What Freddie Mercury's Relationship With His Bandmates Was Really Like

Brian May and Roger Taylor formed their band Smile during the 1960s with bassist and singer Tim Staffell. After Staffell quit, May and Taylor agreed to give Freddie Mercury a chance. When asked why the band decided to work with Mercury, May told The Telegraph:

We took it on faith somehow. His personality was so strong. We didn't see a great singer or musician first of all: he was very wild and unsophisticated. We just saw someone who had incredible belief and charisma, and we liked him...

I think the first time it struck me was in the studio when Freddie was listening to his voice come back, going, "No, that won't do," and just working and working. He was exceptional, and there was a very quick period, you could almost have blinked and missed it, where he learned to harness his technique.

When things became contentious among the band members, Mercury intervened to keep the peace. He didn't want to overshadow the others; he merely wanted to find solutions to problems as they arose. May told The Telegraph:

Freddie wasn't greedy for power. People have this image of him as a diva who insisted on getting his own way, but he was the mediator, the guy who could make sense out of opposite ends of arguments. He was very good at focusing on the important issues.

Mercury's faith in his bandmates continued through to the end of his life. May recalled their final recording sessions in Montreux, Switzerland:

It was obvious that Freddie [did not have] long to live, but he just wanted life to be normal, and to make as much music as humanly possible. He said, "Keep writing for me, let's keep recording stuff. Then you guys can finish it when I'm gone."

Queen's 15th studio album, Made in Heaven, was released four years after Mercury passed. The 1995 album features songs Mercury both wrote and recorded.

Former roadie Trevor Cooper spent years working with Queen. He called them "really good guys" and had nothing but respect for every member. Cooper recalled in Queen: The Early Years: "Freddie would sometimes throw tantrums, but it was because he always wanted things to be right... He'd be 'f*ck this' and 'f*ck that' and the next minute he was calling everyone 'darling' and having a laugh."

Mercury's perfectionism was present in everything he did. In Freddie Mercury: An Intimate Biography, friend and fellow performer Peter Straker admired Mercury's "inventiveness, coupled with a meticulous attention to detail... Freddie celebrated his achievements with extravagant and sumptuous gestures, executed with enormous kindness."

Mercury didn't take himself too seriously, something people around him appreciated. Former Queen roadie Peter Hince recalled the singer's silliness in an interview with Louder:

People talk about Freddie and his ego, but his ego was not as big as people think. It was all a persona. He could make fun of himself, whereas some of the other guys in the band couldn't do it in the same way. You could have a laugh with Freddie, but you knew where the line was. He wasn't necessarily the prima donna that everybody thought he was.

Hince elaborated on the parts of Mercury that were overshadowed by his public persona, saying, "He did have a lot of insecurities - not professionally, but personally."

At a show in Manchester, Mercury called out a heckler in the crowd, demonstrating his ability to take whatever came at him in stride. One of Queen's former crew members described the scene in Queen: The Early Years:

I saw [Freddie] literally shrink this six-foot bloke down to an inch... Queen had just taken the stage, and this bloke shouted to Freddie, "You f*cking poof," or something like that. Freddie demanded that the crew turn the spotlight on the crowd and find this fella. He then said to him, "Say that again, darling," and the bloke didn't know what to do.

Everyone in Queen was on equal footing, something that was true for writing and recording music alike. When Mercury, May, Taylor, and Deacon entered the studio, the competitive creativity among the group sometimes imperiled the band's survival. May described the scene:

Nobody got away with a single note that the other three didn't think was okay. We were argumentative to the point where we almost destroyed each other. At times we all left the group, one of us would go storming off saying, "That's it!" Quite often, in fact. There was a very [difficult] side, four artists with brushes in hands trying to paint on the same canvas.

May told Mojo the band was so competitive that "every time we made an album it seemed like we were about to break up."

The songwriting and recording process could cause tension among the members of Queen, but ultimately it served as a bonding experience. When Queen recorded "Bohemian Rhapsody," May said they all "realized it was something wonderful and [they] should give it [their] heart and soul."

The framework of the song was in Mercury's head and, as May told the BBC, "he and Roger and John set out each part as a backing track."

"We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions" came to fruition with the same collaborative effort. May wrote "We Will Rock You" and told Rolling Stone both songs were created "with audience participation in mind."

According to Taylor, the two songs encompass "a collective 'we' - meaning [Queen], the audience, whoever's listening."