#mark langhorne

Lesley-Ann Jones: Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (2012)

Matt Richards & Mark Langthorne: Somebody to Love: The Life, Death, and Legacy of Freddie Mercury (2018)

As most of you know, June is Pride Month, so consider this blog (and a few more that will follow in coming weeks) my modest show of support for all my friends in the LGBTQIA+ community ...

I've read lots of books about Queen, but none dedicated to Freddie Mercury himself, so I decided to make amends for that this year by doubling down with two biographies that come at one of the greatest rock singers of all time from totally different directions.

As a veteran Fleet Street journalist who interacted with Queen during their peak, Lesley-Ann Jones built her Intimate Biography around her own, first-hand observations and over a hundred interviews with Mercury's inner circle, including partners like Mary Austin and Jim Hutton.

That proximity allowed Jones to focus her efforts upon the extreme, deep-seated conflicts that distinguished the shy, Parsi boy born Farrokh Bulsara, on the island of Zanzibar, from the flamboyant, indomitable, world-renowned frontman reinvented as Freddie Mercury.

It also led Jones to consider the immense isolation that came with Freddie's fame and his necessarily undercover attempts to indulge in the gay club scenes of New York and Munich as a perpetual search for connection and companionship.

And while Jones' up-close, "in the room" narrative style draws the reader closer to her subject (as much as that's possible), it occasionally veers into tabloid-like drama, gossip and sensationalism, which tends to overshadow Mercury's and Queen's music.

Meanwhile, Somebody to Love co-authors, Matt Richards and Mark Langthorne took a unique angle by structuring their book into a panoramic review of Freddie's career in and out of Queen, split with a clinical timeline of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, traced all the way back to the virus' early 20th Century origins in the Congo.

Their approach is simultaneously jarring to the story's flow and very educational; exposing how rampant societal homophobia fueled institutional neglect and devastated an entire generation of victims, from anonymous club-goers to high-profile figures like Rock Hudson.

I can still remember my mother's shocked reaction to the revelation of Hudson's secret and tragic death in 1985, as he had been such a hunk and heart-throb for teenage girls of her post-WWII generation.

Anyway, Richards and Langthorne's efforts result in a literary hybrid that's almost as much sociological document as rock biography, even though they rely on sourcing existing memoirs, public records, and medical histories, instead of direct access to Mercury.

Although, I will say that they still provide a surprisingly detailed and unsentimental look at Freddie and Queen's early career and each band member's combustible struggles for creative control, if not the same level of insight into their later works as other books.

Indeed, neither one of these biographies can compare with (and both obviously rely on material from) 1994's As it Began for a broad and comprehensive overview, but both expanded my understanding of Freddie's life and experience, his tragedy and triumph.

Mind you, both also have their flaws, and the fact of the matter is Mercury was such an intensely private person offstage, forced to hide his true self from a world that wasn't ready to accept or comprehend (still isn't, obviously), that we'll never truly get inside his mind, now that he's gone.

Featured Records:

Freddie Mercury: Mr. Bad Guy (1985)

Queen: The Miracle (1989)

Queen: Made in Heaven (1995)

16) How's their relationship with their parents? Are they alive?

bad. really bad. mark's father john is kind of a very on-the-nose allegory for shitty, abusive and controlling parents; he has a power that basically means people accept whatever he tells them as truth, with the exception of his children, who aren't affected by it. since mark is the only one of his siblings who was born without any kind of power, when it became clear he wasn't going to manifest one, john basically told the whole cult he started that mark was a test sent by the devil and that ignoring him was the only way to remain faithful.

the only reason he didn't kill mark was that several of his other children liked mark very much, and he was concerned they'd do something to him if he put mark out of his misery.

his mother ... it's complicated. jane is a very nice woman who doesn't have a lot of say in her actions. she's almost been stepfordized in a way; she HAS to believe everything her husband tells her, even as it pertains to herself and her children. when john started telling the cult to ignore mark, jane was part of that. but he vaguely remembers a time before that. she's been comatose for years and years now, but he tries to visit her sometimes and is singlehandedly responsible for paying to keep her on life support, because if she wakes up she'll be able to live her own life finally.

22) Fight or Flight? Are they a lover or a fighter?

depends on the situation. usually flight, but if there's someone he cares about involved he'll fight without thinking about it.