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”. 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. He was also the group’s most eclectic writer, composing in a wide variety of styles.
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 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. 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. As for his instrumental abilities, in Queen’s early years, he was the group’s primary keyboardist. 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. 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. Unlike many other singers, his falsetto was not overly thin, and so sounded better than average.
It was also at school that he acquired the nickname Freddie, which he would use for the rest of his life.Īs 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. At school he learned piano and joined his first band, the Hectics, a rock and roll cover band which he formed with several of his classmates (he was the band’s pianist, not its vocalist, as apparently he did not at the time have the self-confidence necessary to be out in front). In any event, Bulsara went to school in his parents’ ancestral home in Gujarat, India, where his grandmother and aunt lived, and absorbed local music as typified by Bollywood film music in addition to Western rock and roll. His parents were Indians of Parsi descent the Parsis were Zoroastrians originating in Iran, though from photos of the Bulsaras, including the young Farrokh, I think it is safe to say they also had some non-Iranian Indian ancestry as well, as they look at least as much like typical Indians as Iranians. Farrokh Bulsara, better known as Freddie Mercury, was born on Septemon the island of Zanzibar, a British territory in East Africa.
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