“I will be a legend”: Freddie Mercury’s 25 favourite songs
“You can be anything you want to be,” Freddie Mercury once said, “Just turn yourself into anything you think that you could ever be.” With his eclectic love of music in all of its guises, it’s easy to imagine that when he wasn’t Freddie Mercury, the frontman of Queen, he was Freddie Mercury, the soul star behind ‘Respect’ or the long-haired rocker riffing out to ‘Kashmir’. His audience? A mirror and maybe one of his many cats. The performance? Outstanding.
That same eclectic mix made Queen so beloved with such a wide brushstroke of fans. The band cobbled together operatics, pop sensibilities, searing guitar solos, soulful refrains, and an unburdened sense of rock ‘n’ roll bravura. This garnered them a legion of followers from a wide range of genres and established them as one of the most unique acts around. They’re a unique outfit with just as much in common with Abba as with Led Zeppelin.
Much of that style came from Freddie Mercury’s refusal to be cornered into any kind of trope, both musically and on an individual level. As the trailblazing stage commander once declared himself: “I won’t be a rock star. I will be a legend.” That much has certainly come to fruition in the years that have followed with plenty of statues and polls crowning him the greatest frontman in history.
With a voice that landed on Mars long before the Rover, he was indeed comparable to his opera heroes like Luciano Pavarotti, but he was equally capable of the solemn and softer balladeer style of Dusty Springfield. This meant that many struggled to place Queen for a while but remained determined to do so for some futile reason all the same, with executives hampering their early efforts by trying to channel them one way or another.
As Mercury once explained: “Back in the old days, we were often compared to Led Zeppelin. If we did something with harmony, it was the Beach Boys.” This led to plenty of problems when they were first trying to establish themselves as, well, themselves—nothing other than good old Queen. And Queen were a phenomenon quite out of the ordinary.
This profound individualism turned Queen’s varied back catalogue into a coherent tome that stated one thing clearly: “The most important thing is to live a fabulous life. As long as it’s fabulous I don’t care how long it is.” That was the mantra that their frontman lived by, and to the very end, music was the most elevating aspect of it.
Freddie Mercury used his creativity as a crutch to overcome it. The tale of the fitting anthem, ‘The Show Must Go On,’ forms the perfect tableau of this. As May recalls, by this stage in the recording process, the virus and effects of the radiation treatment used to fight it had weakened Freddie to the point of being seriously ill and almost bedridden.
Contained within the song’s anthemic declaration of the inviolable legacy of music is a lyric that the frontman’s partner, Jim Hutton, recalls as “the most autobiographical line: ‘My make-up may be flaking but my smile still stays on.’ That was true. No matter how ill Freddie felt, he never grumbled to anyone or sought sympathy of any kind. It was his battle, no one else’s, and he always wore a brave face against the ever-increasing odds against him.” The story of how the song came to fruition is testimony to that.
May had expressed concerns that he thought Mercury was too ill to perform and that the recording session should be scrapped. However, Mercury picked himself up off the floor and, as May recalls: “I said, ‘Fred, I don’t know if this is going to be possible to sing.’ And he went, ‘I’ll fucking do it, darling’—vodka down—and went in and killed it, completely lacerated that vocal.” Knowing he was probably only capable of a single take, the jocular frontman poured all of his might and a serving of vodka into a performance that seemed all-encompassing of the life he lived and the eternally upbeat way he lived it.
When celebrating the life of Freddie Mercury and the music he loved most, his old bandmates in Queen compiled a list of his favourite songs. These are the anthems they fondly remember him humming in the studio, rattling through in rehearsals or overplaying to death on the tour bus. It’s certainly a list that makes for interesting reading, and although the collection is wildly hodgepodge there is definitely something about each of them that just seems to have a bit of Freddie Mercury in it. Enjoy.
Freddie Mercury’s 25 favourite songs:
- ‘Toto’ – Africa
- ‘Kashmir’ – Led Zeppelin
- ‘I Get Around’ – The Beach Boys
- ‘Careless Whisper’ – Wham!
- ‘Jailhouse Rock’ – Elvis Presley
- ‘Woman in Love’ – Barbra Streisand
- ‘Relax’ – Frankie Goes to Hollywood
- ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’ – Elton John
- ‘I Just Don’t Know What to do With Myself’ – Dusty Springfield
- ‘Respect’ – Aretha Franklin
- ‘Rock With You’ – Michael Jackson
- ‘Unchained Melody’ – The Righteous Brothers
- ‘Make It Easy on Yourself’ – The Walker Brothers
- ‘Carnival is Over’ – The Seekers
- ‘Please Don’t Tease’ – Cliff Richard
- ‘Love Me Tender’ – Elvis Presley
- ‘Imagine’ – John Lennon
- ‘Billie Jean’ – Michael Jackson
- ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’ – Mahalia Jackson
- ‘(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman’ – Aretha Franklin
- ‘Goin’ Back’ – Dusty Springfield
- ‘Vesti La Giubba’ – Carreras, Domingo, Pavarotti and Mehta
- ‘Little Red Corvette’ – Prince
- ‘Pull Up to the Bumper’ – Grace Jones
- ‘D’amour Sull’ali Rosee’ – Guiseppe Verdi
