Freddie Mercury

• 1. Introduction

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  Freddie Mercury, the pianist and lead singer of Queen, once described himself in two halves. "When I'm performing I'm an extrovert, yet inside I'm a completely different man." The showman who held whole stadiums in his hand gave very few interviews. Offstage he was shy, especially around people he did not know well. He was born Farrokh Bulsara, and he wrote songs that audiences are still singing decades after he last stood in front of a microphone. His life ended young, and the way it ended shaped a cause that his friends and bandmates took up afterwards. This documentary asks where such a performer came from. It asks what made his voice and his songs so hard to pin down, and whom he trusted when the lights went off. It also follows what the world has kept doing in his name since he left.

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• 2. Zanzibar To Queen

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  Stone Town, in the British protectorate of Zanzibar, was the birthplace of Farrokh Bulsara on the 5th of September 1946. He was born with four extra incisors, and he later credited them for his unusually wide vocal range. His parents, Bomi and Jer, were Gujarati Parsis from western India who practised Zoroastrianism. Bomi worked as a cashier at the British Colonial Office, and that job had brought the family to the island. A younger sister, Kashmira, arrived in 1952. Zanzibar remained a British protectorate until 1963, so he was born a British subject. On the 2nd of June 1969 he was registered a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies.

  Piano lessons began when he was seven, while he lived with relatives in India. In 1954, at the age of eight, he was sent to St. Peter's School, a British-style boarding school for boys in Panchgani, near Bombay. Between the ages of nine and twelve he collected stamps, mostly from the British Commonwealth, an interest he shared with his father. That stamp album survives as one of the few personal possessions of his held by a museum, the Postal Museum in London.

  At twelve he formed a school band, the Hectics, which covered Cliff Richard, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. A former bandmate said that "the only music he listened to, and played, was Western pop music". A friend recalled his "uncanny ability to listen to the radio and replay what he heard on piano". St. Peter's is also where he first began calling himself Freddie.

  In February 1963 he returned to Zanzibar and rejoined his parents at their flat. By the spring of 1964 the family was fleeing the revolution against the Sultan of Zanzibar and his mainly Arab government. Thousands of ethnic Arabs and Indians were killed in the violence. The Bulsaras first stayed at 19 Hamilton Close in Feltham, Middlesex, a town 13 miles west of central London. In late October they settled into a small house at 22 Gladstone Avenue.

  He studied art at Isleworth Polytechnic in West London, then graphic art and design at Ealing Art College, graduating with a diploma in 1969. Afterwards he sold second-hand Edwardian clothes and scarves in Kensington Market alongside the drummer Roger Taylor. He also worked as a baggage handler at Heathrow Airport. Taylor said he did not really know Mercury as a singer then. "He was just my mate. My crazy mate!"

  The year 1969 took him to Liverpool and a band called Ibex, later renamed Wreckage, which played what was described as "very Hendrix-style, heavy blues". He briefly lived above the Dovedale Towers, a pub on Penny Lane in the Mossley Hill district. When that group went nowhere, he joined Sour Milk Sea, an Oxford band. It too had broken up by early 1970.

  In April 1970 Mercury became lead singer of Smile, the band of Taylor and the guitarist Brian May. The bassist John Deacon joined in 1971. Mercury chose the name Queen over the reservations of the other members and of Trident Studios, the band's first management. He explained the choice later. "It's very regal obviously, and it sounds splendid. It's a strong name, very universal and immediate. I was certainly aware of the gay connotations, but that was just one facet of it." Around the same time he legally changed his surname from Bulsara to Mercury.

  Shortly before Queen's self-titled first album appeared, Mercury drew on his art training to design the band's crest. It combines the zodiac signs of the four members. Two lions stand for Deacon and Taylor, who are Leos, and a crab stands for May, a Cancer. Two fairies represent Mercury, a Virgo. A crown sits inside a stylised letter Q, flames rise above the crab, and an enormous phoenix looms over the whole design. The lion supporters give the crest a passing resemblance to the Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom.

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• 3. Voice And Songs

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  Bass low F up to soprano high F was the known span of Mercury's voice, even though his speaking voice sat in the baritone range. He sang most songs as a tenor, and he could belt as high as tenor high F. The biographer David Bret described a voice that moved from "a deep, throaty rock-growl to tender, vibrant tenor" within a few bars. It then climbed to "a high-pitched, perfect coloratura, pure and crystalline in the upper reaches".

  The Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballé recorded an album with him. She said that "the difference between Freddie and almost all the other rock stars was that he was selling the voice". She also praised his sense of rhythm, his vocal placement, and the way he glided between registers while finding the right colour for each word. Roger Daltrey of the Who called him "the best virtuoso rock 'n' roll singer of all time". Andrew Lloyd Webber, describing the lead he wanted for Jesus Christ Superstar, asked for "a genuine, genuine rock tenor" and told listeners to "Really think Freddie Mercury".

  In 2016 a research team led by Professor Christian Herbst set out to explain the appeal of that voice. The team analysed 23 commercially available Queen recordings, along with his solo work and a series of interviews. They identified a notably faster vibrato and the use of subharmonics as distinctive traits, especially when compared with opera singers. They also used an endoscopic video camera on a rock singer brought in to imitate Mercury.

  Ten of the seventeen songs on Queen's Greatest Hits album were Mercury's. They included "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Killer Queen", "Somebody to Love", "We Are the Champions" and "Don't Stop Me Now". The range of styles was the most striking part, covering rockabilly, progressive rock, heavy metal, gospel and disco. He gave his reason in a 1986 interview. "I hate doing the same thing again and again and again. I like to see what's happening now in music, film and theatre and incorporate all of those things."

  "Bohemian Rhapsody" does not repeat in cycles and contains dozens of chords. Six songs he wrote for Queen II deal with multiple key changes and complex material. "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" sits at the other end of the scale, with only a few chords. For all those intricate harmonies, he said he could barely read music. He composed most songs at the piano and used a wide variety of key signatures.

  Formal piano training ended when he was nine, and in London he later learned guitar. His favourite artists then were the Who, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and Led Zeppelin. Brian May said Mercury "had a wonderful touch on the piano" and played with "incredible rhythm, incredible passion and feeling". The keyboardist Rick Wakeman praised the way Mercury had discovered the instrument for himself. Mercury favoured concert grand pianos such as a Bechstein, occasionally played a harpsichord, and from 1980 used synthesisers in the studio.

  From the early 1980s he relied heavily on guest keyboardists. Fred Mandel, a Canadian who also worked for Pink Floyd, Elton John and Supertramp, played on his first solo project. Morgan Fisher collaborated with him from 1982, while Mike Moran in the studio and Spike Edney in concert joined from 1985. May said Mercury played piano less over time because he wanted to roam the stage. His guitar skills stayed rudimentary, yet "Ogre Battle" and "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" were both composed on the instrument, and he played rhythm guitar on the latter.

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• 4. On Stage

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  Live Aid in 1985 produced the performance that a group of music executives later voted the greatest live show in the history of rock. The result aired on a television program called "The World's Greatest Gigs". Mercury's powerful, sustained note in the a cappella section came to be known as "The Note Heard Round the World". Writing in 2005, John Harris said that anyone who ranked Mick Jagger or Robert Plant above Mercury had made "a terrible oversight". Harris judged him "easily the most godlike of them all".

  An early show gave Mercury his signature prop. He accidentally snapped a microphone stand off its heavy base, and he soon realised the broken stand could be used in endless ways. Photographer Denis O'Regan captured a definitive pose during the 1986 tour, with Mercury arched back, knee bent and face turned to the sky. O'Regan called him "a once-in-a-lifetime showman".

  A writer for The Spectator described a performer who set out "to tease, shock and ultimately charm his audience with various extravagant versions of himself". David Bowie, who recorded "Under Pressure" with Queen, said Mercury "took it over the edge" compared with other theatrical rock performers. Bowie added that he had always admired a man who wears tights. Brian May wrote that Mercury could make "the last person at the back of the furthest stand in a stadium feel that he was connected". The roadie Peter Hince said Mercury gave everything in every show.

  An estimated 700 concerts around the world carried Mercury's name alongside Queen's. He once said, "We're the Cecil B. DeMille of rock and roll, always wanting to do things bigger and better." Queen became the first band to play South American stadiums, and in 1981 they broke attendance records at the Morumbi Stadium in São Paulo. In 1986 they crossed the Iron Curtain to play for 80,000 people in Budapest, one of the biggest rock concerts ever held in Eastern Europe.

  Knebworth Park in England hosted his final live show with Queen on the 9th of August 1986. Attendance there was estimated as high as 200,000. A week earlier, May recalled, Mercury had told him, "I'm not going to be doing this forever. This is probably the last time." As the British national anthem "God Save the Queen" played, Mercury stood draped in a robe and held a golden crown aloft, bidding the crowd farewell.

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• 5. Beyond Queen

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  A single released in 1973 under the name Larry Lurex was Mercury's first solo effort. Robin Geoffrey Cable, a house engineer at Trident Studios, was working on a side project while Queen recorded their debut album. He enlisted Mercury to sing lead on "I Can Hear Music" and "Goin' Back". Eleven years later Mercury worked with Giorgio Moroder on "Love Kills", written for a restored version of Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis. It debuted at number 10 on the UK singles chart in 1984.

  Mr. Bad Guy, released in 1985, was the first of his two full solo albums, and it debuted in the top ten of the UK Album Charts. AllMusic critic Eduardo Rivadavia called it "outstanding from start to finish". A remix of its single "Living on My Own" reached number one in the UK in 1993, and it earned Mercury a posthumous Ivor Novello Award. In 1987 his version of the Platters hit "The Great Pretender" peaked at number four in the UK.

  Barcelona, the 1988 album he recorded with Montserrat Caballé, blended popular music with opera. One critic called it "the most bizarre CD of the year", yet the album was a commercial success. Its title track debuted at number eight in the UK and was also a hit in Spain. It became the official anthem of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, held a year after his death. Caballé sang it live at the opening ceremony while Mercury's part played on a screen. She sang it again before the 1999 UEFA Champions League Final between Manchester United and Bayern Munich, held in Barcelona.

  In 1986 Mercury recorded two songs for Dave Clark's West End sci-fi musical Time, including the title song. Clark played the recording for Laurence Olivier, who appeared in the show as a hologram in one of his last roles. Olivier's verdict, as Clark remembered it, was "Now, my dear boy, there's an actor." Clark arranged a dinner party at his home, and the two men got on, in his words, like a house on fire.

  Between 1981 and 1983 Mercury recorded several tracks with Michael Jackson, including demos of "State of Shock", "Victory" and "There Must Be More to Life Than This". None were officially released at the time. Jackson went on to record "State of Shock" with Mick Jagger for the Jacksons' album Victory. Mercury put his solo version of "There Must Be More to Life Than This" on Mr. Bad Guy. Queen reworked it and released it on the compilation Queen Forever in 2014.

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• 6. Friends, Lovers And Cats

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  In 1969, a year before Queen formed, Brian May introduced Mercury to Mary Austin, who worked at the Kensington fashion boutique Biba. They began a long relationship and lived together for several years in West Kensington. By the mid-1970s Mercury had begun an affair with David Minns, an American record executive at Elektra Records. In December 1976 he told Austin about his sexuality, and their romance ended. He moved to a new address at 12 Stafford Terrace and bought Austin a place of her own nearby. He often called her his only true friend. In a 1985 interview he said, "To me, she was my common-law wife. To me, it was a marriage."

  Garden Lodge, his final home, was an eight-bedroom Georgian mansion in Kensington with a quarter-acre garden behind a high brick wall. Austin picked it out. Mercury left the house to her in his will, telling her, "You would have been my wife, and it would have been yours anyway." He was also godfather to her older son, Richard.

  From 1979 to 1985 Mercury lived in Munich, where he could escape the media spotlight. The Austrian actress Barbara Valentin became a friend, and she appears in the video for "It's a Hard Life". Mercury first lived with her and her daughter before moving to his own apartment. In Munich he also had an intense love affair with the German restaurateur Winfried "Winnie" Kirchberger. In the liner notes of Mr. Bad Guy he thanked Kirchberger "for board and lodging". He wore a silver wedding band that Kirchberger had given him.

  By 1985 Mercury had begun another long relationship, with the Irish-born hairdresser Jim Hutton, whom he called his husband. Hutton lived with him for the last seven years of his life and nursed him through his illness. Hutton tested HIV-positive in 1990. Mercury wore a gold wedding band from Hutton, given in 1986, until the end, and he was cremated with it on.

  In December 1974 the New Musical Express asked Mercury directly about his sexuality. He deflected with a joke about schoolboy pranks and added, "I'm not going to elaborate further." Homosexual acts between adult men over 21 had been decriminalised in the United Kingdom only seven years earlier. When Melody Maker asked in 1981 whether rock stars should use their power to improve the world, he answered, "Leave that to the politicians." Looking back in 1992, John Marshall of Gay Times imagined Mercury telling the world, "I am what I am. So what?"

  The disc jockey Kenny Everett met Mercury in 1974, when he invited the singer onto his Capital London breakfast show. In 1975 Mercury brought him an advance copy of "Bohemian Rhapsody". Everett doubted any station would play a six-minute track, but after hearing it he exclaimed, "Forget it, it's going to be number one for centuries". Capital had not officially accepted the song, so he teased listeners with a record he could not play. Then he kept playing it with the excuse, "Oops, my finger must've slipped." One weekend he aired it fourteen times, and the station's switchboard was overwhelmed with callers asking when it would be released. The two men fell out by 1985 and reconciled in 1989. Everett died from an AIDS-related illness just over three years after Mercury.

  Tim Curry, who starred in The Rocky Horror Show, became a friend after Mercury saw both the stage and film versions. Curry later told House and Garden magazine how he designed Mercury's garden. "Freddie came back from a tour and said, 'The garden, dear, it's dead.'" Curry asked whether he had watered it, and Mercury replied, "Water it, dear?" Elton John was a long-time friend too. Shortly before his death, Mercury arranged for a watercolour by the 19th-century painter Henry Scott Tuke, John's favourite artist, to be given to John on Christmas Day.

  Peter Freestone, his longtime assistant, said that "if Freddie had his way, he would have been born aged 18 in Feltham." The BBC broadcaster Bob Harris remembered afternoon visits to Mercury's flat near Shepherd's Bush, where the fine china and sugar lumps came out for tea. Asked about his outlandish persona, Mercury would say only that it was "inbred" and that he would "always walk around like a Persian popinjay".

  At least ten cats shared his life, among them Tom, Jerry, Oscar, Tiffany, Delilah and Lily. All but Tiffany and Lily, who were gifts, were adopted from the Blue Cross. The artist Ann Ortman painted a portrait of each one. Mercury wrote a song for Delilah, his favourite, which appeared on the Queen album Innuendo. He dedicated Mr. Bad Guy to Jerry and the others, and to "all the cat lovers across the universe", with a crude sign-off for everybody else.

  Pikes Hotel in Ibiza hosted his 41st birthday on the 5th of September 1987, several months after he discovered he had contracted HIV. The owner, Anthony Pike, called him "the most beautiful person I've ever met in my life". About 700 guests attended. The cake was shaped like Antoni Gaudí's Sagrada Família, but it collapsed and was replaced by a two-metre sponge decorated with notes from "Barcelona". The bill, which included 232 broken glasses, went to Queen's manager, Jim Beach.

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• 7. Final Years

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  Weeks before Queen's final American appearance with Mercury, on Saturday Night Live on the 25th of September 1982, he reportedly visited a doctor in New York City. The biographers Matt Richards and Mark Langthorne say he went to have a white lesion on his tongue checked, which might have been an early sign of HIV infection. They place the first symptoms of HIV/AIDS in 1982.

  In October 1986 the tabloids News of the World and The Sun reported that he had taken a blood test at a Harley Street clinic. He was quoted as saying he was "perfectly fit and healthy". According to Jim Hutton, Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS in late April 1987. Around then he said in an interview that he had tested negative. He told his Queen bandmates in May 1989. As the press chased rumours, fuelled by his gaunt appearance and the band's absence from touring, Mercury and his inner circle kept denying them. It has been suggested that speaking earlier could have helped AIDS awareness.

  The 1990 Brit Awards, held at the Dominion Theatre in London on the 18th of February, were his last time on a stage. He joined the rest of Queen to collect the award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. In May 1991 he was filmed for the video of "These Are the Days of Our Lives", looking very thin. The director, Rudi Dolezal, recalled that "AIDS was never a topic. We never discussed it. He didn't want to talk about it."

  The band recorded while Mercury felt able to come into the studio, sometimes for just an hour or two at a time. May remembered him saying, "Write me more. Write me stuff. I want to just sing this and do it and when I am gone you can finish it off." The assistant engineer Justin Shirley-Smith said the sessions were not sad but very happy, and that Mercury was one of the funniest people he had met. Work with Queen ended in June 1991, and Mercury retired to his Kensington home. Austin visited regularly in his last weeks. He began to lose his sight and could no longer leave his bed. He chose to hasten his death by refusing medication and taking only painkillers.

  On the 22nd of November 1991 Mercury called Jim Beach to his home to prepare a public statement. It was released the next day. "I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV positive and have AIDS." He explained that he had kept it private "to protect the privacy of those around me", but that the time had come for friends and fans "to know the truth". Before his death he had also told Beach, "You can do what you want with my music, but don't make me boring."

  On the evening of the 24th of November 1991, about 24 hours after the statement, Mercury died at home in Kensington at the age of 45. The cause was bronchial pneumonia resulting from AIDS. Dave Clark of the Dave Clark Five was at the bedside vigil. Austin phoned Mercury's parents and sister, and the news reached newspaper and television crews in the early hours of the 25th of November.

  A Zoroastrian priest conducted the funeral on the 27th of November 1991 at West London Crematorium, where a plinth commemorates him under his birth name. His family and 35 close friends attended, including Elton John and the members of Queen. His coffin entered the chapel to Aretha Franklin's "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" and "You've Got a Friend". As he wished, Austin took his ashes and buried them in an undisclosed location, which she has said she will never reveal. Queen fans traditionally believe they lie at Kensal Green Cemetery.

  His estate was valued at around £8 million, and he had spent and donated much of his wealth during his lifetime. Austin received 50% of his privately owned shares, while his sister Kashmira and his parents each received 25%. He left £500,000 each to Joe Fannelli, Jim Hutton and Peter Freestone, and £100,000 to Terry Giddings. Mercury never held a driving licence, so a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow chauffeured him around London from 1979 onward. His sister later lent it for public events, including the 2002 West End premiere of We Will Rock You. It sold at auction in Birmingham in 2013 for £74,600.

  Graffiti messages from mourners soon covered the outer walls of Garden Lodge in Logan Place. Three years later Time Out reported that the wall had become London's biggest rock 'n' roll shrine. Letters kept appearing there until 2017, when Austin had the wall cleared.

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• 8. The Afterlife

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  Made in Heaven, Queen's final studio album, appeared in November 1995 with Mercury's last recordings from 1991. Its cover superimposes the Freddie Mercury statue over Lake Geneva with the Duck House lake cabin he rented. He wrote and recorded his final songs there, at Mountain Studios. The song "Mother Love" was his last vocal recording. He built it over a drum machine, and after the penultimate verse he told the band, "I will finish it when I come back next time." He never returned, so May recorded the final verse himself.

  The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness took place at Wembley Stadium on the 20th of April 1992, before an audience of 72,000. Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey, Elton John, Metallica, David Bowie, Annie Lennox, Tony Iommi, Guns N' Roses, George Michael, Def Leppard, Seal and Liza Minnelli all appeared, and U2 joined by satellite. Elizabeth Taylor called Mercury "an extraordinary rock star who rushed across our cultural landscape like a comet shooting across the sky". The broadcast reached 76 countries, with an estimated viewing audience of 1 billion people. The remaining members of Queen also founded the Mercury Phoenix Trust that April, which has since raised millions of pounds for AIDS charities. As the first major rock star to die of AIDS-related complications, Mercury made his death an important event in the history of the disease. The 2021 documentary Freddie Mercury - The Final Act won the International Emmy Award for Best Arts Programming in 2022.

  In 1992, the year after his death, Queen album sales in the United States rose dramatically, and the film Wayne's World put "Bohemian Rhapsody" in front of new listeners. By 2004 Queen had sold 34.5 million albums in the United States, about half of them after 1991. Worldwide estimates run as high as 300 million. Queen's Greatest Hits is the best-selling album of all time in the United Kingdom. Major polls named both "We Are the Champions" and "Bohemian Rhapsody" the greatest song of all time. The "Bohemian Rhapsody" video was voted the greatest ever by readers of Q magazine in October 2007.

  One year after the whole band received the 1990 Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music, Mercury received the same award individually in 1992. Queen entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001, the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2003 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2004. The 2005 Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song Collection came next, followed by a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. The Polar Music Prize in 2025 described Mercury as "one of the most charismatic front figures in the history of music". In a 2002 BBC poll he ranked number 58 among the 100 Greatest Britons.

  On the 25th of November 1996 Mercury's father and Montserrat Caballé unveiled a nearly ten-foot statue by Irena Sedlecká in Montreux, Switzerland. Since 2003, fans have gathered there each September for a memorial day. A Royal Mail stamp followed in 1999, and in 2009 a star was unveiled on Feltham High Street by his mother and May. An English Heritage blue plaque went up at 22 Gladstone Avenue on the 1st of September 2016. A Feltham street was renamed Freddie Mercury Close on the 24th of February 2020.

  The heavens joined in. Asteroid 17473 Freddiemercury was named on the 5th of September 2016, the 70th anniversary of his birth. Joel Parker of the Southwest Research Institute said the line "I'm a shooting star leaping through the sky" was now truer than ever. In May 2024 a crater on the planet Mercury was named Bulsara, after his birth name. A frog genus discovered in Kerala in 2013, near where he spent most of his childhood, was named Mercurana, and a Brazilian damselfly was named Heteragrion freddiemercuryi.

  Since 2021 a Freddie Mercury Museum has operated in one of his Stone Town homes. It displays photographs and dozens of handwritten lyrics, but it stays silent on culturally sensitive matters in Zanzibar. These include his sexuality, his death from AIDS complications, and the killing of Arabs and Indians that forced his family out in 1964.

  The 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody became the highest-grossing musical biographical film of its time. Rami Malek won the Academy Award, BAFTA Award, Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor for playing Mercury. The film drew mixed reviews and contained historical inaccuracies, and critics also faulted its portrayal of his sexuality.

  From the 4th of August to the 5th of September 2023, Sotheby's in London exhibited almost 1,500 of his belongings, which he had given to Mary Austin, before selling them across six auctions. Nearly 140,000 fans visited. A Yamaha baby grand piano he used to compose many of the band's hits sold for £1.7 million, and his handwritten lyrics for "Bohemian Rhapsody" fetched £1.38 million. The crown and cloak from the 1986 Magic tour sold for £635,000. Even the Garden Lodge door, covered in fans' graffiti, found a buyer at £412,750.

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