Queen’s ‘Innuendo’: Remembering Freddie Mercury’s Last Masterpiece
Twenty-five years ago this week, iconic English rock maximalists Queen released one final classic album with their original lineup of Freddie Mercury, guitarist Brian May, bassist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor.
Innuendo fell into fans’ laps like a saving grace following the hijacking of Deacon’s signature bass line from “Under Pressure,” the group’s 1981 collaborative single with David Bowie, for Vanilla Ice’s 1990 pop-rap mega-hit “Ice Ice Baby,” a song still dominating Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Play chart by the time of the album’s release on February 5th, 1991. (“I first heard it in the fan club downstairs,” May said of “Ice Ice Baby” in the March 1991 issue of Q Magazine. “I just thought, ‘Interesting, but nobody will ever buy it because it’s crap.’ Turns out I was wrong.”)
Following the death of Queen‘s dear friend Bowie from liver cancer just days after the release of his final album, Blackstar, this past January, some compared the record’s tragic trajectory to that of Innuendo, released just nine months before Mercury himself passed away, succumbing to AIDS-related pneumonia. Rumors of Mercury’s declining health were rampant given his sickly presentation during appearances in the late Eighties, particularly in 1990 at London’s Dominion Theater where the band — with an incredibly gaunt-looking Mercury in tow — was present to receive the Brit Award for “Outstanding Contribution to British Music,” an event that would become the last time the singer was seen in public. Yet rumors of his failing condition were persistently denied, with drummer Roger Taylor insisting to one reporter that he was “healthy and working” and Mercury quickly staving off any inquiries about his health during a rare on-air interview for BBC’s Radio One.
“Freddie found an amazing tranquility, and I never really heard him complain,” May later proclaimed in a 2011 BBC documentary on Queen, Days of Our Lives. “I remember we went out one night, and he had horrible problems with his leg and I think Freddie saw me looking at it and he was like, ‘Oh, Brian, do you want to see what it’s like?’ And he showed me, and he reacted to my face and said, ‘I’m really sorry — I didn’t mean to do that to you.’ I never heard him go, ‘This is really awful. My life is shit. I’m going to die.’ Never, never, never. He was an amazingly strong person.”
Much like Blackstar, to listen to Innuendo isn’t to be confronted with the sorrow of a man with one foot in the grave. Rather, the album comes off as the work of an artist staring sickness right in the eye and vowing to “keep working until I fucking drop,” as Mercury was once quoted as saying.