The Legacy of Svalbard

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 inspir