🏆 Hall of Fame ’24 Photo: David Bailey, distributed by Capitol Records · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons
Freddie Mercury
- Style
- Chevron
- Peak Era
- 1980s
- Born
- 1946
- Hall of Fame
- Inducted 2024
- Fan Votes
- 0 legendary · 0 meh
- Battle Wins
- 1
About Freddie Mercury
Farrokh Bulsara (1946–1991) was born in Stone Town, Zanzibar, to Parsi-Indian parents, spent much of his childhood at boarding school in India, and moved with his family to England in 1964. He studied graphic art and design at Ealing Art College, sang in several bands, and in 1970 joined guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor in what became Queen. He chose the name Freddie Mercury and designed the band's crest himself.
Queen's run through the 1970s and 1980s produced "Bohemian Rhapsody" (1975), "Somebody to Love," "We Are the Champions," "Don't Stop Me Now," "Another One Bites the Dust," and "Under Pressure." Their twenty-minute set at Live Aid in 1985 is routinely named the greatest live performance in rock history, and Mercury's four-octave voice, piano playing, and total command of a stadium crowd remain the standard other frontmen are measured against.
He adopted the mustache around 1980, trading the long hair and satin of the 1970s for a cropped cut, white tank top, and a thick black chevron, a look now so identified with him that it is practically a logo. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1991, one day after publicly confirming his diagnosis. Queen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.
Why the Stach Became Iconic
Freddie Mercury's mustache is the most famous mustache in the history of popular music, and it arrived fully formed. One year he was a glam-rock peacock; the next he was strutting across stadium stages in a tank top, sunglasses, and a perfect black chevron, and somehow it made him even more commanding.
The mustache was polarizing at first (legend says some fans mailed razors to the band) and then it was simply Freddie. The Live Aid footage is its monument: a mustache, a half-microphone stand, and 72,000 people doing exactly what they were told.
Appearances
- A Night at the Opera (1975)
- News of the World (1977)
- The Game (1980)
- Live Aid, Wembley Stadium (1985)
- Mr. Bad Guy, solo album (1985)
- A Kind of Magic (1986)
- Barcelona, with Montserrat Caballé (1988)
- Innuendo (1991)
- He was born in Zanzibar and attended boarding school near Mumbai, where he formed his first band, the Hectics.
- He designed Queen's crest, incorporating the zodiac signs of the four members.
- He had a reported four-octave vocal range, and researchers who studied his voice found he used subharmonic vibration techniques more common in Tuvan throat singing.
- Legend has it that fans who missed the clean-shaven Freddie sent disposable razors to the band's offices after he grew the mustache.
- Queen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001, and Rami Malek won an Oscar for playing Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).
