Freddie Mercury Born: Rock's Greatest Voice Arrives

Freddie Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara on September 5, 1946, in Stone Town, Zanzibar, to Parsi-Indian parents. He spent his childhood between Zanzibar and India, attending boarding school near Bombay, where he formed his first band at twelve. His family fled to England in 1964 during the Zanzibar Revolution, settling in Feltham, Middlesex. Mercury studied graphic design at Ealing Art College before cofounding Queen with guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor in 1970. His four-octave vocal range and theatrical stage presence transformed the band from a competent hard rock group into one of the most commercially successful and artistically ambitious acts in music history. Bohemian Rhapsody, which Mercury wrote in 1975, defied every convention of pop songwriting by combining operatic passages, hard rock, and balladry in a six-minute track that record executives initially refused to release as a single. It became one of the best-selling singles of all time. His performance at Live Aid in 1985, where he commanded a Wembley Stadium crowd of 72,000 through voice and physical presence alone, is routinely cited as the greatest live rock performance ever captured on film. Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987 and confirmed his diagnosis publicly on November 23, 1991, one day before his death at age forty-five. His compositions, from We Are the Champions to Somebody to Love to Don't Stop Me Now, remain fixtures of global popular culture. He never gave a full interview about his illness.