(Credits: Far Out / Spotify)
Mon 8 December 2025 17:30, UK
In the history of art, there is plenty of resilience to be found. There has to be. Whether it’s from the long strife to make it or censorship at the top, industry in-fighting or external tragedy, sickness of the mind or illness of the body, there always seems to be something there to try and silence an artist, but Freddie Mercury wasn’t letting it happen.
There is tragedy everywhere, and that’s just a sad fact of the world. But it seems like the creative world gets more than its fair share of the struggle.
The worlds of art, music, and cinema; they all seem rife with losses. The so-called ’27 Club’ is only one example, as so many talents were lost so painfully young that they had to give them a label, turning the repeat tragedies into a phenomenon. But really, what we have here is the consequence of the stereotypical artist lifestyle proving deadly, and the world and country’s governments proving time and time again that they don’t really care about the artist as a person, only as a product.
While the AIDS crisis went so far beyond the artistic community, it took so much from them. As governments merely stigmatised the disease and refused for so long to do any real research into its cause or treatment, thousands upon thousands died in a devastating epidemic that saw so many pass in lonely, unkind conditions of social isolation. Watching this happen, artists responded as they always do. But also, when the art world has always and forever been so intertwined with the worlds of queerness and sexual liberation, some of the greatest creatives of the time were loss.
Keith Haring, Leigh Bowery, Halston, Sylvester, Rock Hudson. They’re the big names, but in the devastating statistics of the sheer amount of life loss from the misunderstood virus, there will be countless creatives who made an impact.
Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in the recoding booth. (Credits: Far Out / LastFM)
Obviously, Freddie Mercury is arguably the most famous artist to have been claimed by the disease, and as he watched it devastate those around him and felt himself get sicker and sicker, it seems to only fuel his determination to leave a lasting legacy.
Mercury’s final years and days are a true tale of resilience and power. Desperate to keep creating even as his body was giving in, he spent the last of his life in the studio, still blowing his bandmates away.
One song represents that perfectly – ‘The Show Must Go On’.
“My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies / Fairy tales of yesterday will grow but never die / I can fly, my friends,” Mercury sings on the track that feels like his final remarks on a life well lived, a career well spent and a death he was coming to accept. It’s a personal cry from him, clearly, but it also feels like a message to his community; both of queer people, and of people diagnosed HIV positive.
That’s likely why he seems so desperate to sing it, and sing it right. “I’ll sing it till I fucking bleed!” Brian May remembered the vocalist saying in the studio.
“I remember doing the demo for ‘The Show Must Go On,’ with the guide vocal, some of it in falsetto because I couldn’t reach the top notes, and I said, ‘Fred, I don’t know if this is going to be possible to sing.’ And he went, ‘I’ll fucking do it, darling,’ vodka down, and went in and killed it, completely lacerated that vocal,” May recalled as Mercury’s waves of power didn’t stop coming, even at the end.
“He was in a very poor state physically by that time, really hardly able to walk, but he could still bring that passion into the vocal,” the guitarist said, as the singer wasn’t going to let his disease steal this song.
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