One of the biggest fan pages of Queen legend Freddie Mercury, Freddie Mercury Fanclub, has shared some super-rare photos on the official Instagram account and returned back us to 1985.
As you can see in the photos, Freddie was working with famous producer Reinhold Mack for a special project that also features Led Zeppelin singer, Robert Plant, and The Rolling Stones co-founder, Mick Jagger.
In the caption area of the post, the page has revealed a rare interview line of Reinhold Mack in which he was talking about Freddie Mercury and describing his feelings about working with Freddie. He also mentioned the well-kept secret songwriting method of Fred.
Here’s what Mack told:
“Freddie was music. He was a genius. You think of an idea and he would do something even better. He could always top what he had done himself in various ways. You would think, Jesus, how could you even come up with that stuff? He was a brilliant piano player and he actually plays a really good guitar, too, even though he claimed he couldn’t.
He usually came up with really good ideas in a matter of 15 or 30 minutes. He was always good at finding something, even if it was not the complete song. Sometimes he would devise the main hook really quickly. Then he developed it and I edited the stuff together. If we had the backbone of a song, we were happy.”
Reinhold Mack also revealed the song-writing method of Freddie and said:
“The way the guy wrote was to take a little notepad from, say, the Hilton Hotel and he might just write something like ‘A, F, C’, and then the next line would be the following chord and there would be ten of those pages and he would say, ‘Ah, there’s the song. It looks good and I can already hear it. I would tell him that I could sort of understand the chord structure, but wanted to hear the melody. Then he would come up with something remarkable on top of it.”
The admin of the Instagram page added:
“FYI: Reinhold Mack is the celebrated German music producer who worked with Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, AND with Queen for years producing albums like The Game, Hot Space, and The Works. He also produced Freddie’s solo music Mr Bad Guy and during Freddie’s Munich years Mack and his family were like Freddie’s own family as he spent a lot if time with them. Freddie was also the godfather of Mack’s youngest son “Freddie Mack”.
P.S. I don’t wanna add anything else to what Mack has said here about Freddie’s genius & songwriting process. “He was music” says it all.
I have posted about Freddie Mack’s memories of his godfather and I have lots of other stories from Mack himself that I’ll share with you later.
📷 Freddie & Reinhold photographed by Peter Röshler at Musicland Studios in Munich in 1985.”
You can see the rare photos of him right below.
