Intelligence and humour. And huge musical intelligence.
Cultural Impact
The remaining band members rallied against the homophobia stirred up in the aftermath of Mercury's death. The documentary 'The Final Act' ends with yet another of Queen's trademark grand statements of universal love and brotherhood: the 1992 Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium, which featured an incredibly diverse array of international artists performing before a global audience of at least half a billion people. (To those who are serious about politics, who seem forever to want to 'educate' the public and alter behaviour, then take good note of what it takes to win a mass audience and move people from within. If you start with the premise that 'the people' are stupid, selfish, and uneducated, then you won't ever get far). The documentary cites research which indicated a softening of attitudes in light of Freddie's death, overcoming the politicised "moral panic" of the HIV epidemic. 'It's arguable, then,' Mark Beaumont writes, 'that Freddie Mercury made as great a cultural impact in death as in life. A true lost champion.' (Mark Beaumont, He was the champion: Raising the curtain on Freddie Mercury's devastating final act, The Independent).
Very possibly. I don't remember Freddie being celebrated much as a champion in life, or offering himself as such. I think he would have baulked at the idea, being more concerned with individuality and its expression than being part of, still less leading, some grand cause. But if the band pursued their own pathways, they did try to take as many people along with them as they could. 'Ordinary' folk most of all. They liked the numbers. Like Roger Taylor said, 'big' was out at the time, but the band aimed at being 'big, big, big.' 'The bigger the better,' said Freddie (in all things, he added). The band made a direct appeal to a mass audience. Queen fans celebrated, of course - inspiring Freddie to write 'We are the Champions' and Brian May 'We Will Rock You' - but nobody paid any attention to those oddballs. I do distinctly remember critics treating Freddie and the band as jokes. Queen fans were always well aware of a somewhat condescending, even disdainful, attitude on the part of those whose tastes were considered much more cool and fashionable. We all remember the infamous headline in the New Musical Express, 'Is this man a prat?', against an image of Freddie. The author of this piece was Tony Stewart, who sneered at Freddie's ambitions to 'bring ballet to the masses' and the way it reduced to an anthem sung in football stadiums. This is all utterly phoney. I remember it all well, pop journalists thinking they were being rebellious and had street cred by allying themselves with punk and 'alienated youth.' As a fully unpaid member of that youth, I thought it fake to the core - and dull, monotonous, ugly, and unambitious, the ultimate reduction of nihilism. Stewart speaks scornfully of Freddie toasting the audience with the words 'May you all drink champagne tomorrow for breakfast.' A cruel taunt, given that we the masses were all poor and starving at the time, and Freddie and Queen were rich and arrogant millionaires flaunting their wealth in a 'let them eat cake' moment. None of us could afford to be drinking champagne. (Imagine a world with no possessions, says the wealthy man living in a huge mansion. I think the key term here is 'imagine'). Oh ppplease! I remember Freddie's champagne moment very well. It was nothing like these critics portrayed it. It came in the Earls Court concert of 1977. He was taking a break and was somewhat out of breath. 'I was going to make a nice long speech but forget it!' he says, before taking a sip. 'Cheers! Have champagne for breakfast tomorrow, just go out and buy it.'
Even by the somewhat diminished standards of pop journalism, the criticisms that Queen received at the hands of the music press were jaundiced on any number of levels. The motivations behind it were not hard to find - Queen had made it by their own steam, making it clear that they had no need to curry favour with critics and journalists who took themselves far too seriously. I thought Freddie's antics highly amusing, a unique blend of the serious and the ridiculous. If you lacked the wit to grasp the serious - or the artistically different, at least - then you had more than enough scope to entertain yourself with the silly. As someone who hates champagne, Freddie's oddity here always had me smiling. As for the song. 'We are the Champions' was written by Freddie to celebrate the esprit de corps among Queen fans; he compared it to all being on the same team on a sporting field, each being for all.
The criticisms were entirely wrong (and entirely predictable). For one thing, the likes of Stewart were lapping up punk and its street rebellion against the supposed monarchical elitism of the likes of Queen in an act of gross fetishism. The vision of Queen as the football stadium band playing for the masses stands in complete democratic contradistinction to notions of monarchy. Queen were far more popular - and populist - than any punk band. Punk disdained the masses and was inherently elitist, elitist in the sense of making a cult of being different, as in better and more intelligent than the deluded and easily pleased (that would be the likes of me, then). I saw it as an extreme expression of narcissism, leading in the direction of solipsism. It possessed an explicitly anti-mass ethos. Oddly, Queen's supposedly monarchical elitism went in entirely the different direction. Ultimately, the issue resolves itself in the question as to which side is most likely to fill the football stadiums of the world? The combination of football and opera makes perfect sense to me.
Stewart also derides Mercury's references to the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. The only Nijinsky most ordinary working class people knew - claimed Stewart - was the racehorse. Maybe, maybe not. What we conclude from that depends on your horizons and ambitions. I remember my third year class at Windleshaw Juniors, aged 10 or 11. The teacher Miss Platt was doing her level best to introduce a class of overwhelmingly working class kids to culture, asking if we had ever heard of Nijinsky. I said 'yes' immediately and she looked most delighted by the confidence of my response. The smile froze on her face when I declared boldly that he was a racehorse. She replied that there was indeed a racehorse by the name of Nijinsky, but Nijinsky was in fact a ballet dancer. I wouldn't be told and continued to insist that Nijinsky was a racehorse. In defence of my view, I cited the famous Manchester City footballer Colin Bell and his nickname of 'Nijinsky,' given to him after the racehorse, on account of the fact that Bell would gallop from box to box on the football field. Miss Platt pressed her point. And the point is, you listen and learn to those who know better and have more to offer and expand your horizons in the process. Freddie always looked to introduce something new, original, and distinct, reaching far beyond what most people know and understand. He didn't leave you unchanged. But he worked his magic not by going against populism in some elitist assertion of high culture but by embracing it, touching it at its roots and raising it up from within.
Brian May recalls the Queen concert at Bingley Hall, near Birmingham, "where the audience sang every song and then we went off stage and they carried on singing and then they sang 'You'll Never Walk Alone.' [the anthem of the mighty Liverpool football club]. It was a transitional time in rock. You went to see Led Zeppelin and The Who, you'd bang your head but you didn't sing along, that wasn't cool. This was an invitation to sing along."
It was also the invitation to write a song to capture that communal spirit. 'A light went off and I thought, "We shouldn't fight this, we should embrace it!" People didn't do that at the time in rock concerts.' Thankfully, Queen were never cool, but were always the crowd pleasers. How odd to see this most regal of bands as the People's Champions. I guess that really got up the noses of the band's critics, not least because the band became so successful. Whilst the critics sought to take down royalty in the name of the poor, downtrodden masses, the masses were actually with Queen. How terribly inconvenient.
The idea was to write a song that the audience
could participate in, both band and audience joined together leading one
another one. Brian May wrote 'We Will Rock You' and Freddie Mercury wrote 'We
are the Champions.' 'We are the Champions' is perennially misunderstood by overly literal
critics who are simply determined to get hold of the wrong end of the stick. As Roger Taylor explains, '"We are the Champions" is meant to be "we"
as in "all of us," collectively, not the band. It's a shame that some people
understandably had the wrong take on that. "No time for losers" is not the
kindest line, but it's more of a "we all of us."
That seemed pretty obvious to all of us who loved the band at the time. But that's the problem with such appeals, they persuade only the already persuaded. Queen would record another song in precisely this vein in 1986 with 'Friends Will Be Friends.' It was a big hit among the already friendly, but what about those who didn't care for the band. The unpersuaded would simply look for a weak point to target, breaking up the communal spirit. One line opened up a division between winners and losers that ran against the song's fundamental ethos, and sounded all the more harsh the more immensely successful Queen became. But the song is not about division between winners and losers and more about appropriating the feeling of what it is like to be champions. On a sport field you have two opposing teams, but in concert you are all on the same team, so the song is a rallying cry or an esprit de corps for everyone. 'It's about having confidence in yourself,' says May. The song invokes the spirit of a football match but, instead of opposing teams, everyone is on the same team. So there are no losers, only winners, champions all. It's about believing in yourself, being the winners you all could be. The issue would be resolved if the line had been altered to 'no time for losing, because we ["all of us"] are the champions.' The issue cropped up again at Live Aid. Queen were absolutely the best band on the day. Frankly, Queen saved the day and turned the event around. They went down a storm. And still the critics were out there, saying the decision to sing 'We are the Champions,' with its reference to 'losers,' being crass and insensitive at a concert for the starving in Africa. I'm not inclined to argue the point any further, so will simply say that those who embrace a literal-minded righteousness in politics are stupid and ineffective, proceeding by coercion, negativity, and bullying for the reason they lack meaningful motivational content. Empty.
Then there's the ballet. 'We Will Rock You' and 'We are the Champions' had very different origins and motivations to Freddie's ambition of bringing ballet to the masses. But if it's ballet you want, then try something like 'The Millionaire's Waltz' or, one that everyone knows and loves, 'I Want to Break Free,' especially the video, which incorporates a forty-five second sequence inspired by Debussy's 'Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune,' in which Freddie got to dance with - and writhe nakedly all over - the Royal Ballet corps. The criticisms are a nonsense born of ignorance. There is no great distinction to be made between ballet, opera, and football. Read Kenneth Clarke's definition of opera again if you are still in doubt. All guns blazing, all emotions hanging out, for mass entertainment. It was punk that was truly elitist, making a virtue of being an irritating minority. Utterly unambitious.
By some wicked coincidence, Queen recorded the album 'News of the World,' (which contains 'We are the Champions'), the same time as The Sex Pistols were recording 'Never Mind the Bollocks' and in the same studios (Wessex Studios). One day, the Pistols' Sid Vicious stumbled his way into Queen's studio and started to goad Freddie about his ambitions to bring ballet to the masses. "Aren't you Simon Ferocious, or something?" Freddie responded dismissively. As Vicious mumbled on, Freddie offered the challenge "What are you gonna do about it?" before taking him by the lapels and throwing him through the door.
And I love the man's humour:
'I think we survived that test.'
Freddie Mercury Vs. Sid Vicious (Sex Pistols) 1977
It's a clash of approaches, the one reductive, the other expansive. Personally, I love the fact that Freddie wanted to bring ballet, opera, and art to the masses, in however unusual flavours. We can all go on and discover the real thing if we have the talent and inclination. Freddie inspired the inclination. It is for us to do the rest. He had a very fine art collection (of course, he could afford it, but he had taste). It stands to his credit that he wanted as many people as possible to be able to see and experience the power, the beauty, and the wonder of art and music.
The critics loathed Queen with a passion (and way too many of those who considered themselves to be 'cool' followed their lead. Such individuality!) There was a real disdain and contempt for the band. The seriousness and self-importance in the field of rock and pop journalism is hilarious. These are the people who criticised Queen for being pompous! Surely, there are more important things in life. I'd say that Queen had the balance right, being thoroughly professional in what they did, but not kidding themselves about the significance of pop music in the wider scale of things. Or maybe they underestimated just how culturally - and hence politically - significant they were?
Examples of abusive comment on Queen could be multiplied from the music press. True, they asked for it by being so bold and audacious, by being, if not tasteless, then deciding to go by their own tastes rather than those critically approved. And they took risks by being so humorous and entertaining (especially since it was offered for the delight of the contemptible masses). If you had never heard the band and had read only their reviews in Melody Maker, NME and many more, you would come away with the impression that Queen were the worst band that had ever existed. These 'journalists' made fools of themselves, being concerned only with peddling their petted favourites and abusing all those they disliked. Which meant that they supported only those bands they felt they had made big and successful by their words and damning those who made it under their own steam. These journalists were just frustrated politicians, people who couldn't hack it in the real world of politics (they certainly couldn't command support enough to get elected), and so liked to think they were changing culture and society in their little domains. 'Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.' (Frank Zappa). I paid it zero attention, not merely because I knew it to be wrong but because I had the ability to make my own mind up and learned to distrust the conventional wisdom of any day (especially those conventions which flatter themselves in being radical and cutting edge; they are not, they are conformist, predictable, and mediocre to the core). Most of all, though, I had no intention of allowing a motley of dweebs and neurotics to interfere with the enjoyment of my pleasures. I still pay no heed to the talking heads all over media. It's an effort for me to keep my temper when I see how easily swayed people of all political persuasions can be by whatever the cause and orthodoxy of the day is. Arm yourself with an 'ic' or an 'ism' and you are saved the hard task of analysis and informed judgement and consent.
I liked that the band had the nerve to walk the tightrope between good and bad taste - and had the confidence to keep getting back up and going again whenever they fell of it. I also loved the fact that it was rarely clear where the lines of the good and the bad lay when it came to taste. And I loved that the band would play first and foremost to entertain the great public and not at all to impress the critics.
It won Freddie 'fame and fortune and everything that goes with it,' but it's a noble aim for all that. Queen's presentation of their music in terms of entertainment and escapism runs in a contrary direction to those who emphasise the political and transformative aspects to music. Enjoyment leaves the iniquitous world unchanged, conforming people to and hence confirming the status quo. Or does it? I've never been so sure of that view. Maybe culture, joy, and optimism have a much greater impact than the politicians of the musical world can understand. It's odd to note the massive political changes that followed in the wake of Queen's stadium concerts in various continents and countries - Argentina, Brazil, South Africa (a controversial one indeed), and Hungary and Eastern Europe. It's probably coincidence, reflecting the fact that cultural changes were already underway, leading to the band being invited to perform in the first place. But Queen were hugely popular in the liberation movements in these countries, particularly songs like 'I Want to Break Free.' That's what the facts show, however much Queen sceptics may want to deny the band's cultural and political significance.
I am hugely sceptical of the claims made for politics in music. Where some find radical slogans hugely appealing, I tend to see a naive idealism or rebellious stances devoid of content, a surrogate for the hard work of politics. And an evasion of the hard questions. I don't get my politics from the lyrics of a pop song. But that's a debate for another day. If revolution wasn't the point of a Queen show, there was actually a personal
transformation that, allied to the band's ethos of collective celebration, could not but have
practical consequences in time. For good or for ill, who knows. Hedonism is empty, ultimately. But it's no sin to be glad you're alive. And to inspire that sense of joy and hope in people cannot but have a positive, transformatory significance in some way. People who do eventually come to change the world always act out of the hope and expectation that the world could indeed be better than it is. We can dismiss it as entertainment and escapism if we like, but
there is real nobility in using our talents to enhance other people's lives in
some way. The shows were not about the band as champions who succeeded in
winning fame and fortune for themselves by conquering the world but about the communal experience the
performance engendered, drawing disparate people together as the one community. The
approach seemed to work from the assumption - an uncommon one these days - that we are
all unique individuals made up of distinctive particularities and peculiarities,
but a community for all that; we're all kin (pretty odd kin, admittedly, but kin for all
that). Even if we don't necessarily feel kinship with one another to begin with, singing
together will make us feel that way in the end.
I have no idea whether that
alone is enough to change the world. I very much doubt it. I don't care if you
premise your argument on 'God,' 'Nature,' 'Reason,' 'Humanity,' 'The Science,' music,
numbers, Elvis Presley, or some other projected certainty you can only say 'yes' to, these are all empty abstractions or empty signifiers, always demanding one last push, one last demonstration, one more election, one more effort for the realisation of their ends. It never happens and it can never happen. There will never be any roundabout 'third way' workaround that allows human beings, at the level of creative individual and collective agency, having to tread the hard boards of politics, with all that that entails
with respect to the really real - and messy - 'yes/no' questions and answers in the field of
practical reason. Attempt that short cut and you will find the entire process
of change being short-circuited, arrested, and frozen by way of authoritarian
imposition. Supposedly rebellious, radical politics in the contemporary age is proceeding inexorably in this direction, for the reason it lacks agency at its core (and has a very faulty understanding of structure to boot). As monarchical as they were, Freddie and Queen knew that you had to
move people from within, win them over, and keep them on board by involving them. Audience participation was a key concept for the band. I can't guarantee that it
will necessarily change the world for the better. I can guarantee that without it, there is zero chance of a transformation worthy of the name. I can also guarantee that it will
make you feel better. Which is no bad thing. And is so much better than a
negative perceptions bias which constantly has you underestimating life and its
potentialities for joy, a bias that sucks the hope and inspiration out of people and really does leave a bad world unchanged. I'll go with the aristo-populism of Queen instead. It will inspire you, expand your horizons, foster positivity, move and motivate you from within. These are the springs of effective action, without which no change for the better is possible. Beyond all of that, though, there is simply something noble about the band's affirmation of joy, life, and community, that sense of the irreducible uniqueness of each and all, wrapped up in a sense
of belonging. Who knows, that approach may well be the essential ingredient in working the miracle promised by human ingenuity and natural gifts in all their forms.
The Man
'He was some kind of a man,' Marlene Dietrich said of the character played by Orson Welles in 'Touch of Evil,' before asking 'what does it matter what you say about people?' If it matters, I'd say that Freddie Mercury was some kind of a champion after all. Not necessarily in terms of putting himself at the head of particular causes, because he didn't, but in terms of his determination to be himself in a world that always favours conformity. Freddie's influence in this respect was indirect, but no less important. Freddie always ruled out politics in the band in order to focus on entertainment, brightening people's lives up for a while before they returned to the troubles that attended their daily reality. I wouldn't dismiss that approach. I grew up in an era of mass unemployment and rapid deindustrialisation, and Freddie and Queen kept us smiling through it all. It wasn't a substitute for politics, a dumbing and deradicalisation, as those who insist on music having a political edge insist. We engaged in politics elsewhere - in the political world, oddly enough, where it really counted. After that, we were in need of entertainment and pleasure. 'I like people to go away from a Queen show feeling fully entertained, having had a good time,' said Freddie in an interview. 'I think Queen songs are pure escapism, like going to see a good film - after that, they can go away and say "that was great," and go back to their problems... I like to write songs for fun, for modern consumption. People can discard them like a used tissue afterwards ... Disposable pop, yes!'
Note Freddie's self-deprecating humour. Critics are happy to take Freddie at his word here, ignoring entirely the layers of meaning it contained. There was nothing remotely disposable about the meticulous planning and preparation that went into Queen albums and concerts. The band were hugely professional. But Freddie didn't take himself too seriously. 'I like to ridicule myself. I don't take myself too seriously,' he said. 'I wouldn't wear these clothes if I was serious. The one thing that keeps me going is that I like to laugh at myself.'
That's a genuinely endearing quality. It was Freddie's sense of the ridiculous that kept a lot of us going in difficult times, keeping us royally entertained in the process. But I do think that Freddie was being a little disingenuous here, maybe out of concern not to offer critics, always ready to express their disdain of Queen, any easy targets to hit. But I do think Freddie is wrong and I do think it is worth qualifying his remarks, not least when supposed friends as well as determined foes take him at his word. Peter Hogan, in his 'Complete Guide to the Music of Queen,' quotes Freddie here and then agrees that 'disposable pop is what Queen did best.' Talk about damning with faint praise! If that's what Queen did best, why take any further interest? Any book that opens with a statement like that on Queen is so shallow as to be worthy only of the bin. So let's look a little deeper into what Freddie was about. Because I don't think the music industry really understood the nature of Freddie Mercury's creativity. The music press certainly didn't understand, having not only a narrow appreciation of musical boundaries but disdaining 'showbizz' and 'pop' (out of the pretension of offering something different and better themselves). Freddie Mercury was always pushing beyond boundaries, mixing and matching sounds from an eclectic range of sources. This was something which tested the understanding of fellow band members let alone anyone else. By keeping everyone on their toes by his willingness to try out new musical sounds, Freddie kept the public interested and intrigued. Queen manager John Reid describes meeting Freddie Mercury at his home: 'when I first met him he was this guy who was already a bit of a rock star but poised to be a major rock star. And the Liza Minelli 'Cabaret' soundtrack is playing in the house and there's cats everywhere. So I thought, this kind of doesn't compute.'
Freddie didn't compute in any simple sense. Freddie Mercury's musical and cultural interests transcended rock and pop. Those who stick to the well-defined grooves in music and entertainment will never get a handle on Freddie Mercury and Queen. I would have thought Queen fans to have understood this. In my experience over the years, Queen fans are a fairly permissive bunch, happy to be amused and entertained and none too concerned about imposing standards by way of a cultural straightjacket. Of course, the rock fans who were drawn to the early Queen can still be heard complaining that 'early Queen' are the 'real Queen,' dismissing everything that came after 1974. But I consider such people to be more rock fans than Queen fans. But as Queen's standing continues to rise to a level it never quite had in the 70s and 80s, I do see some newer elements among the fandom drawn into the cul-de-sacs of the taste and standards game. It's amusing to hear, occasionally, po-faced Queen or Freddie fans objecting to what they consider to be terrible cover versions of Freddie's songs, claiming that Freddie will be rolling in his grave. They are precious with respect to the music in a way that Freddie never was. The only rolling Freddie would be doing in response is with laughter. Freddie said 'you can do anything you like with my music, my image, my life, anything, but never make me boring.' The one thing that critics attempting to impose taste do to any thing of any kind is to make it boring. It's the anti-Freddie. A lot of diehards hate Freddie's songs being touched and tampered with. I am as certain as certain can be that Freddie would not have been remotely worried, so long as he got paid.
On You Tube, someone comments on Katherine Jenkins' performance of 'We are the Champions' at Proms in the Park on Glasgow Green, 13th September 2014: 'She can be happy Freddie Mercury in his tomb is dead and cannot stop this awful misuse of his famous song.'
There is zero evidence that Freddie Mercury would have intervened to stop his song being mis/used. My view as a Freddie expert is that he would have loved the performance. I should know better, but I wasn't prepared to let the Ayatollahs of musical taste get away with making Freddie Mercury as boring and as censorious as they are. I commented:
'I've been a Queen fan since 1974. One thing I loved about Queen is that the band were never neurotic in seeking to impose taste. They mixed and matched and blended. Freddie couldn't give a damn about critics, the same critics who abused him for precisely this song, sneering at his ambition to bring 'ballet to the masses' reducing to a football chant. The convergence between opera and popera is always treacherous terrain and always generates idle 'debates.' Oddly, I would compare the wretched abuse that Katherine Jenkins attracts to the abuse that Freddie and Queen themselves attracted. And yet both are hugely popular and hugely successful, which no doubt upsets the critics all the more. I'm no expert on voice, although I was declared "the main voice of the choir" by the choirmaster no less, and he should know. I had the solo spots. Katherine Jenkins has a fine voice, has found her audience, and is willing to put herself out for the public. Good luck to her, I say. That's what Queen always did. I've seen her live in concert and she is very impressive. Is she 'really' opera? Can she handle the difficult arias? etc. It's not really a debate I'm concerned to waste time on. We can only guess what Freddie would think. He did love his sopranos, and Katherine Jenkins definitely has the voice for it. Having been with Queen for most of my life, I am sure that Freddie would love it, and love the interest his songs generate in that 'crossover' world of popera and theatre. He loved the show aspect of performance. I think he would have gone in this direction had he lived. Whilst Freddie Mercury was many things, a censorious puritan was not one of them. I think Katherine has sung material better suited to her voice and style, mind. But you can see what she is doing - reaching to a mass audience, exactly as Queen did. Her version of 'Who Wants to Live Forever?' is very good, I must say. I hope she does more Queen songs, she has the talent for it.'
So Queen's music really is 'disposable pop,' then, available to all and sundry to do anything they like with it? Freddie had always expressed himself very plainly on this. Not only was he not precious about his songs, he was always looking to do something new, something different musically. Freddie openly described his songs as disposable product. 'Songs are like buying a new dress or a new shirt .. you wear it and you discard it,' Freddie said in interview. 'People always write new songs ... a certain few classics will always remain but as far as I'm concerned I like to sort to look upon it as writing new material. What I've written in the past is finished and done with.'
There's something refreshing, and liberating, about that view. It frees creativity from the need to conform to the narrow grooves of the already done and the expected. Had Freddie Mercury respected the narrow parameters of taste the way that critics of any 'tampering' with Queen's music do, he would never have been the Freddie Mercury we came to know and love in the first place. At the same time, I detect a certain defensiveness and disarming modesty about Freddie's claim that Queen's songs were merely 'disposable pop.' The claim makes no sense at all in light of Queen's indefatigable endeavours in production in the studio, something which critics hammered the band for. Whatever the motivations behind Freddie's reasoning here, the view that Queen songs were 'disposable' is simply wrong. These songs have not only stood the test of time but are, if anything, more popular now than they ever were. And hugely successful financially.
Queen's music is making crazy money. Could it be worth over a billion dollars?
Queen remain the 38th
biggest artist on Spotify today, with over 37.6 million monthly listeners.
That's more than Kanye West (35.8m), Beyoncé (32.6m), The Beatles (24.3m), and
Jay-Z (21.6m).
Indeed, according to the IFPI, Queen were the world's fifth biggest revenue-generating recording artist of 2019, and the sixth biggest in 2018.
Pop it may be, but there is no sign of Queen's music being discarded like other consumable pop products. Great art endures - and so, evidently, does great commerce. In fact, Queen are doing more than endure, they are actually expanding their values - artistically as well as commercially.
The songs may have been written for the amusement and entertainment of the vulgar and tasteless 'masses' but they have stood the test of time, and have done so as a result of their intrinsic qualities as music and performance. And because of the emotional resonance, too. The songs continue to strike a chord with a lot of people. Human beings don't change that much. There is no reason to suppose that songs written for people to enjoy in one age wouldn't be enjoyed by people in another age, not when they were so expertly crafted to move the public in the first place. I suspect that Queen's 'disposable pop' will be being listened to by 'the masses' for many years to come. They were built for endurance and expansion as well as entertainment.
In the end, I would say that Freddie was a champion of all those struggling to become what they had the potential - and yearning - to be. Whatever that may be. That yearning is often inchoate, and often gets suppressed or diverted. I'm less than sure that Freddie himself ever came to entirely express his own true self. He threw himself into recording 'The Great Pretender' in 1987 very much to make a personal statement. You can also hear the loneliness and emptiness on 'Living on my Own,' his only solo #1 hit. (I get the feeling he was pretty rootless, suffering the trauma of having been sent to boarding school aged 8, miles and miles away from home, never to know home again. I speculate further below).
The documentary 'The Final Act' portrays Mercury as a quiet and
private man who left his shell for dust and turned into a speed of light Mr
Fahrenheit the moment he stepped onstage. The image is one thing, the man another.
"If you're shy, it's being yourself that's the difficult thing," says the documentary's producer Dan Hall. "I imagine to stand on a stage and talk about his life to an audience may have been challenging, but to put on a mask and a coat and have a song and a framework in which you can perform - I can see that that chimed fine with the shyness because you're performing. It's when you're being yourself and all of that comes off, that is the very private, very closed space."
"He built a world for himself, a sort of a safe space," says the documentary's director James Rogan. "It made more sense when Brian May put Freddie in the tradition of Little Richard and said he screamed his passion. Suddenly you see that intensity of passion that was in him, that he could express with this extraordinary instrument that was his voice."
Freddie transformed himself but transformed others, too. I'll end on a personal note, indicating what kind of an alchemist-genius of a personal transformer Freddie was. I remember the band performing on Top of the Pops in 1978. The song was 'Fat Bottomed Girls' of all things (I know .. Brian May the astrophysicist was responsible for that masterpiece ..) My mum sat watching with a worried and very disapproving frown on her face as Freddie pranced around in his black leather pants and braces singing of all manner of illicit pleasures. She could restrain herself no more and finally spoke up: 'I think there has to be something wrong with you to get on these days.' I sat there thinking, I quite like this kind of thing (it's not a patch on the flip-side 'Bicycle Race,' mind, a song containing the greatest bell solo in rock'n'roll history). By the eighties, my mum had been completely won round and had come to adore Freddie. She even had a Freddie Live Aid plate up on the wall in the front room (which I inadvertently left behind when I moved house, and which I now see fetching £200 on Ebay!!) I heard Dave Clark describe Freddie as the Piaf of the modern age. My mum loved Piaf. Mick Rock said something instructive when he said his mother, a pretty conservative woman brought up on all the great voices, absolutely loved Freddie, for his voice. My mum loved his voice, but also his life-affirming boldness and audacity. The flair, the passion, the theatrics, the humour .. who knows what it was he had, but he had it in spades.
The Toast
'I've had upheavals and I've had immense problems, but I've had a wonderful time and I have no regrets. Oh dear, I sound like Edith Piaf.' (Freddie Mercury).
Today, as that distinctive image adorns TV and newspapers one more time, let's take the opportunity to remind ourselves that Freddie Mercury was some kind of a champion. So when the clock chimes at seven tonight, anyone who enjoys a little fun and amusement and escapism should raise a glass of champagne to the man whom only debilitating illness and death could finally persuade to depart the stage he had set out to rule in so singular a fashion.
(I don't say 'born to rule,' for the reason that Freddie Mercury was very much his own self-creation. For all of the interest in Freddie Mercury's origins and identity, he was very much a self-made man who drew on a disparate range of influences to create something irreducibly unique. That's what makes 'Guide Me Home' from 'Barcelona' as intriguing as it is haunting. Whilst I am sure that Freddie Mercury was the best front man in the history of rock and pop (and that that was the least of his talents), I'm not quite sure what home was for Freddie. I trust that he found the place he was looking for. As for the champagne, I have a bottle ready, but only because I can't stand the stuff and so never got round to drinking this bottle that my dad acquired from somewhere. I'm not sure where it came from or how long it's been in the family. It's entirely possible that my mum bought it way back when. But, in an attempt to live up to Freddie's eccentric spirit, I shall do my best. I'll have some crisps with it, just to make it palatable.
Hold on. I've just noticed that the champagne is missing! I must have left it behind when moving house. Have you seen the price of champagne?! Forget it. Sorry Freddie, I'm not that keen. I'll try some sparkling wine instead. Or a bottle of cider. It all tastes the same to me. Whatever you enjoy and have to hand will suffice. It doesn't matter to anything like the extent the dull-witted critics thought. Freddie would like to tease and entice the audience in concert, just playing around with folk, getting people's attention and keeping it. He was always highly amusing in this respect. He was messing about with the champagne toast. It's only the po-faced who take it seriously. Go beyond the teasing and think long and hard on what Freddie said in interview: "The public want a showbiz type of feel. They get a buzz. Why do you think people like David Bowie and Elvis Presley have been so successful? Because they give their audiences champagne for breakfast? No, because they're what the people want."
That's what Freddie delivered on, always: giving people what they wanted. So it's at your own pleasure. Whatever you want.
Let's end on a jolly song. I used to sing this one in the Geometrical and Engineering class at school. I kid you not. It was the era of punk but, frankly, I was a hopeless case when it came to the anger and ugliness. It's jollity and frivolity every time for me. I like the seaside, always did.
Thanks Freddie. Thirty years on and still putting a smile on my face. And still burning through the sky. I have a feeling that Mr Fahrenheit is going to be floating around in ecstasy for a long while yet.
Addendum 1
I've been a Queen fan since 1974. I was just a tiny tot who loved 'Killer Queen' (and had no idea what those incredibly clever lyrics were about). That means I have spent forty seven years with the band. I know the music and the history of the band. I know the controversies and misadventures along the way. I would say that I know the highs and the lows of the band were it not for the fact that the things that some regard as lows I'm inclined to see as incredibly entertaining at least, and often very good. Let's be honest, if 'Hot Space' really is the worst thing the band ever did, then it's a win-win, because I love the album. Then again, I've always been partial to a little disco here and there. My Queen website contains an album by album, song by song review. There is a concertography, too, giving details for every live performance by the band, and offering a commentary on the various concerts seen and heard over the years (bootlegs of varying sound quality are many, some more enjoyable/listenable than others - it depends on how much of a fanatic you are).
Addendum 2
For specialists in esoteric theories.
I have a little theory that Freddie re-invented the lost world of the beach-paradise of his Zanzibar childhood as the British seaside. 'Clutching an orange juice, I'd literally step onto the beach,' Freddie recalled of his early years in Zanzibar. He was packed off to boarding school in India at the age of eight, saying goodbye forever to his early home. It was Paradise Lost and I think the trauma of separation stayed with him. The sadness at losing the one home was sublimated by inventing a new home in pretty jolly forms. It's all in the lost innocence story centred on the kingdom of Rhye that he would tell his sister when young. And it is all contained in a number of early songs: 'My Fairy King' (the song is the first reference to his new name), 'Lily of the Valley,' and 'Seven Seas of Rhye,' with its bucket-and-spade 'I do like to be beside the seaside' singalong ending. A reinvention of Freddie's once carefree life on the palm-fringed beach of his youth? I speculate. But there is a constant theme of lost paradise and innocence and search for a new life and identity in these songs.
'Wars will never cease / Is there time enough for peace?'
I like Freddie's little Elvis impersonation at the end of this song, emphasising that this Heaven really is 'for everyone.'
There's an idealism to the song that has universal appeal. It's good, every now and then, to affirm possibilities for a world of peace and joy for all - Paradise Regained. It will take some effort, but won't be achieved unless people are inspired to try in the first place. A general appeal is a good place to start.
I was watching Katherine Jenkins' 'Believe' show,
Live From The O2 Arena London 2010 the other day. The show ends with 'Nella Fantasia,'
'In My Fantasy,' a song based on Ennio Morricone's 'Gabriel's Oboe' from the
film 'The Mission' (1986). Katherine introduces the song with these words: 'I
thought it would be nice to go out with this song which translated means "In my
fantasy world there is a world where there is peace and truth and justice and
honesty" and it is called "Nella Fantasia."'
That would be nice. But it will take treading the hard boards of politics for its realization, though. Any ideal or utopia that is pure unmediated fantasy is either idle, when passive, or a positive menace when active. Politics is about disagreement, with each person having their own inner 'yes' and 'no' in relation to truth and justice. Any attempt to impose fantasy as unmediated truth and justice will always tend to turn into its opposite. If freedom is the appreciation of necessity (truth and justice as objective realities, however revealed), then the key term is 'appreciation.' Still, it's a nice song. And so is 'Heaven for Everyone.' Beyond the hedonism of the band there is a core idealism, which is a saving grace.
Addendum 3
The statement Freddie released shortly before he died concluded: 'The time has now come for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth, and I hope everyone will join with me, my doctors and all those worldwide in the fight against this terrible disease.'
Ian Green, Chief Executive of Terrence Higgins Trust, the UK's leading HIV and sexual health charity, writes this:
'Freddie wanted his death to save others and to galvanise people across the globe in the fight against HIV. And it did. His death heightened awareness, inspired action and - as importantly - raised a huge amount of money to fund research, support those affected and to educate.
The Christmas number one in 1991 was the re-release of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, which raised over £1 million to support our work at Terrence Higgins Trust. And while today the nature of our work is thankfully very different, there's still a huge amount of work to do.
Now as we approach World AIDS Day on 1 December, we're targeting the end of new HIV cases by 2030 because of the incredible tools we have, which means no one should be contracting the virus any longer.
So don't just be sad about Freddie's untimely death today - celebrate his legacy, the incredible songs he wrote and sang, and play your part in educating others about all the progress we've made in the fight against HIV.
The progress Freddie so desperately wanted to see.'
Freddie Mercury's death 30 years ago changed my life forever
'The Miracle' is one of the best songs that Queen ever recorded. I think there was a part of him that thought a miracle would come, said Brian May in interview. For my part, I mounted a long defence of Freddie Mercury on the Roger Phillips show on Radio Merseyside as controversy erupted in the aftermath of his death. The huge wave of sympathy that overtook the country when Freddie's death was announced incited a reaction on the part of those who were concerned more to condemn the man's sexuality and lifestyle than offer their condolences. There's a time and a place for a final reckoning. I still see people insisting that truth trumps feelings, in all contexts. I find that view oafish in the extreme. Even if they are right in the views they express - and they seldom are - then their manner is repellent rather than persuasive. To the critics who swarmed all over the airwaves, Freddie Mercury was the author of his own demise and was deserving of no sympathy and no respect, not least on account of his role in spreading the 'gay plague.' This was ugly stuff, sabotaging the grieving process. I heard one caller after another holding forth to this effect on The Phillips Phone-In and so decided to intervene. I wrote a defence at feverish pace. My intentions had been to deliver a text that was short and to the point. Unfortunately, being a Freddie fan with a capacious memory and an inordinate facility for writing, it was excess all areas. The text was long and detailed, well-reasoned in the main, but with some savage polemical punches delivered wherever they would be most effective. Polemic is often necessary in dispensing with niceties to cut to the chase. It takes considerably more effort to debunk falsehood than it does to perpetrate it. There is a need to curtail the tendencies of bigotry to feed itself on the hatred and anger it incites. I am rather pugilistic by nature, and not averse to fighting dirty, especially when confronting the hate-filled, the prejudiced, the intolerant, the narrow-minded, the blinkered, and the bigoted. That's a lot of folk, but I can generate a lot of words, and tend to have more than enough to go round. I thundered away, raining down point after point like hammer blows on the heads of the diehards, exposing the inherent inhumanity of their condemnations. Even if - if - such people were correct, I reasoned, the kind of unforgiving, pitiless society their sense of righteousness invoked would be an impossibly inhuman place to live. Frankly, as a fine, upstanding citizen of high moral virtue, I would much prefer the combination of filth, fury, and fantasy contained in Freddie's 'Fairy Fellers Master Stroke.' What was striking was the tendency to condemn people by standards that didn't apply. I'm far from being expert in such matters. But it struck me that the seventies was a decade of sexual permissiveness, exploring the licence created by the sixties, but with people acting not quite knowing of any deleterious consequences. The suspicion is that by the time Aids struck, Freddie already felt it was too late. By the end, he was living like a nun (he said in interview). I think this was all a matter of timing rather than morals. Freddie had gone from uncertainty and repression with respect to his sexuality to liberation and, for a while, went hell-for-leather in pursuit of pleasure and got unlucky. We know better now, is the defence. We knew better then, claimed those determined to take the moral high ground (and put people off morality for life with the inhuman application of principle).
Sadly, I no longer have that text (or I don't think I have; I live in hope that it may be buried among my many papers). I did have a tape recording of its reading, part by part. Alas, I have no idea where it went. A lover of music and radio, I had boxes and bagfulls of audio cassettes, in countless numbers, maybe thousands. I would love to read or hear that text again. My one-man fight-back against the hordes of Orcs descending on poor Freddie's memory was one of my finest hours.
Sections of the text were read out intermittently throughout Roger Phillips' show, from 12 noon to 2pm. By the end, I think I had worn the bigots down into submission. If they still disagreed, they didn't have the energy to take me on any more. It all ended with a lame protest from one that this densely reasoned text of mine, delivered every ten or fifteen minutes or so, was now 'beyond reason.' It was the white flag of surrender - they had had enough. I don't know if I had actually won the battle here or simply bored the bigots into the ground. Probably the latter. They gave up, anyway, probably in a concern to put an end to my interminable berating of them with an unbeatable combination of fact, logic, and polemic. We are now at the last section anyway, Phillips explained to those pleading for an end to their torture. It is to Roger Phillips' credit that the text was delivered in full.
I had taken on the hate-filled bigots and sent them packing. The only other thing I would add here is that I didn't have the nerve to enter the lists using my real name. I knew that people who knew me listened to Roger Phillips and Radio Merseyside and I really didn't want the publicity. Being pretty introverted by nature, I would have preferred to be doing anything but entering public controversy. I am still not remotely comfortable with visibility. But I will take on injustice whenever I have to. I was raging at the abuse and decided to put myself forward. I took the appropriately exotic name of Vinoba, which I took from a chapter on Indian anarchism in the book Anarchism Today (1971) edited by David Apter and James Joll. The book examines Vinoba Bhave as Gandhi's 'spiritual heir,' developing the revolutionary implications of Gandhi's principles.
As it happened, members of the family had little trouble identifying my trademark style. It wasn't difficult, frankly. I do tend to have some very distinctive and easily recognisable flourishes. Whatever conclusions they drew was never mentioned. There is, however, no need for anyone to guess my motivations here: I found the criticisms of Freddie Mercury in the days following his death an abomination against all that is decent and holy. I had seen something very similar happen in the days (and weeks, months, and years) following the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989. I had been on the terraces that afternoon in Sheffield, witnessing the events that led to the deaths of 97 Liverpool fans and the injury of hundreds more. Within a day, accusations were being levelled that Liverpool supporters were responsible for the deaths of their fellow fans. If this the truth that trumps feelings that the pompous and po-faced insist on? The presumption that truth is always so clear and distinct is a piece of breath-taking naivety. There are reasons for conventions which are respectful of people's feelings. With respect to Hillsborough, tragedy was compounded by calumny masquerading as truth. The natural process of grieving was allowed no time and space to do its work of healing. In no time we were mired in the inhumanity of those insisting that lies were truth. That was in 1989. Just two years later, I saw the same thing happening with respect to something - and someone - else I valued. As a Queen fan, the death of Freddie Mercury hit me hard. I experienced it as the final death of youth. I had grown up with Freddie. His death was deeply upsetting in a most personal way. Of course people wanted to express their grief and celebrate the man and his music. Almost immediately there was a reaction from those who, for whatever reason, had objections to raise. Some were just snobs who thought pop music and all who loved it wretchedly vulgar. Others were homophobes and bigots relishing the opportunity to emphasise that the man had no-one but himself to blame for his untimely end. There was also the usual references to the 'gay plague' and such like. They were such great exemplars of the high morality they espoused. They were not persuasive. I got the distinct impression that they simply wanted to tell you 'I told you so' rather than persuade anyone. They strike me as anthropological pessimists, people who don't much like other people and relish nothing better than miring one and all in the swamp of their own negativity.
It was not the time to be having this 'debate,' if debate it was; it was a time to pay respects. Or, if you couldn't do that, then at least keep quiet. But certain people made it clear that they were not going to allow Freddie to pass in peace. Such people are quick to pronounce in poor judgement of others.
I wasn't motivated by a defence of Freddie Mercury's lifestyle, whatever you may understand by that. I cleave to certain clear and definite values. They are not necessarily the same as Freddie Mercury and Queen. I have neither the taste nor the talent for hedonism, in whatever form people may care to indulge in it. I read about the excess and the decadence, the lavish Queen parties attended by all manner of strange beings. It's not my way. I found the stories of Freddie swinging naked from the chandeliers amusing (did he actually do that?, I never did find out). But it's nothing something I would condone, still less do. I was never too concerned to condemn, either. I liked the man and the band first and foremost for the music. It offered something else and something more than other bands. It's my view that Queen were the greatest rock band that ever existed. Better even than The Beatles. There, I've said it. For sheer musicality allied to entertainment value, there's never been a band in the same league as Queen. At the same time, whilst not necessarily condoning certain actions and behaviours - think of the poster to the 'Jazz' album for one thing, the video to 'Body Language' for another, and a thousand more indiscretions, misdemeanours, and outrages besides - I did actually like that the band would walk a tight rope of good and bad taste, play shamelessly for the entertainment and amusement of the masses, be unafraid of a little, well, vulgarity, err on the side of fun and frivolity, and be 'catholic' in their embrace of the many-sidedness of life. Whilst many of those sides may not have been mine, I do appreciate the celebration of difference entailed by that many-sidedness and I do rather like that there are people who have the nerve to explore other avenues and highways in life. In other words, whilst I hold distinct views and values of my own, I don't use them as sticks to beat others with. I loathe bigots and bullies. At least as important as the views and values that people hold is the manner of their holding. Those who use standards of right and wrong, good and bad as a means of brow-beating others into submission and compliance do nothing to advance the cause of rightness and goodness. On the contrary, they just render society miserable and unliveable through an unfeeling and heartless imposition of truth and standards. It is that merciless mountainish inhumanity that erupted in the aftermath of Freddie Mercury's death that I took on with a full frontal vehemence that brought the controversialising to an end. We were at the beginning of a softening of attitudes. Is that the right way to go in the end? If we have lost the 'moral compass,' then it will take a lot more than thundering moral truths from Olympian heights of disdain to get it back. I don't care for the Ayatollahs of truth in any of their many forms, least of all when it is only his, her, or their own version of truth, falsely projected as unanswerable objective truth, such characters are most concerned to impose on others. As Queen drummer Roger Taylor once sang: 'Shove It.' I've been with Queen a long time now, and in that period I have learned to go my own way, immunised against the cheap moralising of the neurotics of the age.