(Credits: Far Out / Carl Lender)
Fri 3 April 2026 15:00, UK
From the minute that Queen was created, Brian May didn’t want the band to be a dictatorship by any means.
No one could deny that Freddie Mercury was the person everyone came to see whenever he strutted across the stage, but when you look at how they divided up their albums, the songwriter was usually the main boss of whatever tunes ended up on the record, even if it meant the rest of the band holding themselves back a little bit. But if May brought the muscle and John Deacon brought a bit of soul, Mercury’s songs always had an intense emotion behind everything he sang.
Throughout every one of their albums, though, there was never a moment where it felt like one band member was standing out more than the others. You can definitely hear their individual voices coming out of every single one of their tracks, but there’s a collective Queen sound that happens every time one of their tunes comes in, whether it’s all of them harmonising on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or stomping their way through every single second of ‘We Will Rock You’.
Even though their massive hits translated a little better when working on their live material, May was always partial to ‘It’s a Hard Life’ whenever talking about Mercury’s tunes, saying, “To my mind, this is one of the most beautiful songs that Freddie ever wrote. It’s straight from the heart, and he opened up during the creation of it. I sat with him for hours and hours and hours, just pouring out every word and trying to get the most out of it. It’s a very revealing thing about how relationships are, and he was talking about his relationship.”
And considering all of the stigmas that were surrounding Mercury’s sexuality at the time, ‘It’s a Hard Life’ was probably one of the only times that he tried to be completely honest in one of his songs. You have to remember how much people didn’t understand the concept of homosexuality or even bisexuality, but if Mercury couldn’t reach people when talking about it, he could find a much better outlet if he knew how to sing his feelings every single time he had something on his mind.
Which is a massive shakeup compared to what May was used to. If you were to single out May’s contributions, though, he was always the rocker of the group. He had a lot of riffs that wouldn’t have been out of place on any other hard rock record, and even when they divided up songwriting duties over different sides of vinyl on Queen II, you could definitely hear May getting the lead out whenever he kicked off a song like ‘March of the Black Queen’.
But as much as he could play riffs all day long, that wasn’t going to be what hit people in the chest every time they played. Mercury was the one constantly trying to tug on people’s heartstrings, and while some of his songs could be more than a little bit camp like on ‘Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon’, there were also tunes that were as pure as they come, like on ‘Love of My Life’ and ‘You Take My Breath Away’.
And while a lot of people get overly emotional when looking at Mercury’s final days on songs like ‘Mother Love’ and ‘The Show Must Go On’, The Works as a whole was the moment where everything started to fall back into place again. They had their fill of making dance music for too many albums by now, and when they burst onto the scene again with ‘Hammer to Fall’, they had more classics to add to the arsenal for when they started making history when they stepped out onto the Live Aid stage and those that could still touch people’s hearts like ‘It’s a Hard Life’.
Now that those feelings are on vinyl until the end of time, the song feels more like a document of what it was like for Mercury going through what would become the final days of his life. His AIDs diagnosis hadn’t become a major problem yet, but for those brief few minutes singing this song, he was finally free to be himself, no matter what the rest of the world thought about him.
