In today’s episode of Queen the Greatest, looking back at the making of the band’s debut album, Sir Brian May shared some incredible revelations.
Going through the artwork of the remixed and remastered Queen I record, the guitar legend confessed to a massive gut prediction he had about Freddie Mercury that came true.
Looking at the 1973 album cover, the 77-year-old said he could tell that their singer was going to become the face of Queen.
He shared: “I had this premonition that Freddie was special and he was going to be our icon.
“So, I thought it would be nice just to have Freddie as a symbol, like the figurehead on a Viking ship.”
Sir Brian continued: “I found this picture of him onstage, which Doug Puddifoot had taken standing in a spotlight, and I liked the way the spotlight looked because it looked like a comet in the sky. And that was basically the cover and everyone liked it. Freddie had designed this lovely special font for Queen. So, we said, ‘Okay, we’ll go with that’.
Meanwhile, Sir Brian looked back at Freddie and John Deacon’s original stage names, with the latter’s reversed, as printed on the original album’s credits.
Sir Brian added: “Deacon John is down to [producer] John Anthony. He wanted things to be grand and memorable, and he thought having a pseudonym was a good idea. Freddie was already Freddie Mercury rather than Freddie Bulsara or Farrokh Bulsara. But when the tracks were first played on the John Peel Show, that hadn’t got through. So, John Peel, who was a big disc jockey at the time, read out a previous blurb: ‘Well, here we have a record by Queen, a new group, and it’s Brian May and Freddie Bulsara and Deacon John’. So he’d read out what was on some previous blurb, but at that point Freddie had already decided he was Freddie Mercury, messenger of the gods.”