The album that Freddie Mercury dedicated to his cat
There’s a good chance that almost any rock band could have been amplified with Freddie Mercury at the helm. Although he may not have taken to the frontman role at first, Mercury embraced the centre of the stage wholeheartedly, always holding the crowd in the palm of his hand whenever he went out on tour. Despite his penchant for making a spectacle whenever he stepped behind the microphone, the liner notes of one of his albums proved he had a sensitive side.
Throughout the band’s earliest years, Mercury was willing to stop anything to get the sounds that he heard in his head. Whenever the group ventured into the studio, Mercury was the one overseeing every song to make sure he got the ideal vocal take, leading to various songs where the final master tape was nearly transparent due to how many different overdubs were on it.
By the time the band had made their way into the 1980s, it was becoming clear that everyone needed a break from each other. Having embraced the sounds of synthesisers throughout their previous album, The Game, the group created an eclectic mix of different textures, from the rockabilly sounds of ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ to the disco-tinged classic ‘Another One Bites the Dust’.
Aside from working on various Queen projects, the band members were free to work on any solo material they pleased. Although drummer Roger Taylor would be among the first to release any material, Mercury would become one of the most high-profile solo stars, even notching a few hits on the charts with his solo album Mr Bad Guy.
When combing through the liner notes, though, Mercury was unabashedly proud of his life as a cat lover. Known for owning ten cats in total, Mercury was known for celebrating his feline friends, even devoting entire rooms to them when he bought his rockstar abode.
Once he finished the masters for Mr Bad Guy, Mercury mentioned in the liner notes that the entire album would be dedicated to his pets, stating, “This album is dedicated to my cat Jerry – also Tom, Oscar and Tiffany, and all the cat lovers across the universe – screw everybody else!”. While the album would be a footnote in the legacy of Queen, it wouldn’t be the last time Mercury would weave his love for cats into his music.
When putting together the final album Queen made while Mercury was alive, the frontman would eventually devote an entire song to his cat, penning the tune ‘Delilah’ around his love for his pets. The infamous felines would also appear in some of Queen’s final videos, being given a prime feature in the video ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’, which would also be one of the final videos Mercury would make.
Although Mr Bad Guy did have its fans in its time, the songs from the album would get a second chance at stardom on the posthumous album Made in Heaven. Modelled after the demos Mercury had been working on up until the day he died, songs like the title track and ‘I Was Born To Love You’ were relics from his debut solo release. Despite the amount of rock history from Mercury’s solo debut, the only ones that seemed to matter to the frontman were the cats he would come home to.
