Brian: Well, I can tell you how [Freddie and I] didn't meet, first of all, 'cause it's very odd that Freddie spent his young childhood in Zanzibar but his family moved over here to Feltham, and I was in Walsham Road and he was in Boundaries Road, probably about 400 yards away, and we never met. It's a very odd thing. But there we were, both growing up in Feltham and being influenced by very similar things. Both of us pretending to sleep and actually listening to Little Richard under the covers. He was inspired by Elvis, absolutely, and Cliff Richard, and also, just before I met him, Jimi Hendrix. So that's around the time that we met, quite a while later. He came to see us play and he'd go, 'Oh yes, really good, I really like what you're doing, but, you know, I could do better.' [chuckles] He was never lacking in confidence, was Freddie. But you know, Freddie's like an onion; you peel away the layers and you find different things. So, on the surface, he was incredibly confident, as you've seen, as everybody's seen; absolutely self-possessed, in control of his actions and his image and his behavior, his interactions. But underneath that layerāif you peel that layer offāyou would find someone very shy and quite insecure. And if you peel that layer off, I think you hadāat coreāsomeone who had an incredible self-belief, somewhere buried deep, and it was hard for him in the beginning to find it. But I always see this duality in Freddie; he knows he's great and yet he fears he's not. Maybe that's a human thing, but Freddie had it in extreme. You could see that stuff working in him, that kind of unique chemistry. So the young boy who was very self-conscious about his looks and his teeth and his hair and everything ends up being this great god on stage in Wembley Stadium. And somehow communicates the fact that he's done this with himself, to everybody in that stadiumāall the people who are very shyly hiding at the back of the stadium feel this stuff coming from Freddie: "I am like you, I am shy, I'm insecure, but I have done this. This is what I've made myself." I think, Freddie's just, uh [chuckles fondly] he's hard to define, and yet he defines himself every time you hear him sing and you see him perform.
Interviewer: Bless his cotton socks.
It has been SO long since Iāve drawn Freddie digitally and Iām really glad I got back into it. This was super fun to draw (especially Freddieās very visible underwearš)