Record Collector, July 1999, Issue 239

KING FREDDIE  
(by Tim Jones)

"What's all the fuss about?", I was asked by a sadly out-of-touch individual. "I could understand if it was Frank Sinatra". Well, in case you hadn't realised, Freddie Mercury was the consummate rock performer, who for ten glorious years cavorted about the world's theatres and stadiums, stunning audiences with his awesome vocal delivery, and mesmerising and often amusing on-stage antics. (Not to mention his intriguing off-stage life.) He was consistently rated by Fleet Street as the king of the rock jungle, outdoing illustrious peers such as Mick Jagger and David Bowie. Robert Plant summed Freddie up as a "true performer", while to Paul Young, he was "the ultimate".

Recently, Roger Daltrey said that, even without Freddie, the Queen sound is still there when Brian, Roger and John plug in their instruments and blast it out - as they did with the Who songster at the Mercury tribute gig, in 1992. But there was more to Freddie than just his voice - spine tingling and exhilarating though it could be. There was an undefinable presence about him. A mystique, or an aura, if you will. When he started trilling his, to all intents and purposes, nonsensical "de dee Dayo" roundelay, to the audience, and raised his arm aloft in tongue- in- cheek defiance, he evoked a wholehearted, blood'n'thunder response like no other rock star. Witness Live Aid in 1985, where Freddie raised the roof even when there wasn't one! Queen were the act on that momentous day, and it was Freddie's showmanship as much as anything else that won over even the sceptics. U2? Bollocks. Those were the days of our lives! Hard rockin' majesty.

True, the Queen quartet delivered infectious stadium anthems unparalleled in rock. But you've got to be able to make people really believe in you to carry them off. Freddie did that with superlative ease. And it was that easiness, playing to a crowd of 250 at a Fan Club gig, 2,500 at the Hammersmith Odeon, or 250,000 at Rio, that marked out the Queen man as one in five billion.

Almost everybody, bar the odd Old Blue Eyes fan, is familiar with the startling Freddie vocal range - simpering, testy balladeer, would-be operatic diva, funky pop hipster, and hard rockin' demigod. Remember him this way: hitting the high notes, holding and masterfully shaping them for unfeasible lengths of time, while almost perpetually whirring about the place with a devil-may-care dervish intensity and at the end of it, a boyishly toothy grin. Whatever vocal or ridiculously over-the-top visual style he adopted, he excelled in that role. And it was the distinctiveness of the Mercury tones that truly told. Amidst a sea of vox populi, he was unmistakable, almost unmimicable.

That said, when I attended the Freddie tribute gig at Wembley, along with 72,000 fellow rockers who'd got tickets during the six-hour selling frenzy, there was more than one smirking face when George Michael took to the stage. They were soon unsmirked. For as everyone but the most pig-headed would admit, old Giorgios came as near to Freddie's timbre and power as anyone could. Quite a shock after the likes of Axl Rose, Elton, and Metallica! It's been rumoured ever since that the life-long Anglo-Greek Queen fan will join the ranks of his heroes, and I for one wouldn't complain - if only to keep the Queen sound alive. Yet no one, Officer George included, could truly fill the shoes of the quick-silvered singer. There may be similarities in their personal lives, but who could imagine Mr. Michael parading at the end of a two-hour visual and sonic blitz in a crown and twenty-foot ermine robe and carrying it off?!

At Queen's last concert at Knebworth Park, in 1986, around 300,000 people poured into the grassy natural bowl. No tickets were checked that day, for what Brian May called Queen's "biggest gig ever". It was as if the masses knew this would be Freddie's swan song. And it showed. He gave it his all, and the gigantic throng responded in kind. In his trademark white trousers and cut-down top, he rushed about the stage like a man possessed, streaking through all the Queen classics like the shooting-star-burning-through-the-sky that he was. With the world's biggest ever stage and lighting-rig as a backdrop, only someone of unrivalled charisma could draw every eye to the distant figure on the stage.

Freddie did that with aplomb. Playing to the crowd was his vocation, playing the piano a respite. And after his solo vocal spot, and several minutes of scale-running and communal chanting with the fervent army of fans, he laughed aloud. "Your too good. Fuck off!" Moments like that made him not only a star, but somehow, one of the mob. A man with a very different world and life-style to most of us, but a man in touch. He made you feel that. Even if, like me, you're not a true fanatic, it's easy to understand the awe in which Queen cohorts hold their musical god. Freddie gave his all, and the people about him felt it. How many rock stars could you genuinely say that about?

The Mercury solo body of work never struck me as much as his group endeavours, but you have to admire the gusto with which he attacked his operatic moments. "Barcelona" could have descended into visual Laurel and Hardy farce to the more sceptical. But Freddie, as ever, grabbed the bull by the horns and showed Pavarotti the way to chart success. "The Great Pretender" was an opus in self-deprecation but, paradoxically, it was the Freddie persona that make it such a glorious triumph.

If other songs failed to scale the heights, they invariably lacked that grandiose energy that touched the nerve of the record-buying public. We demanded more than just a good tune. We wanted another bit of magic that only Freddie could conjure. That was his greatest gift, and the gift that he left us all. Not just a splendid musical legacy, but the memory of his almost supernatural ability to utterly spellbind an audience and take it with him on his musical journey. Old Frankie boy may have transported people to the Big Apple with his crooning, but Freddie took you all the way to the top of the Empire State Building.