(Credit: Far Out / Denis Pellerin)
Sun 28 December 2025 15:30, UK
Queen were unlike anything else when they emerged onto the airwaves, perfectly balancing commercial prowess with the kind of artistic innovations which have never lost their lustre, but the tale of the band also features its fair share of tragedy, revolving around the untimely death of frontman Freddie Mercury back in 1991.
It was decades earlier, during the 1970s, that Queen first emerged from the shadows of the hard rock scene, but their output never seemed to fit into one neat category. While Brian May was more than capable of giving any other hard rock guitarist a run for their money, Mercury added in a wealth of inspiration from the world of theatre, ballet, and performing arts, which set them apart from all the rest.
Inevitably, those influences also made them one of the most spectacular live bands of the century – a fact that was cemented during the band’s iconic Live Aid set back in 1985. After countless legendary live sets and a litany of hit records, though, Queen were in a rather tragic place as the 1990s rolled around, overshadowed by the fact that Freddie Mercury had been diagnosed with AIDS.
So, not only did the band have to come to terms with the deterioration of their leader and close comrade, but they were also forced to reckon with the kind of stigma that was attached to the virus at that time.
Namely, the band were beset by tabloid journalists, who had been homophobically speculating about Mercury’s sexuality and – by extension – the possibility that he had contracted AIDS since the virus first emerged during the early 1980s. “It was unspoken at the time, we did not sit around talking about Freddie’s illness, nobody wanted to, but it was very much out there, casting a shadow over the studio,” Brian May once recalled to Absolute Radio.
Nevertheless, the guitarist was determined that Mercury’s illness would not defeat their spirit. “Both Roger and I felt that, in some way, we should embrace it and, to me, something spoke to me,” he shared. In the end, the product of this brave act of unity and defiance was the track ‘The Show Must Go On’, which ended up being the band’s final single prior to the passing of Freddie Mercury.
According to May, though, the song arrived so fully-formed that it raised questions of unintentional theft. “We were messing around with some chord sequences and the song just leapt into my head so vividly that I questioned whether I’d heard it somewhere else,” he recalled. “I could hear ‘The Show Must Go On’ so clearly in my head.”
That song ended up being a fitting epitaph for Mercury, whose vocals feel particularly powerful despite the fact that he was seriously unwell and physically weak at the time it was recorded, not long before his ultimate passing.
Given the fact that the single spent five weeks in the top 75 of the UK singles charts upon the singer’s death, it also became a way for fans to mourn the loss of Mercury in the way which he would surely want to be remembered: belting out a power ballad with every fibre of his being.
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