THE GREAT PRETENDER

Brian May about the sacrifice and responsibility of stardom: “Queen was a wonderful vehicle and a wonderful, magical combination. But I think it came close to destroying us all … You’re universally adored and loved. But then you’re universally vilified by other people. You’re surrounded by people who love you and yet you’re utterly lonely. You get to a place which is hard to really recover from, and I’m conscious that I never have really recovered … We’ve all suffered. I know definitely we have. Freddie, obviously, went completely AWOL, which is why he got that terrible disease. He wasn’t a bad person, but he was utterly out of control for a while. In a way, all of us were out of control and … it screwed us up.”

“It was very excessive. I think the excess leaked out from the music into life and became a need. We were always trying to get to a place that has never been reached before … A certain amount of neediness [of love, closeness …] is satisfied by the party lifestyle. But you have a terrible hole inside you which needs to be one-to-one with everyone. And that’s a need which can never be fulfilled. You destroy everyone who ever comes close to you … Emotionally I became utterly out of control, needy for that one-to-one reinforcement, feelings of love and discovery, and that’s what I became addicted to, I think.”

Freddie Mercury’s vision in “Bohemian Rhapsody” has become reality: “I can’t win. Love is a Russian roulette for me. No one loves the real me inside, they’re all in love with my fame, my stardom … You can have everything in the world and still be the loneliest man, and that is the bitterest type of loneliness.”

Freddie: “Love is the hardest thing to achieve and the one thing in this business that can let you down the most.”

“I seem to eat people up and destroy them. There must be a destructive element in me because I try very hard to build up relationships, but somehow I drive people away … I just feel I’m not a very good partner for anybody and I just think that’s what my love is.”

Almost everyone in Freddie’s private circle confirmed that Mercury undoubtedly had wished himself a family.

German Queen-producer Reinholdt Mack believes that Mercury would have loved a family of his own: “I had a problem about five years ago when I got badly screwed by an accountant and had to pay lots of back taxes. I was discussing my problem with Freddie one day and said I couldn’t deal with it all. He told me: ‘[Expletive] it’s only money! Why worry about something like that? You’ve got it made; you’ve got everything you need – a wonderful family and children. You have everything I can never have.’ … I believe Freddie would have liked a family very, very much. He was very sentimental in many ways … everybody who was close to him was treated as part of a family to some extent.”

Eventually Freddie had become godfather for Mack’s children and took his task terribly serious – he always bought presents and toys for them; in Mack’s own words Mercury cared more for his children than their mother did.

Perhaps the biggest irony of it all was while Mercury’s own personal life seemed to be filled with permanent sadness and a fruitless search for love, Freddie brought joy to millions of people.