The “beautiful” song Brian May called Freddie Mercury’s finest
Brian May had always had a clear vision for what Queen was going to be.
Every one of them contributed equally to turning the band into a cultural force, but when looking at the way that they interacted both onstage and in the studio, there was always a playfulness to them, making some of their classic songs as well. But even if you didn’t have to think too hard when listening to something as goofy as ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, some songs made May take a different outlook on the kinds of songs that they had been creating all this time.
Because if there’s one thing you should know before anything, it’s that Queen songs are not a walk in the park to play. They had a near-inhuman ability to turn some of the most complex musical ideas into something that we all could understand, but if you ever tried to play along to songs like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or ‘Killer Queen’, you would get a pretty good education in how someone is supposed to construct a song.
Then again, the beauty of Queen was that they never wanted to sound exactly the same every single time they made a record. You could tell it was them from the moment they came on the radio, but even with those recognisable voices, you can’t really say that everything from ‘Doing All Right’ to ‘Dragon Attack’ to ‘Back Chat’ necessarily sounds like they come from the exact same band all the time.
They were willing to do absolutely everything when it came to their records, but they probably didn’t realise how little time they had to give their songs to the public. Freddie Mercury had already been struggling with AIDs in the late 1980s, and while the band would have had every reason to officially retire after working on an album like The Miracle, Mercury was determined to record as much music until he dropped.
He was interested in making music that could be remembered long after he was gone, and Innuendo sounds like it’s being performed by someone who was at the peak of health. ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’ was already showing the world the sorry state of health that Mercury was in at the time, but even after May was convinced that his friend couldn’t sing ‘The Show Must Go On’, Mercury managed to sing something that would have been a masterpiece for any other vocalist.
May even tried to tell Mercury that he didn’t need to do the song, but the fact that Mercury got back out there and dominated the studio one more time was what made May respect him even more, saying, “I remember saying to Freddie, ‘I don’t want you to hurt yourself. You know, don’t force yourself to do this if it’s not going to feel good.’ But he said, ‘I’ll fucking do it, Brian!’ And he did. And it was beautiful. I think it’s one of his finest performances of all time. It’s incredible.”
And what’s even crazier is knowing that this wasn’t even the last thing that Mercury even recorded. Made in Heaven were already going to be the kind of scraps left over from when they were working in the studio next, and hearing him sing the first half of the song ‘Mother Love’ is one of the most heartfelt moments in the band’s discography, especially halfway through when May takes over for his fallen friend to finish the song out.
So while ‘The Show Must Go On’ was never meant to be the band’s best song by any stretch, it stands out today more as a statement than anything else. Mercury knew that he was dying, and even if he was uncertain of what was going to happen from one day to the next, he knew that he could always rely on his music to make him feel comfortable every single time he opened his mouth to sing.
