My love of Queen and of Freddie Mercury is one of my lesser mentioned personality traits here, but it is strong and enduring. Astonishingly it’s 35 years since he died and today he would have been 80. I remain baffled that it can now be more than twice the amount of time since he died than it was the first time I set foot in the Dominion Theatre to see We Will Rock You, which was such a key moment in my teenage years.
The Freddie auction exhibition three summers ago was just an evening of me wandering around with my mouth open at seeing all the things. And the music is still in heavy rotation – even if I hated the biopic. One of the great what ifs of my personal interest areas is what would Freddie have done if he had lived* and what music we might have had. As it is, there’s plenty of music to still enjoy – and this week Mary Austin has popped up giving interviews that are longer than the very short couple of bits she did when the auction happened so there’s lots to dissect there too.
For my videos I’ve picked one of my favourites of the (slightly) lesser known (but still on the Greatest hits I) Queen songs in Seven Seas of Rhye and my favourite of Freddie’s solo videos – I love the dancing-chasing sequence. It’s just so camp and funny. And I say solo videos because I find it hard to discount Barcelona as my favourite of his solo stuff – I adored it from the moment I first heard it which I never know if it was before it was used as the title song for the BBC Olympics coverage in 1992 but I do know for sure that I was tremendously disappointed in 1996 when they (obviously) used something different! Oh and one more before I go: Breakthru, filmed on the historic railway line an hour up the road from here where we used to go to see Santa and ride on a train every year when I was little**.
Happy Birthday Freddie – and thank you for all the music and all the joy.
*another is how many F1 titles would Ayrton Senna have won, I think you can make a case that he would have had either or both of 1994 and 1995 and if he had had then Schumacher might never have become the force he did and even more of F1 history would have been different
**it’s also the railway line in two Bond Movies (Octopussy and GoldenEye), at least one Poirot and also the Biggles movie, which John Deacon wrote some of his very rare non-Queen music for.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 