(Credits: LastFM)
Sat 30 August 2025 23:45, UK
“If you like the icing on the top, you’ve got to have confidence,” Freddie Mercury once said.
Confidence, for Mercury, was his saving grace. He knew it was something he was gifted from birth, but he also knew how difficult it would be if he ever let it go. “You have to have confidence in this business,” he said. “It’s useless saying you don’t need it. If you start saying to yourself, ‘Maybe I’m not good enough, maybe I’d better settle for second place,’ it’s no good.”
Confidence can usually come and go, but for Mercury, it felt like an ever-present. He seemed to stride across every stage like a peacock with a particularly good haircut. Holding the audience in the palm of his hand, Mercury seemed like he could change an entire nation with just one note.
But what we often forget is that confidence also means laying your soul bare. Mercury might have seemed larger than life in front of an audience, but this wasn’t necessarily the kind of confidence he had to work had to get. He even once said he just “clicked” with it, telling The Guardian that “performing comes quite easily, really”. A big statement, considering most people in music are constantly fighting to believe in themselves.
But with Mercury, the challenge with confidence – off stage, at least – came with vulnerability. And honesty. But mostly it came with constantly battling a strange public perception that was never really reflective of who he actually was. It’s why, whenever he sat down to write something that wasn’t as free-flowing as ‘Killer Queen’, things got a little hairy. If it were a ballad, it was more like, “This is who I am,” even if the more upbeat, flamboyant hits were pieces of him, too.
Maybe that’s why he took a specific liking to Stevie Wonder. Wonder, to a lot of people, is the epitome of straightforward timelessness, his ballads hitting exactly where it counts with a type of effortlessness that seems to come directly from that in-built confidence Mercury had in a completely different way. Mercury even once said he’s “the best ballad songwriter in the world” and that “you can’t top that guy”.
This probably came from being endeared to anybody who was able to just say what they felt and deliver it in a way that you knew they just absolutely meant it. Like saying, “I just called to say I love you,” and having that hit in a way that feels sweet because it’s so on the nose. But without trepidation. Because that’s another thing in music, and something people also commended Mercury for. Being able to mean your words, even when they reveal the deep cuts of your soul, even when it spotlights the pieces of yourself you’re not sure you’re even ready to reveal.
Obviously, Mercury’s troubles were different from Wonder’s, and both approached musical expression from different places. But you can see where his own ballads, ones as bare as ‘Love of My Life’, tried to apply the same simplicity. In these moments, it wasn’t about skirting about on stage or drowning out sorrow with loud, anthemic choruses. It was about slowing down and taking time with the more honest parts of his mind.
Related Topics