IT’S A KIND OF MAGIC.

Those supposedly in the know when I was at high school considered Queen – singer Freddie Mercury, guitarist Brian May, bassist Roger Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor – to be Serious Heavy Rock. Even at the time, I knew enough about these things to realise that Queen really weren’t.

The polished camp of ‘Killer Queen’ was in a different class to the sonic histrionics of Led Zeppelin and the wayward, good time boogie of the Rolling Stones. More than that, Queen were part of my childhood and adolescence, fixtures of Top of the Pops throughout the 1970s and the 1980s like David Bowie. Significantly, both artists approached music – and pop culture generally – as an anything-for-grabs dressing up box of styles and inspiration.

Look at ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (1975): a four-act psychodrama marrying opera and a rock wig-out. There’s more – ‘Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy’ (1977): 1930s ragtime jazz. ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ (1980): how many other Serious Heavy Rock acts produced a disco club classic? None. ‘Under Pressure’ (1981): fittingly, the two Top of the Pops stalwarts were united on an, admittedly unlikely, study of mental collapse – The Coolest Man on the Planet hand in glove with everyone’s favourite pomp rockers. I remember a friend at school saying that all the people who went off Bowie and Queen because they’d had the temerity to work outside their respective artistic boxes, left the field clear for music fans who were open minded. He had a point: ‘Under Pressure’ went straight to Number 1.

It’s a serious song, told from the point of view of someone having a nervous breakdown, reasoning whether it’s worth the effort of carrying on. No doubt the subject matter would be considered too ‘woke’ in some corners of society today. In fact, it can’t be long before the people who had Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah’ cancelled get round to blanking ‘Under Pressure’. “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie, throw the books on the fire and watch the flames grow high…” 

1980 and 1981 were my prime Queen years. In the December of the turn of the decade, my form teacher Mr Whelpton took the school minibus down to London so a group of Sixth Formers could see The Game tour at Wembley Arena. It was the first time I’d been there and entry cost an astonishing £4.20 per ticket. Needless to say, Queen were brilliant.

For Christmas 1980, the Sixth Form decided to put on a festive show. The only other part of it I can remember now apart from what I did was a sketch in which the careers advisor ‘Mr Barstud’ (“Call me ‘Right Bleedin’’, most of my friends do”) shot down every one of my friend Ross’s employment ambitions – “You can’t do that either!”

My small group of friends were rather taken with the video that went with the Queen single ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’. A witty rock and roll pastiche, the promo clip had the band playing on a raised gantry so Freddie, all black leathers and tastefully distressed white T-shirt, could preen and slink around girders and along a catwalk with four dancers. Come the night of the Sixth Form show, my friends Ross and Sayer dragged up as the two rock chicks in the dance troupe, while Morph was on bass, Bart was behind the drums and Germ took up the guitar as the ersatz Queen. I took pride of place as Freddie. It made me feel absolutely FABULOUS taking on his persona, but perhaps it’s just as well there were no camera phones back then. We even had Tasker’s motorbike on stage, so Sayer and myself could drape ourselves provocatively over it, as Fred and his amour did in the video.

In 1981, Queen released the LP Hot Space. More heresy: instead of Heavy Rock, here was Funk Rock. Together with 1984’s The Works, it’s my joint favourite of all the albums they did. A unique thing about Queen was that although they wrote about love in a grandiose way, it was never corny. There was so much sincerity in the way Freddie sang that you couldn’t doubt the truth of it. The single ‘Las Palabras de Amor (The Words of Love)’ fitted my 1981 state of mind perfectly, speaking to me directly about the intense ups and downs of teenage romance. Other stand out tracks are the New Wave stomp of ‘Action This Day’, the anti-gun lobby rant of ‘Put Out the Fire’ and the adolescent rush of ‘Calling All Girls’. Whenever I hear the album now, a glorious, early 1980s summer appears in my head. Hot Space ends on a serious note – quite literally – concluding with ‘Under Pressure’. Just twelve years later, Freddie was gone.

He was a special person. A persona invented by the Parsi-Indian boy Farrokh Bulsara, Mercury was both a knowing wink to Queen’s audience and a serious, often experimental and ground-breaking musician. For all the undoubted talent of May, Deacon and Taylor, without Fred there’d have been no Queen. In the best kind of way, he was the Carry On equivalent of a Pop Star, flouncing across the world’s stages in a fur-lined robe and crown, while whole stadiums full of people chanted and clapped in sync to ‘Radio Ga Ga’.

I can’t think of anyone else who could have done that. And every single time, Freddie did it fabulously.