Freddie Mercury – "Living on My Own" (1985)

I get lonely

So lonely

Living on my own

There’s no doubt that Freddie Mercury was an extraordinarily gifted singer.

Montserrat Caballé, an operatic soprano who recorded an album with him in 1988, has this to say about his talents:

His technique was astonishing. . . . [H]e sang with an incisive sense of rhythm, his vocal placement was very good and he was able to glide effortlessly from a register to another.  He also had a great musicality.  His phrasing was subtle, delicate and sweet or energetic and slamming.  He was able to find the right colouring or expressive nuance for each word.

Roger Daltrey of the Who said that Mercury was “the best virtuoso rock 'n' roll singer of all time.  He could sing anything in any style. He could change his style from line to line and, God, that’s an art.”

Freddie Mercury

The most noteworthy aspect of Mercury’s voice was its range, which was over three octaves.  The singer attributed that range to the fact that he was born with four extra teeth – supernumerary incisors that resulted in a noticeable overbite.

Mercury never had the extra teeth removed because he was afraid his voice wouldn’t sound the same if he did.

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Freddie Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara in 1946 in the old part of Zanzibar City, the largest city in the Zanzibar archipelago, which was once part of the British Empire but is now a semi-autonomous region within the East African country of Tanzania.

Mercury’s parents were Parsis – practitioners of the Zoroastrian religion whose ancestors had migrated from Persia to western India in the 7th century A.D.  Mercury’s father moved his family from India to Zanzibar to take a job with the British Colonial Office.

In 1954, young Freddie was sent back to India to attend a British-style boarding school.  When he was only 12, he formed a rock and roll band called the Heretics, which performed at school events.  According to a schoolmate, Mercury listened constantly to Western pop music and had an uncanny ability to replicate the records he heard on the radio on the piano.  

Boarding school days

Mercury moved back to Zanzibar when he was 17, but he and his family had to flee to London to escape a  revolution that overthrew the regime of the Sultan of Zanzibar.  Thousands of Arabs and Indians were killed in that revolution.

Freddie studied art and design at Ealing Art College in London.  He lived briefly in Liverpool, but moved back to London to become the lead singer of the band Smile – which changed its name to Queen in 1971.

He became Freddie Mercury about the same time.  He was interested in astrology – the logo he designed for Queen was based on the zodiac signs of the band members – and the planet Mercury is the ruling planet for Virgo, which was Mercury’s sign.

Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987, and died four and a half years later, when he was only 45.

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Queen albums have collectively spent more weeks on the UK album charts than anyone else’s, including the Beatles.  No fewer than 14 of the group’s 15 studio albums made it to the top ten on the British album charts, and seven of them went all the way to #1, including Queen’s Greatest Hits, which is the best-selling album of all time in the UK.

Queen

“Bohemian Rhapsody” was number one for nine weeks in the UK, and was a top forty hit on three separate occasions in the U.S. – when it was originally released in 1975, after it was featured in Wayne’s World in 1992, and once more last year after the release of the Freddie Mercury Bohemian Rhapsody biopic (which is the highest-grossing musical biopic of all time).

Queen’s over-the-top music is sui genesis – especially “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which is probably the most one-of-a-kind rock song ever recorded.  (There’s never been another song even remotely like it, and I doubt that there ever will be.)

But when I hear a Queen song come on my radio – especially “Bohemian Rhapsody” – I can’t change the station fast enough.  (I think “Bohemian Rhapsody” is ten times more unbearable than “Stairway to Heaven.”)

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“Living on My Own” was released in 1985 on Freddie Mercury’s only solo album, Mr. Bad Guy.

Two years after Mercury’s death, a remix of the song was released as a single and was a #1 hit in the UK, France, Italy, and a number of other European countries.

Click here to listen to the original version of “Living on My Own.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: