Meet The Queen Frontman Few Came To Know In Psychologically Thrilling Documentary 'Freddie Mercury: Inside His Mind'
Nov. 18 2021, Published 10:39 a.m. ET
Freddie Mercury was dramatic yet reserved, extravagant yet modest, praised yet criticized.
But above all, he was a talented and enigmatic musician whose onstage persona differed greatly from who he was behind closed doors.
At least that's what his family, friends and close colleagues had to say in Breaking Celebrity News's exclusive sneak peek at the upcoming REELZ documentary, Freddie Mercury: Inside His Mind.
Tim Staffell, Mercury's former bandmate in the highly successful musical group which the frontman renamed Queen, said that the name "certainly went along with [Freddie's] notion of this kind of pompous, in-your-face presentation that would become his trademark."
The band's new designation and direction stemmed from an idea Freddie had had in college, and its identity took shape in the form of the Tanzanian rocker himself.
"This was a completely new chemical reaction," the famed musician once explained of the group's name change. "And it had to have a new meaning and a new title and everything so that we felt fresh."
He lived, breathed and died for Queen. And perhaps that's because he knew he had more at stake, given that his bandmates all had comfortable and prestigious backup plans.
"He couldn't do anything else," said Lesley-Ann Jones, a music journalist. "So if you take the other members of the band – Brian [May], the astrophysicist, the great scientific career ahead of him; Roger Taylor, the trained dentist; John Deacon, the engineer – Freddie had nothing else! He couldn't do anything else."
The late legend echoed the journalist's sentiments in an earlier interview from 1985, telling a reporter that if he "didn't do this, I wouldn't have anything else to do."