During an appearance on BBC Radio, Queen guitarist Brian May has revealed what the “very insecure” Freddie Mercury was really like offstage.
When asked whether Mercury was always the confident frontman that he appeared to be, May replied (via Ultimate Guitar): “Well, you see, Freddie is different levels too because on one level, yes, he was always a rockstar, he was singing in Kensington Market, going around and calling anyone he met, just generally being a flower, a very confident…”
He continued: “He behaved as if he was Robert Plant at the time and nobody minded him because he just had that aura about him. But underneath it – no – massive insecurity, massive shyness, right to the end.”
“He had a very private side to him. He faced up to his insecurities by building himself in the way he wanted to be. He’s a very self-made creature. If you peeled up all the layers of the onion, you would find a lot of complexity, a lot of which he denied, which is smart.”
May continued on to say that there was “a lot of personal meaning” related to Mercury‘s life in the lyrics to Queen songs.
“People would ask, ‘Is your music important, Freddie?’ He would say, ‘No, I don’t think my songs are worth anything.’ But underneath that, yes, of course, he felt he had stuff to say. And also the obliqueness of some of his early lyrics is very fantasy, it’s very fairies and ghouls and goblins,” he said.
“But underneath that, even at that time, there was a lot of personal meaning in those lyrics, I think. Something we haven’t talked about, we didn’t do that in Queen.”
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“But I feel very strongly Freddie was always expressing himself in rather daring ways, and inside of those was a very insecure person. But on the outside, he was a warrior, so he was building himself into it,” he concluded.
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Check out Brian May discussing Freddie Mercury on BBC Radio:
