THE LAST GOODBYE
By 1990, the hounds of Britain’s tabloid press were hot on Freddie Mercury’s trail. Day and night, the Queen frontman’s Garden Lodge home in West London crawled with reporters, his increasingly rare outings dogged by shutter-clicks and thrusted microphones. His pursuers had a common goal: to confirm the most open secret in rock’n’roll, that Mercury was HIV positive, had AIDS – and was dying. But for now, the press would be forced to seize on crumbs of evidence for their splashes – most recently, Mercury’s gaunt appearance at that February’s Brit Awards – while Brian May parried them with the party line: “He definitely hasn’t got AIDS, but I think his wild rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle has caught up with him.”
In an age before social media, the silence from the Queen camp was absolute. Yet the band’s public denials of Mercury’s worsening condition were at odds with their musical output of the era, with the following year’s Innuendo album all but admitting the singer’s diagnosis, while diving deeper into his headspace than any tell-all interview.
“We were dealing with things that were hard to talk about at the time,” May told , “but in the world of
