That song is not dealing with people who are living on their own in basement flats, or situations like that, it’s my living on my own… I’m just saying that I’m living on my own and I’m having a boogie time!” In 1993, after Mercury’s death, the No More Brothers mix of the song struck a chord with the public and topped the UK charts for two weeks, and has since been streamed more than three million times. There’s a bit in the middle where I do my scat singing and I’m just saying that when you think about somebody like me, my lifestyle, I have to go around the world and live in hotels and that can be a very lonely life. “If you listen to ‘Living On My Own,’ that is very me,” said Mercury. Bad Guy, is such a fine representation of his songwriting is that it captures his personality, including his scat-singing tribute to jazz star Ella Fitzgerald. Generally, the music comes first, but that time it was the words, along with the sophisticated style that I wanted to put across.”įreddie Mercury was honest in his interviews and one of the reasons that “Living on My Own,” a single from Mr. It was one song that was really out of the format that I usually write in. “‘Killer Queen’ was one I wrote the words for first. “It just fell into place, as some songs sometimes do,” said Mercury. The song won Mercury his first Ivor Novello Award from the British Academy Of Songwriters.
He said it was written in one night and was a song that he could have imagined Noël Coward singing. I don’t really like writing songs in that sphere, but there comes a time when I feel emotional in that way and it’s just a very small part of what John Lennon actually did.”įreddie Mercury always talked about his pride at writing “Killer Queen,” which appeared on Queen’s 1974 album Sheer Heart Attack. “It’s the nearest I want to go to in terms of talking about world politics or the disasters that are happening in the world. “I wrote a song called ‘There Must Be More to Life Than This’, and that is probably the nearest thing I could cite to a message song – and that’s not even a message as such,” said Mercury at the time. The song was in part inspired by the songwriting of John Lennon, one of the many formative influences on Mercury’s work. The version went unreleased at the time and Freddie Mercury returned to the lyrics for his solo album. Bad Guy, was originally recorded by Queen for 1982’s Hot Space, as a duet with Michael Jackson. “There Must Be More to Life Than This,” which appeared on Mr.