When Bulsara was 17 his family moved to England in the wake of the Zanzibar Revolution. As an art student in London, he joined several bands as vocalist, including Ibex (later called Wreckage) and Sour Milk Sea. He also met Tim Staffell, the vocalist of Smile, and through him the group’s guitarist and drummer, Brian May and Roger Taylor. When Staffell quit, Bulsara persuaded May and Taylor to form a new band with him, which he named Queen. He himself started to use the surname Mercury, and it was as Freddie Mercury that he went on to become one of the best known rock vocalists in history.
As a vocalist, Freddie Mercury was widely recognized as one of the best in rock music, due to both the range and the power of his voice. Unlike many other singers, his falsetto was not overly thin, and so sounded better than average. But while a lot of rock fans tend to equate good singing with singing high notes, something that Mercury certainly did well, his ability to sing low and with great power was if anything more outstanding. In concert, due to worries about damaging his throat, he would usually not sing the high notes that he sang on record, but his live vocal performances remained very impressive regardless, certainly more so than the vast majority of other singers in rock, and when combined with his powerful stage presence, it is no surprise that few others could match him as a live performer. As for his instrumental abilities, in Queen’s early years, he was the group’s primary keyboardist. Though he himself was supposedly dismissive of his skill on the piano, his playing on tracks like “The March of the Black Queen”, “Love of My Life”, "The Millionaire Waltz" and “My Melancholy Blues” is, at least to my admittedly untrained ear, excellent. He only played guitar on record on one song, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” (on this song, he also played guitar in concert), but he wrote one or two others on guitar, including “Ogre Battle”, and he wrote many guitar lines on piano.
In Queen’s first decade, Freddie Mercury was the band’s most prolific songwriter, writing slightly more than Brian May and far more than Roger Taylor or bassist John Deacon in terms of total number of songs, as well as composing more of the group’s hits than all the others put together. He was also the group’s most eclectic writer, composing in a wide variety of styles. The group’s biggest hit in the UK, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, a mix of ballad, opera and hard rock that is still considered their magnum opus and is often voted best song of all time in UK music polls, was entirely Mercury’s work. Among the group’s other big hits from their first eight albums, he also wrote the sports stadium favorite “We Are the Champions” (originally paired on record with Queen’s other big sports anthem, Brian May’s “We Will Rock You”), the gospel-style “Somebody to Love”, the rockabilly “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” (Queen’s first American chart-topper), the vaudeville-tinged “Killer Queen” and “Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy”, and the playful “Bicycle Race” and “Don’t Stop Me Now”. As for album tracks, he wrote the highly complex “The March of the Black Queen”, centerpiece to the second side of Queen II, all of which was written by Mercury; ballads like “Love of My Life”, “Nevermore” and “Lily of the Valley”; the music hall/vaudeville songs like “Seaside Rendezvous”, rockers like “Ogre Battle”, “Death on Two Legs” and “Flick of the Wrist”, the classical-style track “The Millionaire Waltz”, the lounge jazz-style song “My Melancholy Blues” and the Middle Eastern-flavored “Mustapha”, along with many other songs.
In the 1980s, Mercury’s share of the songwriting for Queen shrank considerably, with the other members writing as much or more than he did. He still wrote a number of excellent tracks such as “It’s a Hard Life” and “I’m Going Slightly Mad” (the latter, like all tracks on the albums The Miracle and Innuendo, was credited to the group as a whole) and was according to various sources the main writer on collaborations like “Friends Will Be Friends”, “Was It All Worth It” and “Innuendo”. He also made key contributions to songs written primarily by others in the group. In addition, in1985 he released a solo album called Mr. Bad Guy (two of the best tracks on this album, “Made in Heaven” and “I Was Born to Love You”, were later reworked by the other members of Queen for the posthumous album Made in Heaven), in 1987 he released an excellent cover of “The Great Pretender” (his biggest solo hit in his lifetime), and in 1988 he released Barcelona, an album he recorded with opera singer Montserrat Caballé (this album, featuring some of his best solo songs, was largely co-written with keyboardist Mike Moran). He also sang songs on a couple of soundtracks and produced or sang on some tracks by other artists. Unbeknownst to the public, by the time of the release of Queen’s 1989 album The Miracle, Mercury was already ill with AIDS, and by the time of the release of Innuendo in early 1991 his condition was already quite serious, as is apparent from the videos featuring new footage of the band made for that album. He continued to record in the following months, until it became impossible for him to do so. On November 23 he issued a statement confirming that he had AIDS, and the next day he died. Several years after his death, in 1995, the rest of the band released a final album called Made in Heaven, which included Mercury’s last composition “A Winter’s Tale” and his last recording “Mother Love” (written by May with help from Mercury) in addition to several reworked older recordings, such as the Mercury solo tracks mentioned above. Since then, a number of demos and incomplete recordings by Mercury have been released, and it is reported that May and Taylor are polishing up some of Mercury’s demos (whether ones that have been released or others is not clear) for release on a new album in the near future.
As noted above, Mercury was the most eclectic songwriter in Queen, covering a wide variety of genres. He was particularly strong as a composer, with a good gift for melody and harmonics. Lyrics were not his strong point, as most of the songs he wrote were by his own admission fairly disposable and not very deep, though few of his lyrics were truly awkward and some were quite good. Even when his lyrics were relatively weak, the music often overcame this deficiency, a case in point being “The March of the Black Queen”, which has pretty nonsensical lyrics but great music. In any case, Mercury’s voice was such that he could almost have sung the phone book, as they say, and gotten away with it. That might be a slight exaggeration, but he could usually make an average song sound good and a good song sound great. Still, like the other members of Queen, he did his best work with the band. Mr. Bad Guy has some good songs but also quite a few that are at best mediocre. Barcelona is much better, but is less of a pure solo effort, as he was collaborating with others in both the songwriting and the performing. In any case, it is for the songs he produced with May, Taylor and Deacon, particularly those from the 1970s when his songwriting was at its peak, that he will be remembered.
The following is a list of 30 of Mercury’s best compositions. It is drawn from songs that are credited solely to Mercury or, for later songs that were credited to Queen, are known to have been written nearly entirely by him. In addition to a short list of honorable mentions, I have appended a short list of some of the best songs that Mercury co-wrote with others. I should emphasize that if a song doesn’t appear here, this doesn’t mean I dislike it, just that I think the other songs are better (in some cases only slightly so). For that matter, I might feel differently if I were to do the list again another time (in particular, I like several of the "honorable mentions" just as much as some of the songs that made the main list, but I had narrow it down somehow).
The Best of Freddie Mercury
(All songs written by Freddie Mercury and performed by Queen except where otherwise noted)
My Fairy King
Ogre Battle
The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke
Nevermore
The March of the Black Queen
Seven Seas of Rhye (credited to Mercury, but May helped with the music)
Killer Queen
Flick of the Wrist
Lily of the Valley
In the Lap of the Gods (Revisited)
Death on Two Legs
Seaside Rendezvous
Love of My Life
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Millionaire Waltz
Somebody to Love
Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy
We Are the Champions
My Melancholy Blues
Mustapha
Bicycle Race
Let Me Entertain You
Don’t Stop Me Now
Crazy Little Thing Called Love
Life Is Real
It’s a Hard Life
Princes of the Universe
I’m Going Slightly Mad (Credited to Queen)
Made in Heaven (First recorded by Mercury, later re-recorded by Queen)
I Was Born to Love You (First recorded by Mercury, later re-recorded by Queen)
Honorable Mentions: Great King Rat, Funny How Love Is, In the Lap of the Gods, Big Bad Leroy Brown, Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon, Get Down Make Love, Jealousy, Play the Game, Staying Power, Man on the Prowl, Keep Passing the Open Windows, There Must Be More to Life Than This (Freddie Mercury solo), Living On My Own (Freddie Mercury solo), Delilah (Credited to Queen), A Winter’s Tale (Credited to Queen)
Notable Collaborations
(All songs performed by Queen except where otherwise noted)
Is This the World We Created (Music mostly by May, lyrics mostly by Mercury)
Friends Will Be Friends (Mercury/John Deacon)
The Miracle (Mercury with Deacon, May and Taylor)
Was It All Worth It (Music: Mercury with May, lyrics: Mercury/Taylor/May/Deacon)
Innuendo (Music: Mercury [melody and middle section] and May/Deacon/Taylor [basic backing track], lyrics: Taylor/Mercury)
Bijou (Mercury/May)
Barcelona (Mercury/Mike Moran; recorded by Mercury and Montserrat Caballé)
Exercises in Free Love (Mercury/Mike Moran; recorded by Mercury and Montserrat Caballé)
The Golden Boy (Mercury/Moran/Tim Rice; recorded by Mercury and Montserrat Caballé)
How Can I Go On (Mercury/Moran; recorded by Mercury and Montserrat Caballé)
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