Freddie Mercury once asked, “What is this thing that builds our dreams, yet slips away from us?” And as the Queen frontman approached his final days, he felt those words more acutely than ever.
Mercury died on Nov. 24, 1991, after an intensely (and intentionally) private struggle with AIDS. In the 30 years since his death, his bandmates and closest friends have made it clear that, toward the end of his life, the singer was fueled by an almost defiant need to create — even as, and no doubt because, he felt time slipping away.
“Freddie lived for his music and loved his music and he was proud of himself as a musician above everything else,” says Queen lead guitarist Brian May in the upcoming documentary Freddie Mercury: The Final Act.
“For him, the studio was an oasis, a place where life was just the same as it always had been,” May noted in a 2013 interview with The Telegraph.
“We all knew there wasn’t much time left,” May told The Telegraph of heading into the studio in Switzerland to record in spring of 1991, but “Freddie wanted his life to be as normal as possible.”
May’s wife, Anita Dobson, sheds an even starker light on Mercury’s mindset: “I remember he said ‘When I can’t sing anymore darling, then I will die. I will drop dead,'” she tells filmmaker James Rogan, according to a report in The Mirror. “And that’s what he did.”
