Episode Details

Before he was Freddie Mercury, he was Farrokh Bulsara, a Parsi boy born in Zanzibar who refused to fix his extra teeth because he believed they shaped his voice. This deep dive looks past the stage persona to a displaced young man, a quiet art student, and a musical architect who treated his own identity as a design project.

We follow him from boarding school near Bombay and his family's flight from the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution to Ealing Art College, the naming of Queen, and the crest he designed himself. We explore how he composed without reading music, what a 2016 study revealed about his voice, the Live Aid performance, his private relationships and need for sanctuary, and his final years recording while fighting AIDS.

• How the Zanzibar Revolution and life in England pushed him to reinvent himself
• Why he fought for the name Queen and built the band's crest from the members' zodiac signs
• How he composed intricate songs using shorthand notes, a piano, and the recording studio
• What a 2016 study found about his subharmonics and unusually fast vibrato
• How he kept his illness private and announced his diagnosis one day before he died