Freddie Mercury was a complex person, with an enormous talent for music that allowed him to rank among the best artists in history and with a fame that made him rub shoulders even with royalty. Among the stories he left behind is that of to dress Lady Di as a man to go out one night in London, to sing with Montserrat Caballé at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics or to plan to release songs with Michael Jackson. And precisely a new biography details how were the love and hate relationships of the leader of Queen with other great artists such as Caballé, Jackson, Bowie or Sex Pistols. It goes on sale next November 11, just a few days before the thirty anniversary of the death of Freddie Mercury.
Titled ‘Magnifico !: The A to Z of Queen’, journalist Mark Blake, who interviewed band members numerous times over the past three decades, reveals what Mercury was like in intimacy with other singers and highlights the close friendship he achieved with Montserrat Caballé. “He was a huge fan of opera and had gone to see it in London, in Covent Garden. (Mercury) never focused solely on rock music or pop music. He had a whole series of strange influences,” says the author about the artist , which dedicates a whole chapter to Freddie’s relationship with the soprano.
Enlarge
–
–
The first meeting between the two took place at the Ritz Hotel in Barcelona and Mercury claimed to have been intimidated by the Spanish singer and not knowing “how to treat her“At this meeting, Caballé understood that Mercury had made a song for her and this was the trigger for the Queen vocalist to compose the song. ‘Barcelona ‘with Mike Moran, the same one they would sing at the opening of the 1992 Olympic Games. “They invented it as they were composing it,” confirms the journalist. They would record a full album in 1987.
The relationship with Michael Jackson: everything to nothing
The book is written mainly thanks to the statements made by Brian May and Roger Taylor, the men who were in charge of the guitar and drums at Queen. With them, Blake has managed to find out what happened between Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury to cool their relationship when it seemed they were going to create a historical society. In the book Blake exposes that the leader of the Queen did not sit well with a detail that the king of pop had, since after inviting him to record a series of songs in California that did not end because Mercury had to return to London, two of them appeared with Mick Jagger’s voice and not his. Four years later, Mercury joked that “we should title our next album ‘Good'” to counter the ‘Bad’ that Jackson had released.
The rivalry with David Bowie and “a total chump”
The figure of David Bowie appears better standing in the book, although Blake insists on the strong rivalry that existed between the artist of ‘Heroes’ and the band Queen. Nevertheless, they ended up creating a song together that was a huge hit and that provided a little bit of fresh air both to their competitiveness and to the careers of both: ‘Under Pressure’.
The same would not happen with Sex Pistols, with whom they met in a London recording studio in 1977 and who had very different ideas about music than Queen. “We looked at each other suspiciously at first, but they were down-to-earth kids,” Roger Taylor explained to Blake. Of course, one of them did not like them: “Except Sid Vicious. He was a total chump. “
–
