The story of Queen

From Zanzibar to Smile

The story of Queen begins far from London. Farrokh Bulsara was born in Stone Town, on the island of Zanzibar, on the fifth of September 1946, to Parsi parents from western India. His father worked as a cashier for the British Colonial Office. At eight he was sent to St. Peter's, a British style boarding school near Bombay, where he took piano lessons, formed a school band called the Hectics and started calling himself Freddie. Friends remembered that he could hear a song on the radio and play it straight back on the piano. In 1964 revolution broke out in Zanzibar, thousands of Arabs and Indians were killed, and the Bulsara family fled to England, settling in a small house in Feltham, near Heathrow.[1]

In Feltham the young Freddie studied art, then graphic design at Ealing Art College, graduating in 1969. His diploma thesis was about Jimi Hendrix. To make ends meet he worked as a baggage handler at Heathrow Airport and sang with bands that went nowhere, first Ibex, later renamed Wreckage, then Sour Milk Sea. Friends from those days describe a quiet, shy young man who lived for music. At Ealing he became friends with a fellow student called Tim Staffell, who sang and played bass in a band with a clever guitarist named Brian May. Freddie went to their gigs, became a keen fan, and let it be known that he would love to be their singer.[1] [2] [3]

Brian May was an only child from Hampton, near Twickenham. In 1963, aged sixteen, he and his father Harold, an electronics engineer and draughtsman, built an electric guitar by hand. The neck was carved from the wood of an old fireplace, and the tremolo used a bicycle saddle bag carrier, the end of a knitting needle and valve springs from a motorbike. They called it the Red Special, and Brian would play it on almost every Queen record. He formed a band called 1984 with Tim Staffell, then went to Imperial College London to study physics and astronomy. In 1968 the two started a new group called Smile, and put up a notice at college asking for a drummer in the style of Ginger Baker or Mitch Mitchell.[1] [2] [3]

The drummer who answered was Roger Taylor, a dental student from Cornwall who had grown up in Truro and taught himself to tune drums by listening to Keith Moon. He turned up to audition with only bongos, because his kit was elsewhere, and still got the job. Smile played the London college circuit, recorded a handful of songs for Mercury Records that were never released at the time, and played the Royal Albert Hall in February 1969. Taylor, meanwhile, shared a flat with Freddie and ran a stall with him at Kensington Market, selling second hand clothes. On the eighteenth of September 1970 the two closed the stall for the day, in memory of Jimi Hendrix, who had just died.[1] [2] [3]

Becoming Queen

In 1970 Tim Staffell left Smile, tired of the lack of success and more drawn to soul music. Freddie saw his chance, and this time Brian and Roger said yes. Freddie had big ideas. He wanted a bolder stage show and a bolder name, and he proposed Queen. The others were doubtful, but he told them it was wonderful and people would love it. He later said he knew about the gay connotations, but that was only one side of it. At the same time he changed his own surname to Mercury, inspired by a line about Mother Mercury in his song My Fairy King. The new band played their first gig on the twenty seventh of June 1970, at a fundraiser in Truro, Roger's old home town.[1] [2] [3]

Finding a bass player took longer. Mike Grose played the first few shows, then Barry Mitchell, then Doug Bogie for just two gigs. In February 1971 a friend introduced Brian and Roger to a quiet electronics student from Leicestershire called John Deacon. He auditioned in a lecture room at Imperial College and got the job. He was the youngest of the four, a gifted bassist who barely spoke in rehearsals, and he could build and repair equipment. From parts found in a skip he built a small amplifier the band called the Deacy Amp, which Brian used for his layered guitar orchestras for the rest of Queen's career. John also finished his studies, taking a first class honours degree in electronics in 1971.[1] [2] [3]

With his art school training, Freddie designed the band's crest before their first album came out. It combines the star signs of all four members: two lions for Leo, meaning John and Roger, a crab for Brian's Cancer, and two fairies for Freddie's Virgo, all under a huge phoenix, with a crown inside the letter Q. The band's first real break came through an engineer friend at De Lane Lea Studios, who let them record demos in return for helping test the new rooms. Producers John Anthony and Roy Thomas Baker heard a song called Keep Yourself Alive and started shopping the band around. Charisma Records offered a deal, but Queen turned it down, worried the label would always put Genesis first.[1] [2]

Instead they signed with Trident, the Soho studio run by Norman Sheffield and his brother Barry, which managed them through a company called Neptune. The deal gave Queen use of a top studio, but only when paying clients were not using it, so they recorded their debut in the dead of night. Roger later called those off peak hours gold dust. It was hardly glamorous. One early 1972 gig at Bedford College drew just six people. While they waited, Freddie even sang on a side project by a Trident engineer, released in 1973 as a single under the name Larry Lurex. In March 1973 Trident finally secured a deal with EMI, and the debut album Queen came out that July.[1] [2] [3]

The debut album was a mix of heavy rock and progressive ambition, with fantasy lyrics and Brian's multi layered guitars. The cover shot of Freddie on stage was taken by a friend of Roger's. John was credited as Deacon John, an idea meant to make him sound more interesting, which he disliked and quickly dropped. Critics were fairly kind, and Rolling Stone later picked out Keep Yourself Alive as one of the great guitar songs, but the album made little noise at the time and the single sold poorly. Watching David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust shows, the band had realised they had to make a real impact or be left behind. Their answer was to get bigger, louder and more elaborate.[1] [2] [3]

Seven Seas and a Killer Queen

Their second album, Queen II, was made with far more studio time, and the band used every minute. The vinyl had a Side White and a Side Black instead of sides one and two, long suites, fantasy lyrics and stacks of vocal harmonies, and Freddie's The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke was based on a Victorian painting by Richard Dadd. The cover, a moody shot by photographer Mick Rock inspired by an old picture of Marlene Dietrich, showed the four of them in a diamond with heads tilted back. Released in March 1974, it reached number five in Britain, and the single Seven Seas of Rhye gave Queen their first hit. Some critics hated it. One Canadian paper called it an over produced monstrosity. Hardcore fans still treasure it.[1] [2] [3]

Early 1974 also brought a humiliation. Queen flew to Australia to play the Sunbury Pop Festival, arrived late, and were jeered by a crowd that wanted local acts. Before leaving, Freddie told them that when Queen came back, they would be the biggest band in the world. Then came their first American tour, supporting Mott the Hoople. A month in, in May 1974, Brian collapsed and was diagnosed with hepatitis, and the rest of the tour was cancelled. He was still ill when the band started their third album, and later needed an operation for stomach problems. He remembered lying in bed at Rockfield Studios in Wales, hearing Freddie play a brilliant new song and feeling sad he could not join in.[1] [2] [3]

That song was Killer Queen. Freddie said it was about a high class call girl, and that he wrote the words before the music, the opposite of his usual way. The band left space for Brian, and when he recovered he added a solo in three parts, each with its own voice. Released in 1974, it reached number two in Britain and became Queen's first American hit. Brian called it the turning point. The album around it, Sheer Heart Attack, reached number two at home and gave the band their first taste of international success. It also contained John's first song, Misfire, and Stone Cold Crazy, a ferociously fast track later seen as an early ancestor of thrash metal. Metallica would cover it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Success did not bring money. In 1975 Queen toured America as headliners and were greeted by thousands of screaming fans in Japan, yet they were still on small Trident wages, living in bedsits. When John asked for money for a deposit on a house, he was refused. EMI brought in a lawyer called Jim Beach to get the band out of their contract, and Trident said it wanted back the two hundred thousand pounds it had invested. After a bitter split in August 1975, Queen were free. Led Zeppelin's manager Peter Grant offered to take them on, but they feared being second in line behind Zeppelin. Instead they hired Elton John's manager, John Reid, who told them he would handle the business while they made the best record they could.[1] [2] [3]

Bohemian Rhapsody and A Night at the Opera

Queen took Reid at his word. Their fourth album, named after a Marx Brothers film, was called A Night at the Opera, and at the time it was said to be the most expensive album ever made. It opened with Death on Two Legs, a savage attack Freddie wrote about the band's old management, so coarse that the others were shocked when they first heard the lyrics. Roger contributed I'm in Love with My Car, and John wrote You're My Best Friend for his fiancee Veronica, whom he married in January 1975. Brian brought The Prophet's Song and the skiffle tune Thirty Nine, and Freddie wrote the tender Love of My Life, with Brian playing harp one chord at a time.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The centrepiece was Bohemian Rhapsody. Freddie had been carrying fragments of it since the late 1960s. He played the opening ballad to producer Roy Thomas Baker in his flat, then stopped and announced that this was where the opera section came in. Recording began at Rockfield in August 1975 and spread across several studios. The operatic middle grew and grew, as Freddie kept adding more Galileos. Freddie, Brian and Roger sang for up to twelve hours a day, and some passages carry around one hundred and eighty overdubs. Because tape then had only twenty four tracks, parts were bounced down again and again, and Brian remembered holding the worn tape up to the light and seeing through it.[1] [2]

At almost six minutes, with no chorus and an opera in the middle, the song was called far too long for radio, and the band were pushed to cut it. Freddie refused. Help came from his friend Kenny Everett, a DJ on Capital Radio in London. Given a copy on the promise he would not play it, Everett teased listeners with snippets, then played it fourteen times over one weekend. Fans flooded the switchboard and went looking for a single that did not yet exist. EMI released the full song, and it spent nine weeks at number one in Britain, becoming the Christmas number one of 1975. Greg Lake, whose Christmas song it kept off the top, later called it one of the greatest records ever made.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Queen did not want to mime such a complex song on Top of the Pops, and a tour date clashed with the show anyway, so they made a film instead. Director Bruce Gowers shot it at Elstree in a matter of hours, recreating the Queen II cover in near darkness, with Freddie's face cascading across the screen through camera feedback rather than editing tricks. It was broadcast that November. Promo films were not new, but this one changed the business, and it is often credited with inventing the modern music video years before MTV. The song also gave Roger a windfall. His I'm in Love with My Car was the B side, and earned him as much in publishing royalties as Freddie earned from the A side.[1] [2] [3]

There was a price for Death on Two Legs. The song never named anyone, but Norman Sheffield of Trident sued the band and EMI for defamation, and the case was settled out of court, which only made the target more obvious. Sheffield always denied treating Queen badly, and decades later he published a memoir defending himself. On stage Freddie dedicated the song, in the crudest terms, to a nasty old man. A Night at the Opera went triple platinum in America, and on Christmas Eve 1975 the band played Hammersmith Odeon live on BBC television. Then, on the eighteenth of September 1976, they played a free concert in Hyde Park to a record crowd of about one hundred and fifty thousand.[1] [2] [3]

Champions of the World

The Hyde Park show ran so late that police warned Freddie he would be arrested if he went back on for an encore. A few months later came A Day at the Races, again named after a Marx Brothers film and produced by the band themselves. Its big hit, Somebody to Love, turned Freddie, Brian and Roger into a gospel choir that sounded a hundred voices strong, inspired by Freddie's love of Aretha Franklin. In March 1977 Groucho Marx invited Queen to his Los Angeles home, and they thanked him by singing Thirty Nine unaccompanied. Earlier, on the first of December 1976, they had pulled out of a spot on the Today programme. Their late replacement was the Sex Pistols, whose foul mouthed interview with Bill Grundy became notorious.[1] [2] [3]

Their private lives were changing too. Freddie had met Mary Austin through Brian around 1970, when she worked at the Biba boutique in Kensington, and they had lived together for years and even become engaged. By the mid 1970s Freddie had begun an affair with a man, and around the end of 1976 he told Mary about his sexuality, which ended their romance. In her own account he said he thought he was bisexual, and she replied that she thought he was gay. They stayed extremely close. He bought her a flat near his own, and he later called her his common law wife and the only true friend he had.[1] [2]

One night in 1977 at Bingley Hall in Stafford, the crowd did not just clap for an encore. They sang You'll Never Walk Alone back to the band. Brian was deeply moved, and it gave him an idea for a song the audience could perform with them. We Will Rock You is almost entirely stamps, claps and voices, recorded by the band stomping on boards and layering the sound with delays. Freddie answered with We Are the Champions, written with the crowd in mind, where the word we meant everyone singing. Both opened the 1977 album News of the World, and radio stations started playing them back to back. They became fixtures at sports grounds across the world.[1] [2] [3]

By now Queen lived large. In 1978 they launched the album Jazz with a Halloween party at the Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans, with mud wrestlers, fire eaters, strippers and jazz bands. Jazz included Fat Bottomed Girls and Bicycle Race, inspired when Freddie watched the Tour de France pass through Montreux. The video featured dozens of naked models racing bicycles at Wimbledon Stadium, and the hire company made the band buy all the saddles. The album also held Don't Stop Me Now, a minor hit at the time that has since become one of their best loved songs. Brian admitted he struggled with it then, because it celebrated a hedonistic life he found worrying. Queen soon bought Mountain Studios in Montreux.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1979, relaxing in a bath at a Munich hotel, Freddie wrote a tribute to Elvis Presley in a matter of minutes, on a guitar he said he could not play for nuts. Crazy Little Thing Called Love became Queen's first number one in America. It began a long partnership with Munich producer Reinhold Mack, and a new sound. For their 1980 album The Game, the band dropped the old sleeve note boasting that no synthesisers were used. John wrote a lean, funky track built on a bass line inspired by Chic, and after a Queen show in Los Angeles, Michael Jackson told Freddie it had to be a single. Another One Bites the Dust topped the American chart and became the band's biggest selling single.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stadiums, Pressure and Hot Space

In February 1981 Queen took rock to places few Western bands had gone. They played giant stadiums in Argentina and Brazil, much of it under military dictatorships. More than one hundred and thirty thousand people saw the first of two nights at the Morumbi Stadium in São Paulo, then the largest paying audience for a single band anywhere. In Buenos Aires they met the young footballer Diego Maradona backstage. The live version of Love of My Life topped the charts in Argentina and Brazil, and crowds sang it word perfect while Freddie conducted. Not everything went smoothly. Later that year in Mexico, fans threw objects at the stage, and Freddie signed off the final show by swearing at them.[1] [2]

In September 1981, while Queen were working in Montreux, David Bowie came to the studio. The session turned into a long jam and, in one marathon evening, into Under Pressure, credited to all five. Freddie and Bowie wrote their vocal lines separately and, Brian later said, had a fierce battle over the mix. The song went to number one in Britain. Years later Vanilla Ice lifted its bass line and piano for Ice Ice Baby without credit, first denied it, and ended up giving Queen and Bowie songwriting credit after they sued. That October Queen also released Greatest Hits, which went on to become the best selling album in British chart history, the only one to pass seven million copies there.[1] [2]

Then came the most turbulent period in the band's history. They made the 1982 album Hot Space mostly in Munich, and it leaned heavily into funk, disco and dance. Freddie and John loved the new direction. Brian and Roger did not, and the sessions were tense. John refused to let Brian play a solo on his song Back Chat, which led to a bitter argument. The others also blamed Freddie's personal manager, Paul Prenter, for pulling him away from the band. Producer Mack said Prenter loathed rock music and was in Freddie's ear throughout, and Brian claimed Prenter had told radio stations to get lost. Munich was also where Freddie could vanish into the city's gay scene, away from the British press.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Hot Space confused many fans, and in America it marked the start of a long decline. The band played their last American shows with Freddie in September 1982 at the Forum in Inglewood, and on the twenty fifth of September they appeared on Saturday Night Live, Freddie's final public performance in North America. Part of the cooling was blamed on homophobia. Freddie had adopted a short haired, moustached look, and at some shows on the 1980 American tour fans had thrown disposable razors on stage. Later research by biographers suggested that around this time Freddie quietly saw a doctor in New York about a lesion on his tongue, possibly an early sign of the virus that would kill him.[1] [2]

After touring Japan, the band took a long break. Brian later admitted that for a while they hated each other. They returned in 1984 with The Works and a run of hits. Radio Ga Ga came from Roger's small son muttering radio ca ca at a song he disliked in the car. John's I Want to Break Free came with a video in which all four dressed as women to spoof the British soap Coronation Street. Britain laughed, but MTV in America banned it. In October 1984 the band played nine sold out shows at Sun City, in apartheid era South Africa, breaking a United Nations cultural boycott. They were fined by the Musicians' Union and blacklisted. In 2021 Roger called the trip kind of a mistake.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Live Aid and the Magic Tour

Queen started 1985 by headlining two nights at the first Rock in Rio festival in Brazil, playing to more than three hundred thousand people each night. Freddie also released his first solo album, Mr. Bad Guy, in April. He dedicated it to his cats and to cat lovers across the universe. Then Bob Geldof started organising Live Aid. Geldof was not a fan, and he later admitted he thought Queen's star had risen and fallen. Promoter Harvey Goldsmith pushed him to call them anyway. Freddie worried it might be seen as a political statement, but Queen agreed.[1] [2] [3]

On the thirteenth of July 1985, at nineteen minutes to seven in the evening, Queen walked onto the stage at Wembley Stadium for a set of about twenty minutes. Freddie opened at the piano with a taste of Bohemian Rhapsody, then led seventy two thousand people clapping in perfect time to Radio Ga Ga. In the middle he broke into an improvised call and response with the crowd, and one long held note became known as the note heard round the world. They finished with Hammer to Fall, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions. Geldof said they were the best band of the day, and that they understood it was a global jukebox. In 2005 an industry poll called it the greatest rock performance ever.[1] [2] [3]

Roger called Live Aid a shot in the arm, and Freddie said it came out of nowhere to save them. After the show Freddie suggested writing something together, and the result was One Vision. In 1986 they released A Kind of Magic, much of it written for the fantasy film Highlander. Brian wrote Who Wants to Live Forever in the back of a car after watching a rough cut of a scene in which the hero's wife grows old and dies while he stays young. Around this time Freddie began a relationship with an Irish hairdresser called Jim Hutton, which would last the rest of his life. Freddie called him his husband.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

That summer the Magic Tour played to more than four hundred thousand people in Britain alone. Freddie wore a crown and a royal robe designed by his friend Diana Moseley, and at Wembley he told the crowd the rumours of a split were rubbish and that Queen would stay together until they died. On the twenty seventh of July they played the Népstadion in Budapest, behind the Iron Curtain, to eighty thousand people, and Freddie sang a Hungarian folk song with the words written on his palm. The show was filmed on thirty five millimetre film using seventeen cameras, which was all the available equipment in the country.[1] [2] [3]

Because Wembley could not host a third night, a final date was added at Knebworth Park on the ninth of August 1986. More than one hundred and twenty thousand people came, and the band flew in by helicopter. It was a triumph with a terrible shadow. During the show a fight broke out near the stage, and a twenty one year old fan was fatally stabbed, with medics unable to reach him through the crowd. By an oversight, nobody arranged professional filming. It turned out to be the last concert Freddie ever played with Queen. A week earlier, Brian recalled, Freddie had said he would not be doing this forever, and that this was probably the last time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Show Must Go On

In October 1986 the tabloids claimed that Freddie had been tested for HIV at a Harley Street clinic. He told them he was perfectly fit and healthy. In fact, according to Jim Hutton, he was diagnosed with AIDS in the spring of 1987. Freddie kept it secret from almost everyone, telling only a tiny inner circle, and he told the rest of Queen in May 1989. The press did not let up. Paul Prenter, who had been let go from Freddie's employment, sold a story to The Sun in 1987 revealing Freddie's private life and his relationship with Jim Hutton. Prenter's brothers later said he was bitter and needed money for his own HIV treatment. Prenter died of AIDS in August 1991.[1] [2] [3]

Freddie kept creating. He had long adored the Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballé, who he said had the best voice in the world, and in 1988 they released an album together called Barcelona. The title song became the official song of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. For his forty first birthday in September 1987, he threw a party for some seven hundred guests at a hotel in Ibiza, with a cake shaped like the Sagrada Família. In 1989 Queen released The Miracle, with I Want It All and Scandal, and for the first time they credited every song to the whole band. They explained there would be no tour, saying Freddie wanted to break the cycle of album and tour.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the eighteenth of February 1990 Queen collected the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. It was Freddie's last public appearance on stage, and he looked painfully thin. Rumours were everywhere, and the band denied them. They were already working on Innuendo, recording whenever Freddie felt strong enough, often for an hour or two at a time. Brian remembered him saying, write me more, write me stuff, I want to sing this, and when I'm gone you can finish it off. The title track, with a flamenco passage played by Steve Howe of Yes, went straight to number one in Britain in January 1991. The album was full of songs that seemed to reach toward his fate.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The most famous was The Show Must Go On, written mainly by Brian. When he played Freddie the demanding demo, he doubted Freddie could sing it in his condition. Freddie reportedly downed a vodka, promised he would do it, and went in and nailed it. On the thirtieth of May 1991 he filmed his last video, for Roger's These Are the Days of Our Lives. It was shot in black and white to hide how ill he was. At the end he looks into the camera and whispers I still love you. That month he also recorded his last vocals, for a song called Mother Love, and told the band he would finish the final verse next time. He never came back.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Freddie retreated to Garden Lodge, his home in Kensington, cared for by Jim Hutton, his assistants and Mary Austin, while photographers camped outside. Near the end he was losing his sight and could not leave his bed, and he chose to stop his medication apart from painkillers. On the twenty second of November he asked manager Jim Beach to prepare a statement. The next day it confirmed that he had AIDS and asked people to join the fight against the disease. On the evening of the twenty fourth of November 1991, about a day later, Freddie Mercury died of bronchial pneumonia brought on by AIDS. He was forty five. His funeral was led by a Zoroastrian priest, and Mary Austin took his ashes to a place she has never revealed.[1] [2] [3]

Life After Freddie

Within weeks Bohemian Rhapsody was reissued with These Are the Days of Our Lives and went back to number one in Britain for five weeks, with early proceeds of about one million pounds going to the AIDS charity the Terrence Higgins Trust. It became the only single to be Christmas number one twice. In America, a scene of friends headbanging to the song in the 1992 comedy Wayne's World sent it to number two, and Queen's American sales surged. On the twentieth of April 1992 the surviving members staged the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley, with Elton John, David Bowie, George Michael, Metallica, Guns N' Roses and many more. It was broadcast worldwide and raised millions for AIDS causes, through the band's new Mercury Phoenix Trust.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Grief hit each of them differently. John said there was no point carrying on, because Freddie could not be replaced. Brian threw himself into his solo album and a world tour, and later spoke of a depression in those years deep enough that he contemplated suicide, tied up with his failing first marriage and the deaths of Freddie and his own father. In 1993 the three went back into the studio to finish Freddie's last recordings. Made in Heaven came out in 1995, with Brian singing the final verse of Mother Love. It went to number one in Britain. In November 1996 a statue of Freddie was unveiled in Montreux, looking out over Lake Geneva.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 1997 Queen played The Show Must Go On with Elton John at a ballet premiere in Paris. It was John Deacon's last public performance. After recording one final song with Brian and Roger that October, No One but You, he retired from music and from public life altogether. He did not attend the band's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001, and he has declined every invitation to return, though he still signs off on the band's business decisions. Roger later described him as a little fragile. Brian and Roger carried on together, appearing at charity shows with guest singers under the name Queen plus.[1] [2]

In May 2002 the musical We Will Rock You, written by comedian Ben Elton with Brian and Roger, opened at the Dominion Theatre in London. It ran there for twelve years, the longest run in that theatre's history. That June, Brian played God Save the Queen on the roof of Buckingham Palace for the Golden Jubilee. In 2004 the pair teamed up with Paul Rodgers of Free and Bad Company, a singer Freddie had admired, billed as Queen plus Paul Rodgers so that nobody thought he was replacing Freddie. They toured the world from 2005 and made an album, The Cosmos Rocks, in 2008. The partnership ended amicably in May 2009.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Adam Lambert and a Lasting Legacy

Days after the split with Rodgers, Brian and Roger performed on the American Idol final with the runner up, a theatrical young singer called Adam Lambert, who had auditioned for the show with Bohemian Rhapsody. In 2011 he sang with them at the MTV Europe Music Awards, and from 2012 Queen plus Adam Lambert became a touring force, playing arenas and stadiums worldwide for more than a decade. They opened the Academy Awards in 2019 and played outside Buckingham Palace for the Platinum Jubilee in 2022. Roger's son Rufus played percussion with them for years. Their Rhapsody Tour wound down in 2024, and as of 2026 the band say they are resting, with no big tours planned.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The biopic Bohemian Rhapsody arrived in 2018 after years of trouble. Sacha Baron Cohen had left the lead role over creative differences, and director Bryan Singer was fired during filming, with Dexter Fletcher finishing the job. Rami Malek won the Oscar for Best Actor as Freddie, and the film grossed more than nine hundred million dollars. Critics attacked its liberties with history and what some called a sanitised view of Freddie's sexuality, and Brian and Roger were consultants on it. Still, it sent Queen back into the charts, and Bohemian Rhapsody became the most streamed song of the twentieth century, certified diamond in America in 2021.[1] [2] [3]

Freddie's legacy kept being counted in new ways. In 2023 Mary Austin, who had lived at Garden Lodge for more than thirty years, sold his possessions at Sotheby's. The six sales raised almost forty million pounds, with the Yamaha piano he used to write Bohemian Rhapsody going for one point seven million, and his handwritten lyrics for the song for one point three eight million. His sister Kashmira opposed the sale. In 2025 a biography claimed Freddie had a secret daughter, which his old friends doubted. The band's finances changed too. In 2024 Sony agreed to buy Queen's catalogue outside North America for about one billion pounds, one of the largest music deals ever.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The surviving founders are still active. Brian finished his astrophysics doctorate in 2007, thirty seven years after starting it, worked with NASA's New Horizons team, co founded Asteroid Day and campaigns hard for animals. He was knighted in 2023. He survived a heart attack in 2020 and a minor stroke in 2024 that briefly took the use of his arm. Roger was made an OBE, and in September 2026 released a new solo album, Violence Insane in a Beautiful World. Queen won the Polar Music Prize in 2025, and that September Brian and Roger played Bohemian Rhapsody at the Last Night of the Proms for its fiftieth birthday. As of 2026, the restored Budapest concert film is heading to cinemas.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Queen

Freddie Mercury and Mary Austin. They met around 1970 through Brian May, when Mary worked at Biba, and soon moved in together. They became engaged, but by late 1976 Freddie had told her about his sexuality and the romance ended. The friendship never did. He called her his common law wife, she became his assistant, and he left her Garden Lodge and half his estate. She was with him at the end, took his ashes to a secret place, and in 2023 sold his belongings at Sotheby's.[1] [2] [3]

Freddie Mercury and Jim Hutton. Jim Hutton was an Irish born hairdresser who became Freddie's partner around 1985 and lived with him for the rest of his life. Freddie called him his husband and wore a gold band Hutton gave him until the end. Hutton nursed him through his illness and was at his bedside when he died. He was left five hundred thousand pounds but had to leave Garden Lodge, which caused lasting resentment. He later contributed to a biography of Freddie and died in 2010.[1] [2]

Freddie Mercury and Paul Prenter. Paul Prenter, a former Belfast disc jockey, became Freddie's personal manager in 1977. The other members of Queen disliked him intensely and blamed him for the band's troubled Hot Space period and for keeping Freddie away from them. After he was dismissed, he sold a story about Freddie's private life to The Sun in 1987. His brothers said he was bitter and needed money for his own HIV treatment. He died of AIDS in August 1991, months before Freddie.[1] [2]

Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett. The DJ Kenny Everett met Freddie on his Capital Radio breakfast show in 1974, and they became close friends and nightlife companions, though never lovers. Everett broke Bohemian Rhapsody by playing it fourteen times in a weekend. The two fell out by 1985, and the rift deepened when Everett was outed in his ex wife's autobiography. With both men ill, they reconciled in 1989. Everett died of an AIDS related illness in 1995.[1] [2]

Queen and Norman Sheffield. Norman Sheffield co owned Trident Studios and managed Queen from 1972 to 1975, getting them studio time and their EMI deal. The band came to feel underpaid and trapped, and after a bitter split Freddie wrote Death on Two Legs, widely understood as aimed at him. Sheffield sued for defamation and settled out of court. He always denied mistreating Queen and defended himself in a 2013 memoir. When he died in 2014, Brian May posted a tribute.[1] [2] [3]

Queen and Jim Beach. Jim Beach, a Cambridge educated lawyer, first worked for Queen getting them out of the Trident contract, and took over as manager from John Reid in 1978. He has run their affairs ever since. Freddie nicknamed him Miami, a pun on his surname, and trusted him with his final statement in November 1991. Beach co founded the Mercury Phoenix Trust and produced the 2018 biopic, where Tom Hollander played him. He also managed Monty Python.[1] [2] [3]

Queen and John Reid. Elton John's manager, John Reid, took Queen on in 1975 after the Trident split and told them to make the best record they could while he handled business. The result was A Night at the Opera. The partnership ended in 1978, with Reid calling it the gentlest parting of his career. The 2018 film shows Freddie firing him for pushing a solo deal, a version the record does not support.[1] [2] [3]

Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé. Freddie considered the Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballé the finest voice in the world, and in 1987 they recorded the duet Barcelona, followed by a full album in 1988. She praised his technique and his gift for colouring every word. After his death the song became the official song of the 1992 Olympics, and she sang it live alongside his recorded voice. In 1996 she helped unveil his statue in Montreux.[1] [2]

Brian May and John Deacon. For most of Queen's life the two worked closely, with Brian's guitar orchestras running through the Deacy Amp John built. Their sharpest clash came on Hot Space, when John refused to let Brian play a guitar solo on Back Chat, sparking a bitter row. After John retired in 1997 they drifted apart, and Brian has said a return to live performing would be unlikely, though John still approves all of the band's financial decisions.[1] [2]

Brian May and Anita Dobson. Brian met the EastEnders actress Anita Dobson in 1986 and worked on her hit single that year. She inspired him to write I Want It All. At the time he was still married to Christine Mullen, the mother of his three children, and he later spoke of the depression he suffered over his troubled first marriage. His first marriage ended, and he and Anita married in November 2000.[1]

Queen and Adam Lambert. Adam Lambert auditioned for American Idol with Bohemian Rhapsody and sang with Brian and Roger on the 2009 final. From 2012 they toured the world as Queen plus Adam Lambert, the longest running partnership since Freddie. Lambert also co owns a West Hollywood bar with Roger and his wife.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Queen

• Freddie Mercury was born with four extra incisors, which some have linked to his remarkable vocal range. The extra teeth pushed his front teeth forward. Some have suggested they gave his voice extra room and resonance, although that idea has never been proven.[1]
• Freddie's childhood stamp album is on display at the Postal Museum in London. Freddie inherited his father's love of stamps and collected them between the ages of nine and twelve, mostly from across the Commonwealth. The album is one of the few personal belongings of his held by a museum.[1]
• Before Queen, Freddie worked as a baggage handler at Heathrow Airport. After art college Freddie took whatever work he could while singing in going nowhere bands. Heathrow was close to the family home in Feltham, and the job appears in the opening scenes of the 2018 biopic.[1]
• Brian May's Red Special was built partly from a century old fireplace, a knitting needle and motorbike springs. Brian and his father built the guitar at home in 1963. The neck came from an eighteenth century fireplace, the tremolo arm from a bicycle saddle bag carrier tipped with a knitting needle end, and the springs from an old motorbike.[1] [2]
• Brian May plays with an old sixpence coin instead of a plastic pick. He says the rigid coin gives him more control and a distinctive edge to the sound. He favours sixpences from a 1970 farewell proof set and carries coins in his pockets for the purpose.[1]
• Roger Taylor auditioned for Smile playing bongos, because his drum kit was somewhere else. Brian and Tim Staffell had advertised on an Imperial College notice board for a drummer in the style of Ginger Baker. The young dental student turned up without his kit and still won the job.[1]
• The maternity ward where Roger Taylor was born had just been opened by the future Queen Elizabeth the Second. Roger was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk, in July 1949. Princess Elizabeth opened the new ward and was introduced to sixteen new mothers, one of them Roger's mother Winifred.[1]
• John Deacon built the Deacy Amp from electronic parts he found in a skip. The tiny amplifier, built in 1972, became one of Queen's secret weapons. Brian used it for his layered guitar orchestras, including the twin guitar melody near the end of Bohemian Rhapsody.[1] [2]
• On Queen's first album, John Deacon was credited as Deacon John. The reversed name was meant to make him sound more interesting. He disliked it and asked to be credited under his real name from Queen II onward. Roger, meanwhile, used his full name, Roger Meddows Taylor.[1] [2]
• Freddie's first solo single came out in 1973 under the fake name Larry Lurex. While Queen were making their debut at Trident, house engineer Robin Cable asked Freddie to sing covers of I Can Hear Music and Goin' Back. The single flopped, but a snippet of Goin' Back closes Queen's Mother Love.[1] [2]
• The No Synthesisers note on Queen's early albums was not an anti synth statement. Producer Roy Thomas Baker explained that record executives kept assuming Brian's layered guitar parts were synthesisers. The note was there simply to set the record straight. The band first used a synth on The Game in 1980.[1]
• Queen sang a song to Groucho Marx in his living room in 1977. Having named two albums after Marx Brothers films, the band were invited to Groucho's Los Angeles home in March 1977. They thanked him in person and sang Brian's Thirty Nine unaccompanied.[1]
• The Sex Pistols' notorious Bill Grundy interview only happened because Queen cancelled. Queen were booked for the Today programme on the first of December 1976 but pulled out at the last minute. Their EMI labelmates the Sex Pistols stepped in and caused a national scandal with their swearing.[1]
• The echoes on the stamps of We Will Rock You were set to delays in prime number ratios. The band stomped on boards and clapped many times at Wessex Studios, then added delays whose lengths were in prime number ratios, so the repeats never lined up and sounded like a huge crowd.[1]
• After the naked Bicycle Race shoot, the bike hire company made Queen buy all the saddles. The video featured dozens of nude models racing at Wimbledon Stadium. When the rental firm learned how its bikes had been used, it insisted the band pay for every seat.[1]
• Freddie wrote Crazy Little Thing Called Love in five or ten minutes, reportedly while in the bath. Roger said Freddie finished the lyrics while relaxing in a bath at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich. Freddie said he wrote it on a guitar he could hardly play, which forced him to keep it simple.[1]
• Another One Bites the Dust has been used to teach medics the rhythm of CPR. The song runs at close to one hundred and ten beats per minute, inside the recommended range for chest compressions. One study found it helped vets keep the right pace, though the lyrics were judged less than ideal.[1]
• Another One Bites the Dust was in an early cut of Rocky Three before Eye of the Tiger replaced it. Survivor guitarist Frankie Sullivan said Brian May raised the subject when he saw the band in Los Angeles in 1984, and Sullivan offered to send him a copy of the tape.[1]
• Producer Mack named his son after Freddie, and the boy's godfathers were Freddie and John Deacon. Freddie grew close to Reinhold Mack's family in Munich during the early 1980s. Mack himself turns up in the Queen song Dragon Attack, in the line about using my stack, it's gotta be Mack.[1] [2]
• To use Metropolis footage in the Radio Ga Ga video, Queen had to deal with the East German government. Freddie contributed a song to Giorgio Moroder's restoration of the 1927 film, and Queen got the right to use its images in return. But they still had to buy performance rights from the communist state that held the copyright.[1]
• The engine noises at the end of I'm in Love with My Car are Roger Taylor's own Alfa Romeo. Roger wrote the song about a roadie, Johnathan Harris, whose Triumph sports car was the love of his life. The dedication calls Harris a boy racer to the end.[1]
• An early draft shows Bohemian Rhapsody was once titled Mongolian Rhapsody. The draft, written on British Midland Airways notepaper around 1974, surfaced in the 2023 auction of Freddie's belongings. The word Mongolian is crossed out and replaced with Bohemian.[1]
• Brian May completed his astrophysics PhD in 2007, thirty seven years after starting it. He abandoned his research on zodiacal dust when Queen took off in 1974. He re registered in 2006 and his thesis on radial velocities in the zodiacal dust cloud was approved in 2007.[1]
• There is a crater on the planet Mercury named Bulsara, after Freddie's birth name. It was named in May 2024. Freddie also has an asteroid, 17473 Freddiemercury, named on his seventieth birthday in 2016, and Brian has asteroid 52665 Brianmay.[1] [2]
• In 2013 four new species of Brazilian damselfly were named after the four members of Queen. The flatwing damselflies, including Heteragrion freddiemercuryi and Heteragrion brianmayi, marked Queen's fortieth anniversary. The same year a new frog genus from India, Mercurana, was named in Freddie's honour.[1] [2] [3] [4]
• Roger Taylor's appearance on a 1999 stamp broke an unwritten rule against living people on British stamps. The Royal Mail stamp showed Freddie on stage, with Roger visible behind him. Until then, living people other than royals had almost never appeared on British stamps.[1]
• Freddie never learned to drive and was chauffeured in a Rolls Royce. Without a licence, he was driven around London in a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow from 1979 until his death. The car passed to his sister and was auctioned in 2013 for seventy four thousand six hundred pounds.[1]
• The Queen song Delilah was written for Freddie's favourite cat. Freddie kept at least ten cats, mostly rescues from the Blue Cross, and had portraits painted of each one. Delilah appeared on Innuendo, and his solo album Mr. Bad Guy was dedicated to his cats.[1]
• Steve Howe of Yes is the only non member to play guitar on a Queen studio recording. Howe dropped by the Montreux studio while Queen were making Innuendo. Asked to play flamenco guitar on the title track, he thought they had lost their minds, but they talked him into it.[1]
• Freddie's last words on camera were a whispered I still love you, aimed at his fans. They come at the end of the These Are the Days of Our Lives video, filmed in May 1991. He asked for one more take of the final line, then snapped his fingers and walked out of shot.[1]
• Freddie's 1987 birthday party in Ibiza ended with a bill that included two hundred and thirty two broken glasses. About seven hundred guests came to Pikes Hotel. The original Sagrada Família cake collapsed and was replaced by a two metre sponge decorated with notes from Barcelona. The bill went to Jim Beach.[1]
• Nobody remembered to professionally film Freddie's final concert with Queen at Knebworth. The show was multitracked for audio, but by an oversight no proper video crew was booked. Only handheld audience footage survives of the last time the classic line up played live.[1]
• At Budapest in 1986, Freddie sang a Hungarian folk song with the lyrics written on his palm. The song was Tavaszi Szél Vizet Áraszt. The concert was filmed with seventeen cameras, reportedly all the suitable equipment in Hungary, and the film was restored in four K for its fortieth anniversary.[1] [2]
• Smile's singer Tim Staffell later became chief model maker for Thomas the Tank Engine. After leaving music, Staffell built models for television, including the BBC's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the first series of Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends. He rejoined Brian and Roger in 2018 to re record Doing All Right.[1]
• In 2020 Queen became the first band to appear on a British coin. The Royal Mint's commemorative five pound coin shows the instruments of all four members, including Freddie's Bechstein piano and microphone stand. Later that year they got their own set of Royal Mail stamps.[1] [2]
• Freddie's broken microphone stand started as an accident. Early in Queen's career the heavy base snapped off during a show. Freddie realised the half stand could be swung, pointed and posed with in endless ways, and it became his trademark prop.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.