Whose band has spent more weeks on the UK album charts than any other musical act, meaning more than the Beatles, Pink Floyd, or the Rolling Stones? Who wrote the song chosen by the Guinness Book of Records poll as the greatest song of all time? Who wrote a different song chosen as the best ever by another major poll conducted by Sony? That’s right, Farrokh Bulsara, born on Zanzibar, and later founder and frontman for Queen and composer of most of their hits including those two greatest, Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions. The band is said to have sold more than 300 million albums worldwide. Never a darling of the critical press, Queen was universally considered to be electrifying in concert, in part because of their high camp and theatrics, but also because of Mercury’s mighty four-octave range and mesmerizing flair. They were the first band ever to play South American stadiums and the first to play behind the Iron Curtain (in Budapest), yet they also played Sun City, which put them on the United Nations’ blacklist. Their gig at Live Aid 1985 was later voted by music industry honchos to be the greatest live performance in the history of rock. Watch one gay man—in complete clone gear, ultra tight jeans, tank top, and studded armband proudly signaling that the pop charts are the only thing he’ll top—as he transfixes 72,000 people and gets all of them waving and singing in unison. YouTube has the complete performance in four parts. Below are a highlights clip with commentary and a 90-second blast .
Exuberantly gay in everything his band did from its name onward, Mercury was not out offstage. He also tried to hide his one-hundred-percent Indian ethnicity—both his parents were Parsis from India—even from his bandmates, and he denied having HIV, for which he tested positive in 1987—until the day before his death on November 24, 1991, when he was 45.
The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for Aids Awareness, performed at Wembley Stadium on Easter Monday, April 20, 1992, starred everyone from Elizabeth Taylor, Annie Lennox, Elton John and George Michael to Metallica, Def Leppard, Guns n Roses, and David Bowie. It was seen on television by 1 billion people, which in 1992 was just under twenty percent of the planet’s population.
Thanks for this post, what great videos.
Posted by: Jess | September 06, 2007 at 08:38 AM