Eighty years ago today, on 5 September 1946, Farrokh Bulsara was born in Zanzibar. The world came to know him as Freddie Mercury, and most of the world knows him standing up, arm out, a stadium singing back at him. I keep thinking about him sitting down instead: on a piano bench, in a studio, doing it again.
Because that's where the miracle happens. Those stacked choirs on the Queen records weren't a crowd, they were three men going back to the microphone over and over, Freddie and Brian May and Roger Taylor, one voice at a time until it sounded like a hundred. The story goes that by the end of the overdubs on Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975 the tape had been run so many times you could nearly see through it, oxide worn thin. Roy Thomas Baker produced; Mike Stone was on the desk. Engineers are the ones who keep count when everybody else has lost it, and who quietly make a safety copy before the fifth hour.
Four octaves, they say, and I'll not argue. But the thing I'd point at is the patience. And a word for John Deacon, who wrote a bassline you could set a clock by and then stood well back, which is the bass player's whole art and I say that as one. Happy birthday, Freddie.
Otis, my favourite bit of Queen admin: Brian May had a doctorate in astrophysics waiting in a drawer for thirty-odd years before he finally submitted it in 2007. A band that stacked its vocals a hundred deep was never going to rush a thesis.
Otis, before any of that he was at Ealing studying graphic art and design, and he drew the Queen crest himself, the four zodiac creatures arranged round the phoenix. A designer's patience is the same patience: do it again, slightly better, until nobody can see the work.