Friends will be friends!
Sir Brian May posted a tribute to the late Freddie Mercury on Sept. 4, just one day before the legendary Queen frontman would have turned 79.
“Happy Birthday dear Freddie,” the 78-year-old guitarist declared, sharing a photo from the “Good Days” with fans of the rock ‘n’ roll band. “Here’s Freddie in 3-D, courtesy of my Stereo Realist camera, greeting the world from his balcony in the Munich Hilton, Germany. I’m thinking 1979.”
The singer tragically passed away on Nov. 24, 1991 from bronchial pneumonia amid his battle with AIDS. Mercury didn’t publicly announce his diagnosis until the day before he died, but there had been “all these rumors,” May said in the 2011 documentary Queen: Days of Our Lives, per Smooth Radio. “He was obviously suffering and we didn’t know what it was.” Not until Mercury sat the band down at his London home. “He said, ‘Look, you probably know what I’m going to say. You know what I’m suffering from, you know what the problem is, but I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I just want to make music to the day I f*cking die and let’s get on with it,'” May recalled.
Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns
And so, they did. Queen jetted off to Switzerland to record their last album as a foursome. “Montreux was a much more peaceful place to work, so we ended up doing a lot of stuff there,” May noted. “Freddie found an amazing tranquility and I never really heard him complain.” In fact, “the sicker Freddie got, the more he seemed to need to record, to give himself something to do, you know – some sort of reason to get up,” he said.
Nine months after Innuendo was released, Mercury was gone. May and his wife, Anita Dobson, were able to visit the vocalist one last time, though. “[We] went to see him and he was in bed with the curtains open so he could see out into his garden,” he shared. “And I was talking about things in his garden, saying ‘That’s really interesting.'” Mercury wasn’t interested in small talk. “‘Guys, you don’t need to feel like you need to make conversation,'” May remembers him telling them. “‘I’m just so happy that you’re here. So even if we have nothing, it’s just having these moments.'”
Queen has worked to ensure that Mercury’s memory remains alive in the decades since. They hosted a tribute concert in his honor in 1992 and May went on to found the Mercury Phoenix Trust with drummer Roger Taylor and manager Jim Beach to raise AIDS awareness. May and Taylor, 76, also served as creative consultants on 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, the Oscar-winning biopic starring Rami Malek as Mercury.
“I’ve seen it hundreds of times now, in fragments and eventually coming together, and it still gets me, I must say,” May told Classic Rock magazine. “It’s very emotional. It’s all about Freddie. Yes, we are in there, but the story is about Freddie and that was always the aim. Obviously, Freddie is so precious to us.”
This story was originally reported by Parade on Sep 5, 2025, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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