Days before he died in 1991, Freddie Mercury was wondering how the world would remember him. The singer, who was 45, had met his manager to work out the best way to tell his fans about his Aids diagnosis. The wording of the announcement agreed, their thoughts shifted to posterity. “You can do what you want with my music,” Mercury said, “but don’t make me boring.”
Thirty-four years later, the man who once declared “I’m not going to be a star, I’m going to be a legend” is still incapable of being dull. A new biography of Mercury, set to be published in September, will reveal that he has a secret daughter, who was conceived during a fling with the wife of a close friend in 1976 — a year after Queen had topped the charts with Bohemian Rhapsody. Fans knew Mercury the flamboyant showman, the singer with the four-octave vocal range — but now Love, Freddie is expected to introduce them to Mercury the doting father.
According to the biography’s author, Lesley-Ann Jones, the daughter was known about only by those closest to Mercury, including his parents, sister, bandmates and former girlfriend and close friend Mary Austin. However, his daughter — who is now 48 and a mother who lives in Europe and works in medicine — always knew Mercury was her father. According to Jones, he would stay with her parents frequently, the three remaining close friends despite the infidelity and raising the girl together. Mercury would speak to her every day when he was away, and he gave her 17 volumes of his personal journals before his death.
Mercury performing in 1975
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“Freddie Mercury took his greatest secret to the grave,” Jones said. “He was a hands-on, devoted dad. He described fatherhood as the fulfilment of his most cherished ambition and as the greatest blessing of his life.”
Born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar in 1946, Mercury was the son of a cashier at the British Colonial Office. A happy childhood on the island was briefly marred when he was sent to a missionary school run by strict nuns, but then the family moved to Mumbai, where he began taking piano lessons at the age of seven. The family returned when he was a teenager to Zanzibar but political unrest encouraged the family to leave again, moving in spring 1964 to England where the family settled in Feltham in Middlesex. The Bulsaras moved to a semi-detached Victorian house which was about five minutes’ walk from the home of a budding young guitarist called Brian May.
Although intelligent and cultured, Mercury only got 3 O-levels — in art, history and English. According to another biography, Freddie Mercury by Laura Jackson, at 17 he got a job handling crates in a local warehouse where he was so slothful that his colleagues ending up doing all his work for him (his excuse was that as a musician, he couldn’t possibly roughen up his soft hands).
Yet he was highly ambitious: May has said that Mercury was the most self-motivated man he had ever known.
Mercury having his signature moustache trimmed in 1982
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Mercury studied graphic art and design at Ealing Art College in west London and, after graduating, joined a series of bands while selling second-hand clothes in Kensington Market. In 1970, he teamed up with May and the drummer Roger Taylor for a band initially called Smile. Later, the name was changed to Queen, with Mercury — who changed his own name at about the same time — later recalling: “It’s very regal obviously … I was certainly aware of the gay connotations, but that was just one facet of it.”
The photographer Denis O’Regan, known for his intimate images of rock stars and who took pictures of Queen on tour, said that Mercury continues to captivate in part because of his enigmatic personality, but also because of the sense his story was cut short.
“Freddie was still an enigma all the way through, all those years,” O’Regan said. “It was 11 years from when I first saw [Queen] to that last show — it was quite a short period, a bit like the Beatles. He was a bright flame burning brightly for that period of time.”
O’Regan took one of the most famous photographs of Mercury, bent backwards in his yellow jacket and white trousers with a double red stripe down the side. He said he felt it was a photograph that exemplifies Mercury who is, “throwing a shape that no one else could”.
O’Regan’s favourite photo he took of Mercury. He found the star difficult to capture given how fast he moved
DENIS O’REGAN/GETTY IMAGES
O’Regan said that Mercury was difficult to photograph because he was always moving, and there was only a microsecond to capture the perfect pose before he would spin again. “Sometimes I missed it, sometimes he blurred,” he said. “His moves were very sudden so I would only know later if I got the image.”
O’Regan would work with bands for months at a time as they toured. “I saw the two, or three sides to him: the on-stage legend, outrageous, amusing and dynamic, and the more reserved and shy person off-stage, who could have ostentatious and outrageous outbursts,” he said. “I have a story about one dinner that can’t be repeated because his language was so outrageous. He did it because there was a journalist around, and he decided he would say nothing that she could repeat [in print]. It was along gynaecological lines. He swore like a trooper, all the time, relentlessly.”
He said that Mercury would feel homesick on tour. “Freddie wasn’t actually a fan of touring — he loved performing, but he didn’t like being away from home. So this affected the whole way the tour ran because he would take his domestic entourage with him. I photographed him backstage at Live Aid, and at one end of the table was Adam Ant on his own, then there’s Freddie with Roger Taylor and Freddie has about ten of his entourage behind him — his chef, his bodyguard, his friend and so on. That’s how he got through those things, by effectively taking his home with him.”
After stadium shows, O’Regan said that most bands would ordinarily head swiftly out of the stadium to avoid becoming caught in the traffic, perhaps returning to the hotel before going out — but Queen were different.
“Queen did the opposite — they would always stay at the stadium,” he said. “I think that was because — as Brian put it — in the evenings, Freddie would go his way and we would go ours. Freddie would go off to places that the rest of us didn’t want to go to, so they would have dinner after the show at the stadium instead. I think that’s what kept this little family together, it was very sweet. And even sweeter, they would often go and meet disabled people who had been brought to the stage doors to meet them. In both those ways, they weren’t really what people would imagine Queen was. Freddie wasn’t what people imagined he was either.”
O’Regan first met Mercury in the mid-1970s when Queen played at Hammersmith Odeon. “I saw them just as [Freddie] was emerging as this glamorous, on-stage being — and that is what made me want to photograph him,” he said. “I took my photographs into [Elton John’s label] Rocket Records. That was the first picture I have ever sold — Freddie at the Hammersmith Odeon. It was taken on a rubbish camera. I was a fan and just ran down to the front with everyone else. I had this Russian camera that cost me five quid that had nothing apart from a lens. Jackie [a weekly magazine aimed at teen girls] bought it.”
O’Regan also went on tour with Queen in 1986, flying in with the band over the crowd at Knebworth Park and taking a photograph of the helicopter and the last audience that would ever see Mercury perform with Queen.
Some 120,000 people attended Mercury’s last concert with Queen at Knebworth Park in 1986
DAVE HOGAN/GETTY IMAGES
After his death, May told O’Regan that Mercury had given him the nickname “Doris”, although he never used it to his face: “I knew nothing about it, but I thought that was very sweet.”
O’Regan said he was thrilled that Mercury was finding a new generation of fans. “I have a teenage son and his too-cool-for-school friends would come past [his London gallery] and say: ‘Did you really know Freddie Mercury?’ Out of the people I photographed, he is the one that jumps out at a new generation.”
Mercury, who was diagnosed with Aids in 1987 and died from bronchial pneumonia as a result of the disease, featured after his death on Queen’s 1995 album, Made in Heaven.