The best member of The Beatles, according to Freddie Mercury: “Always preferred”
It’s hard to think of any reference point for someone like Freddie Mercury in rock and roll history.
Even though there had been countless singers who had taken rock and roll to new heights every single time they made a new record, there’s no proper way of being able to describe the kind of electricity that happened whenever Mercury took to the stage. A lot of that came from his natural talent every single time he played with an audience, but he may have never felt comfortable on the world’s stage were it not for The Beatles breaking the doors for everyone else in the early 1960s.
While the Fab Four’s story has been overexplained to a certain degree, the fact that they have influenced all of rock and roll isn’t necessarily an accident. Even if there are some bands that claim that they hate them, there’s always going to be pieces of rock history that wouldn’t exist without them. No matter which way you slice it, you’re either going to love them or you’re going to move in a different direction because you didn’t like what they did.
But Mercury had no problem flying that flag every single time he sang. In fact, when listening to some of their old-school songs, a lot of them sound like the kind of tunes that The Beatles would churn out. ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ sounds like a Beatlesque spin on an Elvis Presley tune, those grand sing-alongs in their repertoire bring to mind the communal chants in ‘Hey Jude’, and even when Mercury was making his showtune numbers, there isn’t a single one of them that doesn’t sound the tiniest bit like one of Paul McCartney’s granny music.
Then again, Mercury felt like he needed to have a lot more passion behind the ones that he was doing. Despite ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’ being one of those showtunes, the whole thing feels like it was plucked directly from Mercury’s soul. And that approach to singing only what was in his heart was something that fell much more in line with everything that John Lennon had to say.
While Queen wasn’t going to end up scaling things back like Lennon did on Plastic Ono Band, they could certainly understand where he was coming from when writing his songs… He seemed genuinely interested in making music that was deeply personal rather than worrying about getting a hit single, and that kind of fearlessness is what resonated with Mercury the most when he started making his own music.
There were other idols that he looked up to like Aretha Franklin and Jimi Hendrix, but in terms of The Beatles, Mercury felt no one came close to Lennon, saying, “He was larger than life, I think, and an absolute genius… Even at a very early stage, when they were The Beatles, I always preferred John Lennon’s things. I don’t know why. He just had that magic.” And that showed when you heard the kinds of songs that the band made in tribute to him.
For all the flak that Hot Space gets as one of the band’s worst records, no album that has songs like ‘Life is Real’ can be all bad from cover to cover. There are many moments where Mercury seemed genuinely hurt that Lennon was no longer with us, but he was going to do right by his name every time he made a new record, whether that was quoting his own heart or trying to perform in the same way that Lennon did when Queen performed at Live Aid.
Mercury didn’t see himself as someone who got involved in political causes like his hero did, but he did understand the need to have something that was a bit more heartfelt every time he made a record. Nobody was ever going to connect with someone that didn’t have a song in their heart, and he was going to make sure that he made people feel his joy, pain, and anger the same way that you could feel Lennon’s on his work.
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