The Fan, The Lyric and What Freddie Meant   

I have finally come to terms with the idea that I'll never know what Freddie Mercury meant.

I fell in love with Queen as an eight year old and Freddie Mercury still has the honour of being my most important musical influence. Given all the personal meaning I invested in his creative output, I thought that Freddie would think about it in much the same way. However, when it came to talking about his music and lyrics, Freddie was vague. And flippant. Annoyingly vague and flippant. He boasted about the disposability of his music, famously likening his songs to Bic Razors. It was an irksome message: "You listen to it, like it, discard it, then on to the next. Disposable pop."

In his earliest interviews, he spoke of the difficulty and irritation associated with lyric writing. In later interviews, he spoke of the routine nature of creativity, the analogy that struck me most was that making music was much like churning out sausages in a factory. He consistently avoided disclosing any personal meanings and associations, urging listeners to develop their own interpretations. At the same time, there was a tantalising suggestion that there was some autobiographical meaning there: "People are always asking me what my lyrics mean. Well I say what any decent poet would say if you dared ask him to analyse his work: if you see it, darling, then it's there."

I've spent a lot of time with Freddie. I've read a lot of books and listened to a lot of interviews. I have talked to a lot of people about his attitude towards lyricism and musical creativity: from musical collaborators, biographers, documentarians to representatives from Queen Productions. Some fascinating revelations came from that research, one contributor even theorised that Freddie's reluctance to disclose the nature of his creative process was due to a superstition. Apparently, he feared that if he described his working process, he would lose that ability to create... and here I imagined that he just wanted to keep it all to himself, not make his feelings conversational fodder for untrustworthy music journalists.

I was in this never-ending search for this lost sound byte, where Freddie gives up the coy bravado and reveals something consequential. I'd find flecks of honesty here and there, a re-imagining of Freddie pulling up a piano to his bed, to play melodies if inspiration ever struck during the night. Of course there's that immortal anecdote of Crazy Little Thing Called Love being composed in a tub at the Munich Hilton. It was not because it particularly affected my relationship with his music, but I just never bought his dismissive "forget this, it means nothing" routine. Given the passion and complexity of his work and the immense effort it took to create it, I fail to see how he honestly believed his music was disposable.

But perhaps it was just me, perhaps it was just me! Perhaps I had just spent so much time with this music and I had theorised about it so much that I wanted to feel as if he invested something personal in his art. There was always that possibility that he only viewed music as a money-making venture, but I was forever hopeful that he had approached it as a sentimental artist. While everybody else I talked to could accept what he said at face value, it was harder for me to accept that maybe, he just didn't care as much as I did and maybe, just maybe, I didn't know him as well as I thought I did.

Ironically enough, there was once a time when I didn't really care what Freddie thought of his own lyrics. As a teenager, I wrote wildly preposterous online essays interpreting various Queen lyrics. I employed provocative techniques to get readers enraged and engaged. I wanted them to tell me I was wrong: "That was not what Freddie meant!". For me, it was not about being right, as such, it was about motivating listeners to articulate their personal understanding of these songs. The passion and the authority with which readers spoke about his lyricism really inspired me. Even though there was no citations for any of it, I was often moved by the insight and eloquence of these people who took the time to study his music so carefully.

All those essays, that research and production work invariably led to the invention of this series. Consequential Lyrics is a project which celebrates the meanings we independently create, as lovers and listeners of pop. We are naturally pre-disposed to create personal meanings, in such a way that provides comfort, wisdom and insight. For all the songs we do love, it's rare that we get that opportunity to faithfully articulate that significance in a properly ordered way. I suppose this project as an opportunity for you to express those private meanings, to record your voice, describing the significance of those songs in such a way that it legitimises the process of personal identification.

I may never find that sound byte, that phantom interview where Freddie reveals exactly what I want him to reveal. Frustration lies in the fact that nobody really asked the right questions, not the questions I would have wanted to ask, anyway. I comfort myself at the thought that he would have extremely unimpressed at my preposterous suggestions and my tenuous theories, connecting lyrical fragments to a varied succession of internal conflicts. Yet now it doesn't even really matter, I see now that his reluctance inspired to something far more personally meaningful. Whatever his feelings were about his music, life and words, I'm grateful to him for all the love and curiosity he inspired within me.

Consequential Lyrics #1: Queen

The Night Comes Down

The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke

The March of the Black Queen

In the Lap of the Gods (Revisited)

Spread Your Wings

The Show Must Go On

Download (53.3 MB)

Eleanor Gray is a Melbourne-based Queen fan of twenty years standing and a producer who creates podcasts, essays and online content for the music blog, Cassettes & Chocolate Milk. She has produced many radio programs, television programs, interviews, documentaries, vox pops and commercials for stations SUB FM, SYN FM, SYN TV, Triple R and the SBS program, Alchemy, frequently shoehorning Freddie Mercury into almost every project. She loves notebooks, mochas and London.  facebook.com/cassettesandchocolate