In going through Amazon’s Kindle book, I found this book on Freddie Mercury and thought I would give it a try. The book is called ‘Freddie Mercury: A Life, In his Own Words by Freddie Mercury, Greg Brooks and Simon Lupton. Now, it says by Freddie Mercury but that is very misleading as Freddie was not involved with this book as he had long since passed. It is not an Autobiography. The book is actually a collection of interviews that Freddie had done over the years and they were pieced together here to let you hear from Freddie and what he was thinking. A pretty cool idea, however, it didn’t work in the way I am sure they were hoping it would.

Here are the problems…First…the book is in no real chronological order. It doesn’t really tell the story of Queen or really Freddie in any kind of sequential order. It is all over the place timeline wise. Second…it doesn’t go in depth on Queen much at all. So, if you are looking for a deep dive in to the inner workings of Queen, albums or tours, you will be sadly bored to tears. And third…it is very repetitive, It is very repetitive and it is very repetitive. I can’t tell you how many times we have to hear about how much Freddie likes to spend money, how much the real Freddie is not like the stage Freddie and how lonely and few friends he has. Those are all interesting story points true, but these interviews mention it time and time and time again.

What did they get right? Well, the concept is really cool. I did like hearing Freddie talk about the struggles of being famous, his battle with being lonely and his inner thoughts about getting old. As I said, they are truly interesting bits to learn about they just didn’t need to rammed down our throats a hundred times. The man does have an ego as he knows how good he really was, but that ego is squashed by how charming he can be in an interview. Heck, I did have fun reading the book in Freddie’s voice. In my mind I am putting the inflections on the headvoice as I am reading the same way I remember how Freddie would say things. He was flamboyant, he was over-the-top and he was Freddie Mercury, but you do get to see the other side of him which is quite nice to learn.

When he did talk about some of his solo work and meeting certain people, it was entertaining and interesting. When he started talking about his mortality and how he didn’t want to live to 70 because that would be boring, that was also quite intriguing. To see his thoughts on burning out rather than fading away are sad, but a deep look in to who he was and what he was about. These parts of the book were what I loved, I only wished they could’ve structured things a lot better and put it in a time line as I don’t really remember the timeline of these actual interviews. I could piece a few things together based on certain topics discussed, but not all was clear.

And that is really all I have to say about it. The book had its moments and reading things exactly how Freddie said them was fun, but the structure of the whole book for me was a chance missed. I really hoped for more insight on his solo work, his Queen work and more in depth on his thoughts of his bandmates. You get a little, but nothing in depth and earth shattering. I started getting bored with it and it was a struggle getting through it at times when the repetition of topics happened and for that I left feeling a little lackluster about the whole thing. I am only giving it a 2.0 out of 5.0 Stars as the concept was good, but the execution was not. At least I didn’t have to pay anything for it as it was free on Kindle Unlimited. If you are a massive Freddie fan, then you might find some things of interest and if you are not, you can probably skip this one. Thanks for hanging and around and have a great day!