Little Valentine’s Day story extracted from the book Mercury and Me by Jim Hutton
“..The night before Valentine’s Day in 1988 Freddie and I had an
enormous row. I’m not sure how it started, but it finished with the two of us
going to bed and barely speaking to each other.Next morning I got up especially early and left Freddie to
sleep on. I drove to New Covent Garden, in south London, and bought sixty Blue
Moon roses. They were pale blue, larger than the average rose, with a
magnificent scent. They were perfect and Freddie was especially fond of
them.
I got home and arranged them in a wicker basket. Then I took
them up to Freddie in bed, along with tea.
‘Happy Valentine’s Day,’ I said.Freddie was still in a bad mood with me and grunted.
He seemed
to have woken up in the same rotten mood he’d fallen asleep in. I left him to it
and went down to start work in the garden.
When Freddie got up in the middle of the morning he moved the
Blue Moon arrangement into the hall. Later in the day friends came to visit and
they commented on the spectacular basket of roses.
‘Yes,’ said Freddie, ‘my husband did them for me.’
They had pleased him, after all. And that night in bed he told
me so. We kissed and made up and he gave me a Valentine card.”
Once I read a thing that said Roger’s range is so high that sometimes people mistake him for a guitar and now whenever there’s a guitar solo I just picture Roger in the background fuckinf sCREAMING and it makes me cry shjdnfkdnfk
Yes! At first everyone mistook his high notes for a synth even though Queen had a no-synth policy throughout the seventies. There’s also a note in Somebody to Love after Freddie sings “I ain’t gonna face no defeat” that totally sounds like guitar but it’s Roger singing “yeah”. That’s my frame of reference for Roger as the guitar (the Blond Special?) in Queen from now on. Don’t know if it’s right to picture Brian holding Roger while he screams tho.
Not gonna lie, one of my favorite parts about writing urban fantasy is determining how and where the fantasy meshes in with reality.
Like, I’m not saying Freddie Mercury WAS a siren, but have you ever heard anyone NOT sing along to Bohemian Rhapsody?
I rest my case.
It is a six-minute song with incomprehensible lyrics that seem to have something to do with murder and demons, with five sections that are completely different stylistically but no chorus.
It was number one on the the UK singles charts twice, 15 years apart, and is by many measures one of the most popular, or the most popular, single of all time.
Yeah, there’s magic involved.
And an absurdly broad swathe of people know it. I have no memory of learning it, do you?
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 