Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara; 5 September, 1946 – 24 November, 1991) was a British musician, best known as the lead singer of the rock band Queen (inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001). He is noted for his vocal abilities and for his live
performances. As a songwriter, he composed many international hits, including
"Bohemian Rhapsody", "Killer Queen",
"Somebody to Love", "We Are the
Champions" and "Crazy Little Thing Called Love". In addition to
his work with Queen, he also produced several hits as a solo artist. Mercury, who was of Indian
Parsi descent and who grew up in India, has been referred to as "Britain's first Asian pop
star."[1] He died of
complications from AIDS in 1991.
Although Queen was not always popular with rock music critics,[2][3][4] estimates of the band's worldwide record sales to date have been placed as high as 300
million.[5] The band has also spent more collective weeks
on the UK Album Charts than any other musical act, including The Beatles.[6] In
2006, Time Asia named Mercury as one of the most influential Asian heroes of the past 60
years.[7] On the other
hand, he has been criticized for having kept his ethnicity, as well as his HIV status, a secret from
the public.[8][9]
Biography
Early years
Mercury (on right) with his college friends in 1964, after a lunchtime drink.
Freddie Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara on the African island of Zanzibar, at the time a British colony, now part of Tanzania. His parents, Bomi Bulsara[a] and Jer Bulsara were Parsis from British India.[10][b] The family had moved to Zanzibar in order for Bomi to continue his job as a
middle-ranking cashier at the British Colonial Office. He had one
younger sister, Kashmira.[11]
Mercury was sent back to India at the age of 8 to attend St. Peter's School,
a boarding school for boys at Panchgani near
Bombay (now Mumbai). At St. Peter's, he was a bright student who
excelled at sports. At school, he formed a popular school band, called The Hectics, for
which he played the piano. A friend from the time recalls that he "had an uncanny ability to listen to the radio and replay what
he heard on piano."[12] It
was also at St. Peter's where he began to call himself "Freddie". Mercury remained in India for most of his childhood, living
with his grandmother and aunt. He completed his education in India at St. Mary's (ISC)
High School in Mazagon before returning to Zanzibar.
At the age of 17, Mercury and his family were forced to flee from Zanzibar, due to the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution.[1] The family moved into a small house in Feltham,
London. He enrolled at Isleworth Polytechnic (now West Thames College) in West London where he studied art. He ultimately earned a Diploma in Art and
Graphic Design at Ealing Art College, later using these skills in order to design the
Queen crest. Mercury remained a British citizen for the rest of his life.
Following graduation, Mercury joined a series of bands and sold second-hand clothes in the Kensington Market in London. He also held a job at Heathrow
Airport. Friends from the time remembered Mercury as a quiet and shy student who showed a great deal of interest in music.
[13]In 1969 he formed the band
Ibex, which was later renamed to Wreckage. When this band failed to take off, he joined a
second band called Sour Milk Sea. However, by early 1970, this group broke up as well.[14]
In April of 1970, Mercury joined with guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor, who had previously been in a band called Smile.
Despite reservations from the other members, Mercury chose the name "Queen" for the new band. He later said about the band's
name, "I was certainly aware of the gay connotations, but that was just one facet of it."[15] At around this time, he also
legally changed his name.
Influences
As a child, Mercury listened to a considerable amount of Indian music, and one of his early influences was the
Bollywood playback singer Lata Mangeshkar, whom he had the opportunity to see live in India.[16] After moving to England, Mercury became a fan of Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and The
Beatles.[17] He said of Hendrix:
"Jimi Hendrix is very important. He's my idol. He sort of epitomizes, from his presentation on stage, the whole works of a rock
star. There's no way you can compare him. You either have the magic or you don't. There's no way you can work up to it. There's
nobody who can take his place."[18]
Another one of Mercury’s favourite performers was singer and actress Liza Minnelli. He
once explained: "One of my early inspirations came from Cabaret. I absolutely adore Liza
Minnelli, she's a total wow. The way she delivers her songs-the sheer energy." [19]
Career
Singer
Regarded as one of the greatest singers in popular music,[7][20][21] Freddie Mercury possessed a very distinctive voice, including a recorded range of nearly four
octaves.[22][23][24] Although his speaking voice naturally fell in the baritone range, he delivered most songs in the tenor range. Biographer
David Bret described his voice as "escalating within a few bars from a deep, throaty
rock-growl to tender, vibrant tenor, then on to a high-pitched, almost perfect coloratura,
pure and crystalline in the upper reaches."[25] On the other hand, he would often lower the highest notes during live performances.
Mercury also claimed never to have had any formal training and suffered from vocal nodules.[26] Catalan soprano Montserrat Caballé, with whom Mercury recorded an album
expressed her opinion that "the difference between Freddie and almost all the other rock stars was that he was selling the
voice."[9]
Songwriter
Mercury wrote ten out of the seventeen songs on Queen's Greatest
Hits album: "Seven Seas of Rhye", "Killer
Queen", "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Somebody to Love", "Good Old-Fashioned
Lover Boy", "We Are the Champions", "Bicycle
Race", "Don't Stop Me Now", "Crazy Little Thing Called Love", and "Play the
Game". However, by the 1980s, all four members of the band were writing hits.
The most notable aspect of his songwriting involved the wide range of different genres that he used, which included, among
other styles, rockabilly, heavy metal and
disco. As he explained in a 1986 interview,"I hate doing the same thing again and again. I like to
see what's happening now in music, film and theatre and incorporate all of those things."[27] Compared to many popular songwriters, Mercury also tended to write
musically complex material. For example, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is acyclic in structure and comprises dozens of chords.[28][29] "Crazy Little Thing Called Love", on the other hand, contains only a few chords. Despite
the fact that Mercury often wrote very intricate harmonies, he also claimed that he
could barely read music.[30] He
wrote most of his songs on the piano, often choosing keys that were technically difficult for band mate and guitarist Brian May.
Live performer
Freddie Mercury with a Brazilian flag during the
Rock in Rio concert, 1985.
Mercury is noted for his live performances, which were often delivered to stadium audiences around the world. He displayed a
highly theatrical style that often invoked a great deal of participation from the crowd. A writer for The Spectator described him as "a performer out to tease, shock and ultimately charm his audience
with various extravagant versions of himself."[31] David Bowie, who performed at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert and recorded the song "Under Pressure" with Queen said of Mercury, "Of all the more theatrical rock performers, Freddie took it
further than the rest." ... "He took it over the edge. And of course, I always admired a man who wears tights. I only saw him in
concert once, and as they say, he was definitely a man who could hold an audience in the palm of his hand. He could always turn a
cliché to his advantage."[32]
One of Mercury's most notable performances with Queen took place at Live Aid in 1985, during
which the entire stadium audience of 72,000 people clapped, sang, and swayed in unison. Queen's performance at the event has
since been voted by a group of music executives as the greatest live performance in the history of rock music. The results were
aired on a television program called "The World's Greatest gigs".[33][34] In reviewing Live Aid in 2005, one critic wrote, "Those who compile lists of Great Rock
Frontmen and award the top spots to Mick Jagger, Robert
Plant et al. are guilty of a terrible oversight. Freddie, as evidenced by his Dionysian Live Aid performance, was easily
the most godlike of them all."[35]
Over the course of his career, Mercury performed an estimated 700 concerts in countries around the world with Queen. A notable
aspect of Queen concerts was the large scale involved.[27] He once explained, "We're the Cecil B. DeMille
of rock and roll, always wanting to do things bigger and better."[27] The band was the first ever to play South American stadiums, breaking worldwide records
for concert attendance in the Morumbi Stadium in Sao
Paulo in 1981.[36] In 1986,
Queen was also the first to play behind the Iron Curtain, when it performed to a crowd of
80,000 in Budapest.[37] Mercury's final live performance with Queen took place on August 9th, 1986 at
Knebworth Park in England and drew an attendance estimated as high as 300,000.[38]
Instrumentalist
Freddie Mercury playing guitar during a live concert with
Queen in
Frankfurt, 1984.
Mercury played the piano in many of Queen's most popular songs. Examples of piano-based Queen songs include "Killer Queen",
"Bohemian Rhapsody", "Good Old Fashion Lover Boy", "We Are the Champions", and "Don't Stop Me Now". He used concert grand pianos
and, in the studio, various keyboard instruments such as organs, harpsichords and an upright piano. From 1979 onwards also he
made extensive use of synthesizers in the studio. Queen guitarist Brian May claims that
Mercury was unimpressed with his abilities at the piano and used the instrument less over time.[39] Although he wrote many guitar
lines, Mercury possessed only rudimentary skills on the instrument. Nevertheless, he wrote the song "Crazy Little Thing Called
Love" on the guitar and often played it during live performances of the song.
Solo career
In addition to his work with Queen, Mercury put out two albums and several singles. Although his solo work was not as
commercially successful as most Queen albums, the two albums and several of the solo songs debuted in the top 10 of the
UK Album Charts. His first solo effort involved the contribution of a song called
Love Kills to a 1984 album dedicated to the 1926 Fritz
Lang film Metropolis. The song, which was produced by Giorgio Moroder, debuted at the #10 position in the UK charts.[40]
Mercury produced two solo albums, Mr. Bad Guy and Barcelona, released in 1985 and 1988, respectively. The former was a pop-oriented album that
emphasized disco and dance music."Barcelona" was recorded with the opera singer Montserrat
Caballé, whom he had long admired. Although it debuted in the top ten of the UK Album
Charts,[40] Mr. Bad Guy was not considered to have been a commercial success relative
to most Queen albums. However, in 1993, a remix of "Living on My Own", a single from
the album, reached the #1 position on the UK Singles Charts.[41] The song also
garnered Mercury a posthumous Ivor Novello Award. All Music critic Ed Rivadavia describes Mr. Bad Guy as "outstanding from start to finish" and
expressed his view that Mercury "did a commendable job of stretching into uncharted territory."[42] In particular, the album was heavily synthesizer-driven in a way that was not
characteristic of previous Queen albums.
Barcelona, recorded with Catalan soprano
Montserrat Caballé, combined elements of popular music and opera. Many critics were
uncertain of what to make of the album, with one critic referring to it as "the most bizarre CD of the year."[43] Caballé, on the other hand, considered
the album to have been one of the great successes of her career. The title song from the album debuted at the #8 position in the
UK charts and was a hit in Spain.[44]
In addition to the two solo albums, Mercury released several additional singles, including his own version of the hit
The Great Pretender by The Platters, which
debuted at the #5 spot in the UK in 1987.[40] In September of 2006, a compilation album featuring Mercury’s solo work was
released in the UK in honour of what would have been his sixtieth birthday. The album debuted in the top 10 of the
UK Album Charts.
Personal
In the early 1970s Mercury was in a long-term relationship with a girlfriend named Mary Austin, with whom he lived for many
years. However, by the mid-1970s, the singer began an affair with a male record executive at Elektra Records, which ultimately resulted in the end of his relationship with Austin.[45] Mercury and Austin
nevertheless remained close friends through the years, with Mercury often referring to her as his only true friend. In a 1985
interview, Mercury said of Austin, "All my lovers asked me why they couldn't replace Mary (Austin), but it's simply impossible.
The only friend I've got is Mary, and I don't want anybody else. To me, she was my common-law wife. To me, it was a marriage. We
believe in each other, that's enough for me. I couldn't fall in love with a man the same way as I have with Mary."[46] He also wrote several songs
about Austin, the most notable of which is "Love of My Life."[39]
By 1980, he began to frequent gay bathhouses and clubs in New York, where he met many short-term partners.[47] Inspired by Glenn Hughes of the Village People, Mercury also
began to grow a moustache at around this time.[47] By 1985 he began another long-term relationship with a
hairdresser named Jim Hutton. Hutton lived with Mercury for the last six years of his life, nursed him during his illness and was
present at his bedside when he died. Hutton also claims that Mercury died wearing a wedding band that he had given him.[48]
Although he cultivated a very flamboyant stage personality, several sources refer to Mercury as having been very shy in
person.[11][49][9] He also granted very few interviews. Mercury once said of himself:
"When I'm performing I'm an extrovert, yet inside I'm a completely different man."[4]
Death
According to companion Jim Hutton, Mercury was diagnosed with HIV in the spring of 1987.[50] Around that time, Mercury also claimed
to have tested negative for the virus in an interview.[9] Despite the denials, British press pursued the rampant rumours over the next few years,
fueled by Mercury's physical appearance, Queen's lack of touring and by reports from former lovers to various tabloid
journals.[51] Towards the end of
his life, he was routinely stalked by photographers, while the daily tabloid newspaper The
Sun featured a series of articles claiming that he was seriously ill. Mercury's gaunt appearance further fueled
speculation.
Mercury continued to record music in the studio until the month before he died in November of 1991. During the final year of
his life, Queen was at the height of its commercial success, as the album Innuendo entered the British charts at the number one position and sold 250,000 copies in the first
week alone.[52]
On November 22, 1991, Mercury called Queen's manager Jim
Beach over to his Kensington home, to discuss a public statement. The next day, November 23,
the following announcement was made to the press on behalf of Mercury:[53]
| “ |
Following the enormous conjecture in the press over the last two weeks, I wish to
confirm that I have been tested HIV positive and have AIDS. I felt it correct to keep this information private to date to protect
the privacy of those around me. However, the time has come now for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth and I
hope that everyone will join with my doctors and all those worldwide in the fight against this terrible disease. My privacy has
always been very special to me and I am famous for my lack of interviews. Please understand this policy will continue. |
” |
A little over 24 hours after issuing the statement, the singer died on November 24,
1991 at the age of 45, the same day as Kiss drummer
Eric Carr. He died at home, in his bedroom. The official cause of death was bronchial pneumonia resulting from AIDS.[54] Although he had not attended
religious services in years, Mercury's funeral was conducted by a Zoroastrian priest.
Singer Elton John and the remaining members of Queen attended the funeral. He was
cremated at Kensal Green Cemetery and the
whereabouts of his ashes now are unknown.
In his will, Mercury left the vast majority of his wealth including his home and recording royalties to Mary Austin and the
remainder to his parents and sister. He further left £500,000 to his chef Joe Fanelli, £500,000 to his personal assistant Peter
Freestone, £100,000 to his driver Terry Giddings, and £500,000 to his partner, Jim Hutton. [55] Mary Austin continues to live at Mercury's home, Logan Place,
Kensington, with her family.[55]
Criticism and controversy
Regarding Ethnicity
Mercury has been criticized for having kept his Indian ethnicity a secret from the public. As a journalist from
The Times observed,"Freddie himself always played down his Indian origins. In the few
interviews he gave, he remained deliberately unclear about them.[1] A close friend of Mercury's further related to biographer David Bret: "[Farrokh] Bulsara was a name he had buried. He never wanted to talk about any period in his life
before he became Freddie Mercury, and everything about Freddie Mercury was a self-constructed thing."[56] A very critical journalist from
Times Online compared him to Michael Jackson: "He
wanted to pass as a white European rock’n’roll star. Curiously, people are horrified that Michael Jackson should be in such
denial of his ethnic origins and yet don’t mind Mercury doing the same thing." [8]
It has been suggested that commercial considerations may have been a major reason behind Mercury's elusiveness. Bandmate
Roger Taylor suggested that he downplayed his heritage because he worried that it was not
"something that people would equate with rock 'n' roll".[9] In his book Brimful of Asia: Negotiating Ethnicity on the UK Music Scene, author Rehan
Hyder explores the obstacles that Asian musicians may have in attaining commercial success in popular music. Hyder writes of
Mercury: "His public persona made little or no reference to his ethic origins. This public denial of his background (along with a
similar refutal of his homosexuality)-reflects a man who certainly valued his privacy but can be viewed as part of a calculated
and necessary career plan."[57]
Regarding HIV Status
Mercury has also been criticized for the fact that he hid his HIV status from the public for many years, waiting for the day
before he died to admit that he had AIDS. It has been suggested that he could have raised a great deal of money and awareness by
speaking truthfully and honestly about his situation and his fight against the disease.[32][58]
Regarding Sexual Orientation
While some critics have suggested that Mercury hid his sexual orientation from the public,[1][9][8] other sources refer to the singer as having been "openly gay".[59] In fact, Mercury referred to himself as "gay"
in a 1974 interview with NME magazine.[2] On the other hand, he would often distance himself from partner Jim Hutton during public
events in the 1980s.[48] A writer for
a gay online newspaper felt that audiences may have been overly naive about the matter: "While in many respects he was overtly
queer his whole career, ('I am as gay as a daffodil, dear' being one of his most famous quotes [sic]), his sexual orientation
seemed to pass over the heads of scrutinizing audiences and pundits (both gay and straight) for decades."[60] John Marshall of Gay Times expressed the following opinion in 1992: "He [Mercury] was a 'scene-queen', not afraid to publicly
express his gayness but unwilling to analyze or justify his lifestyle....It was as if Freddie Mercury was saying to the world, 'I
am what I am. So what?' And that in itself was a statement."[60]
Criticism from rock critics
Although Queen was always highly successful on a commercial level, the band often received poor reviews from rock music
critics in magazines such as the "NME" and "Rolling Stone."
[2] In the 1970s, many of these critics
embraced the newly emerging punk rock movement and felt that Queen albums were musically
excessive. A journalist for The Guardian wrote of the song Bohemian Rhapsody: "Its
overblown operatic tones and melodramatic tempo changes came to epitomise the style lampooned by rock critics as pomp
rock."[4] Another Rolling Stone critic expressed his opinion that many of the songs on the band's 1974 Queen II album featured "histrionic vocals, abrupt and pointless compositional complexity, and a dearth of
melody.[3]
Controversies
Mercury and Queen were widely criticized in the 1980s for the fact that they broke a United
Nations cultural boycott by performing a series of shows at Sun City, an
entertainment complex in (then) apartheid South Africa. As a result of these shows, Queen was placed on a United Nations list of
blacklisted artists and was widely criticized in magazines such as the NME.[35]
A further controversy ensued in August 2006, when an organization calling itself the Islamic Mobilization and Propagation
petitioned the Zanzibar government's culture ministry, demanding that a large-scale celebration of what would have been Mercury's
sixtieth birthday be canceled. The organization issued several complaints about the planned celebrations, including that Mercury
was not a true Zanzibari and that he had lived a homosexual lifestyle not in accordance with the laws of Islam, the dominant
religion of the island. The organization claimed that "associating Mercury with Zanzibar degrades our island as a place of
Islam."[59] The planned celebration was
canceled.
Legacy
Appearances in lists of influential individuals
Several popularity polls conducted over the past decade indicate that Mercury's reputation may in fact have been enhanced
since his death. For instance, in 2002 he appeared in the 58th spot in a list of the "100
Greatest Britons", sponsored by the BBC and voted for by the public.[61] He was further listed at the 52nd spot in a
2007 Japanese national survey of the 100 most "influential heroes".[62] Despite the fact that he had been criticized by gay activists for
hiding his HIV status, author Paul Russell included Mercury in his book "The Gay
100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present."[63] Other entertainers on Russell's list included Liberace and Rock Hudson. In 2006, Time
Asia magazine named him as one of the most influential Asians heroes of the past 60
years: The article credited Mercury with having "duplicated in popular music what other Indians — such as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth — have done in literature: taking the
colonizer's art form and representing it in a manner richer and more dazzling than many Anglophones thought possible.[7]
Continued Popularity
In the UK, Queen have now spent more collective weeks on the UK Album Charts than any
other musical act (including The Beatles),[6] and Queen's Greatest Hits is the highest selling album of all time in the UK.[64] Estimates of the band's total worldwide
record sales to date have been set as high as 300 million.[65] Two of Mercury's songs, "We Are the Champions" and
"Bohemian Rhapsody", have each been voted as the greatest song of all time in major
polls by Sony Ericsson[66] and Guinness World Records,[67] respectively. The former poll was an attempt
to determine the world's favourite song, while the Guinness poll took place in the UK. In October of 2007, the video for
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted as the greatest of all time by readers of Q magazine. [68] Mercury was also voted second to Mariah Carey in MTV's 22 Greatest Voices in Music.[7]
The extent to which Mercury's death may have enhanced Queen's popularity is not clear. In the United States, where Queen's
popularity had lagged in the 1980s, sales of Queen albums went up dramatically in 1992, the year following his death.[69] In 1992 one American critic noted, "what
cynics call the 'dead star' factor had come into play — Queen is in the middle of a major resurgence."[70] The movie Wayne's World, which
featured "Bohemian Rhapsody," also came out in 1992.
Tributes
The statue of Freddie Mercury in
Montreux
A statue in Montreux, Switzerland (by sculptor Irena Sedlecka) has been erected as a
tribute to Mercury. Beginning in 2003, fans from around the world gather in Switzerland on a yearly basis to pay tribute to the
singer as part of the "Freddie Mercury Montreux Memorial Day" on the first weekend of September.[71] A Royal Mail
stamp was issued in honour of Mercury as part of the Millennium Stamp series. A plaque was also erected at the site of the family home in Feltham where Mercury and his family moved upon arriving in England in 1964.[72]
Importance in AIDS history
Freddie Mercury's death represented an important event in the history of AIDS.[73] In the spring of 1992, the remaining members of Queen founded
The Mercury Phoenix Trust and organized The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness.[74] The Mercury Phoenix Trust has since raised millions of pounds for various AIDS charities. The
tribute concert, which took place at Wembley Stadium for an audience of 72,000,
featured a wide variety of guests including Robert Plant, Extreme, Elton John, Metallica,
David Bowie, Annie Lennox, Tony Iommi, Guns N' Roses, Elizabeth Taylor, George Michael, Def Leppard and Liza Minnelli. The concert was broadcast live to 76
countries and had an estimated viewing audience of 1 billion.[75]
Discography
-
- See also: Queen discography
Instruments used by Mercury
Keyboards
Grand pianos:
- Baldwin SD10 Concert Grand
- Bechstein D Concert Grand
- Bechstein S Baby Grand
- Bösendorfer Imperial Concert Grand
- Kawai RX7 Concert Grand
- Steinway D Concert Grand
- Steinway S Baby Grand
- White Baby Grand (unknown brand)
- Yamaha C1 Baby Grand
- Yamaha C7 Concert Grand
- Yamaha CFIIIS Concert Grand
Upright pianos:
Electronic pianos:
Synthesizers and samplers:
Other keyboard:
Other
Guitars:
Notes
| a) |
On Freddie's birth certificate,[10] his parents defined themselves with "Nationality: British Indian" and "Race:
Parsi." The Parsis are an ethnic group of the Indian subcontinent that follow Zoroastrianism. |
| b) |
The Bulsara family gets its name from Bulsar, a city and district that is now in the
Indian state of Gujarat and is today officially known as
Valsad. In the 17th century, Bulsar was one of the five centers of the Zoroastrian religion (the other four were also in what is today Gujarat) and consequently "Bulsara" is a
relatively common name amongst Zoroastrians. |
References
