The 1989 epic Queen track Brian May refused to play live
Freddie Mercury wasn’t just a singer; he was the owner of one of the most technically proficient voices to ever make rock music, dancing around octaves and making it look effortless, but at the same time, injecting boundless emotion into every word.
Equally, he was a world-class performer, with a stage presence that separated him from almost everyone else in his field. The crowd would sit pretty comfortably in the palm of his hand for entire concerts, as Mercury dominated every single inch of whatever stage he was performing on, as if he had been treading those boards for his entire life.
If all of that wasn’t enough, Mercury was also an exceptional songwriter. When you look through Queen’s discography, so many of the songs that fans consider their very best are the result of Mercury’s penmanship. One of his biggest is ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, one of the greatest and most complex songs ever written. When talking about it, Brian May said he felt like Mercury put a lot of emotional sentiment into every last confusing word of the track.
“I think that Freddie was certainly battling with problems in his personal life, which he might have decided to put into the song himself,” said May, “He was certainly looking at re-creating himself. But I don’t think at that point in time it was the best thing to do, so he actually decided to do it later.”
Mercury passed away in November 1991, but Queen continue to tour to this day and keeps his memory alive the best way they know how. From London to Lisbon, his songs fill the hearts of those who make up the crowds from around the world and scream his iconic lyrics at the top of their lungs. However, while the band uses these shows in a bid to pay tribute to him, there is one song they won’t touch because of the excessive emotional weight.
Mercury wrote ‘The Miracle’ towards the back end of the ‘80s, and it wound up being the title track for their 1989 album. It’s worth noting that at this point, his health was really taking a turn for the worst, but despite things looking incredibly bleak, he still managed to put together a song which was optimistic at heart.
It’s not the band’s most popular track, but it’s one that May feels like is a perfect reflection of how much of a hopeful person Mercury was. As a mark of respect for his late friend, he doesn’t ever want to play it live, as it doesn’t feel like a song anyone other than the band’s original frontman should be singing.
So, there’s another thing we can like about Mercury: not only was he a great singer, performer, songwriter, but, it turns out, an eternal optimist. As he happily proclaimed at the outset of his career, “I won’t be a rock star. I will be a legend.”
“I’m going to pick a song that not everybody knows out there, which is called ‘The Miracle’, which Freddie wrote that I always thought has a strange, unique magic to it,” said May, when once asked to pick his favourite Queen songs, “Especially because Freddie wrote it at a time when it was very hard for him to be optimistic […] and it’s just very beautiful. I’ll go for that.”
