Freddie Mercury: a high strung genius of escapism

“So I think in the end being natural and being actually genuine is what wins, and I hope that comes out in my songs.”

• Freddie Mercury in an interview in 1985.

The word “genius” is often thrown around in most art forms, but if we were to determine what makes an artist such and makes him or her to be a genius, what would the requirements? Creativity? Originality? Capacity to sustain a creative output for a long amount of time without losing quality? These are all elements and questions that beg the question: What makes a genius tick?

If we focus our attention to music, especially of Rock ilk, the capacity to provide entertainment and creativity at the same time has been a task that only the finest have been able to accomplish.

And you hardly reach a higher level of excellence in Rock music than Freddie Mercury and his seminal group, Queen.

Much has been said about Freddie Mercury’s life and the recent film about Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody, while has failed in some measures to show the reality of the band as it was during that period of time, it did a great effort to put the band and Freddie himself back in the spotlight after more than two decades.

But talking about Freddie is often a discussion about his scenes of debauchery, his reservations to the public about his sexual tendencies, his extravagance on the stage and the case of AIDS that ended up taking his life. More often than not, the music, the very element that managed to raise Freddie to an almost god-like status in Rock pantheon, ends up having a secondary role and that is such a shame when discussing one of the finest musicians and singers that the world has given us in the last fifty years or so.

The influences, the method of composition, what the songs meant to him and what he wanted to convey… the artistic nature of Freddie is often overlooked in favor of much more extravagant aspects of his life. But here we are going to have a look at what made Freddie Mercury an artist, what his writing methods at Queen and what music meant to him.

First of all: Queen, the iron giant built by four.

“No way is this Freddie Mercury and his backing band. When you analyze it, the four of us make the whole thing work. It’s 25 per cent, and I’m the one upfront, that’s all.”

• In an interview in 1981 with Melody Maker.

In front of the popular eye that doesn’t have a big insight into the band’s methodology and history, Queen is often perceived as the Freddie Mercury Show and him being the biggest creative force, which is something that couldn’t be further from the truth–the reality was that Queen was an iron giant built by four creative forces.

The Queen method of work was actually quite simple and ironclad: each member comes to the studio with a set of ideas for songs and the one responsible for said idea is the one who is going to develop it. So if we were to look at an album like, say, A Night at the Opera, a track like The Prophet’s Song was credited only to guitarist Brian May who was the main responsible of coming up with the concept and idea while Freddie himself would come up with the likes of Bohemian Rhapsody or Love of My Life.

Despite being an obvious collective musical force, Queen was a group designed to provide a lot of individual music efforts and that was the main reason behind the band’s such notorious eclectic sound. Another great example of this is the 1977 album, News of the World, where drummer Roger Taylor was heavily influenced by the Punk Rock movement at the time, thus contributing with a hard-edged track such as Sheer Heart Attack –a song influenced by the Sex Pistols, a band that Freddie wasn’t very fond of. That same album will provide a bassist John Deacon-penned song like Spread Your Wings, which is a much more accessible and light-hearted track compared to the aforementioned Sheer Heart Attack.

Queen was the end result of a melting pot of influences and while Freddie was an instrumental part of it and the most visually notorious figure of the band, John, Roger and Brian had as much relevance in the band’s greatest songs, albums and on their careers as a whole.

Workaholic and perfectionist.

“I’m a very highly strung person. I like having fun, and my job is a very good release for me, but it’s still my job and I always take it very seriously. And when you are highly strung and you take your work seriously, you’re bound to appear difficult to the outside world.”

• In an interview in 1981 with Melody Maker.

Just like the other three members of the band, Freddie could have dedicated his life to another profession. A graduate in Graphic Design, he decided, along with Brian, John and Roger, to give his 100% in the music business and not fall short of being the best–this was the kind of never say die attitude that permeated the band during their early years where they were victim of several scams from labels and agents, leaving them with almost no money.

Even during those times of hardship, Freddie was known to spend a lot of time on the studio to iron out what he considered to be flaws in his music and to improve the quality of their sound. This often led to months and months of studio recordings, not holding themselves back in any shape or form when it came to music. As the man himself once pointed out in a 1977 interview to Circus Magazine: “We’re a very expensive group; we break a lot of rules. It’s unheard of to combine opera with a rock theme, my dear. And, we have no such things as a budget anymore. Our manager freaks when we show him the bill. We’re lavish to the bone, but all our money goes back into the product.”

Actually, A Night of the Opera was at one point the most expensive album of all time, which goes to show the level of commitment and investment that they had on their work. For Freddie, music was an entertainment similar to see a good film or a play at the theater; it was not only the enjoyment, but also the grandiloquence and the larger-than-life approach than gave Queen that characteristic excessive and histrionic sound.

Even during his last years of live, he was a constant state of composition and committed to making music, which often led to a certain degree of social alienation to the rest of the world, moments of debauchery notwithstanding. He would go as far as saying that his constant need to compose and make new music would difficult his possibilities to settle down later on.

But beyond that level of sophistication there was a certain degree of simplicity to Freddie’s musical vision.

The fun of simplicity.

“People seem to think that we’re over complexed, and it’s not true. It depends on the individual track really, if it needs it – we do it. So this is pretty sparse actually by Queen and our standards.”

• Talking about You Take My Breath Away on a Capitol Radio interview in 1976.

Queen’s evolution has been one of the most fascinating to observe and to comprehend in the big spectrum of Rock music. They have managed to cover pretty much every style of Rock music available to them while adding components of Jazz, Blues, Pop and even a bit of Metal in the process when the moment called for it, enabling a much wider musical range for the band.

In Freddie’s case, he was always one for simplicity and to understand that you don’t always need to create a Bohemian Rhapsody to appeal to your audience (regardless of the initial critics that that single received because of what was, at the time, an unheard combination of opera with Rock music). There was also the perception of constantly striving to make new material, to see music as a constant mean to provide music and stay relevant rather than relying just on what he had done in the past.

“’Cause I think songs are like, you know, they’re like buying a new dress or shirt, you just wear it and then you discard it. I mean people always write new songs,” he said in an interview in 1985. Freddie always had a carefree attitude regarding his songs, often perceiving them as something that were a product of a certain period of musical inspiration and then moving on to the next hot moment of composition–this led to him saying more than once that he could forget the rhythms and melodies of a song like Love of My Life and he would had to practice it to get it right once again.

Beyond all: the pure joy of escapism.

“I like people to go away from a Queen show feeling fully entertained, having had a good time. I think Queen songs are pure escapism, like going to see a good film – after that, they can go away and say ‘that was great’, and go back to their problems. I don’t want to change the world with our music.”

• In a 1981 interview with Melody Maker.

If there’s one commandment that ruled Freddie Mercury’s career from beginning to end was the notion that fun and entertainment to the public were not negotiable; he would come to the stage or the studio fully determined to make sure that the quality of the product was up to his standards.

This is something that can be detected throughout their career and on all their albums due to the fact that there’s a high amount of variety. For Freddie, as a musician, he was always willing to branch out and to do different things as both a songwriter and as a singer –his first solo album released in 1985, Mr. Bad Guy, where he strikes a couple of high notes, which isn’t normally his style.

“The structure and the melody are easy for me, but the lyrics are very hard, I’m not a poet. I just like to write catchy tunes,” he said to CBS in 1985–it’s very hard to find a much clearer and definitive statement to explain what his songwriting process was and what were his targets behind it.

This aspect of his musicianship can be perceived in clearer fashion during Queen’s 80s period when they were aiming for a more Pop Rock approach and updating their sound to the tendencies of the time while still retaining the elements that made them be what they were–this is a period where Freddie branched out to several other musical interests such as Disco and this lead to the creation of Mr. Bad Guy, thus cementing another transition in his career during the mid-80s.

Always being him. Always being you.

“A lot of people slammed ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, but who can you compare that to? Name one group that’s done an operatic single. You know, we were adamant that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ would be a hit in its entirety. We have been forced to make compromises, but cutting up a song will never be one of them.”

• In a 1977 interview to Circus Magazine.

Genius can be defined through a certain amount of aspects and elements, but the main thing that separates them from the rest is the fact that they are not afraid of being genuine, of being transparent, and that is one of Freddie Mercury’s greatest and finest strengths as a musician: his capacity to not compromise what he comprehended as his musical vision and to do what he wanted, regardless of the end result or the public’s perception.

The definition of someone who lived and died for his music in the most literal sense of the expression, Freddie never took himself too seriously when it came to his interests, his view of life or his musical output; he did it because he felt like it and stayed true to what he considered the best for him and Queen as a whole.

Talent is much more abundant in the world than what it seems; what makes a genius tick is the notion to never compromise and to always being genuine to what they to convey. Queen, not only Freddie, was like that: a musical entity that lived and died for the sheer joy of making a great song.

And that is how he and they should be remembered until the end of time.