Brian May Sang the Demo in Falsetto. Freddie Mercury Took It Higher

Brian May already had a demo for “The Show Must Go On” when he brought one of its hardest lines to Freddie Mercury. He could hit the notes himself in falsetto. Singing the same passage in full voice was a different matter, and May wasn’t sure it could be done. Mercury’s answer, as May recalled it years later, was to roll the tape.

It’s easy to hear why the line worried him. Queen lets the tension build across the verses and gives the chorus a broad, open melody. The later climb asks Mercury to add force after he has already given the song plenty of it. His phrasing makes the rise sound inevitable, even though May had treated it as a question in the demo.

May told the story in Queen’s retrospective on Innuendo. He recalled Mercury having a couple of vodkas before going for the line. What stayed with him was the sound Mercury produced when the tape was running. May had worked with the same singer for two decades and still heard him reach for something he hadn’t heard from him before.

The song grew out of a collaboration. In Queen’s account of the Innuendo sessions, Mercury and May developed the idea together, and May worked on the words while Mercury was still able to record. The demo story offers a glimpse of that partnership. One musician sketched a way through the song. The other found a way to sing the line as May had hoped to hear it.

By the time the band made Innuendo, Mercury’s health was declining. In the studio, the group kept working at a pace he could manage, with producer David Richards helping them put the recordings together. Queen released the album in February 1991. “The Show Must Go On” closes it, a place that gives the song a different weight from hearing it on its own.

Queen’s 1991 promo pairs that studio recording with footage from earlier in the band’s career. The images span years. The voice you hear belongs to the Innuendo sessions. Watch the clip once for the footage, then listen again for how Mercury approaches the rise that May had sung in falsetto.

The song reaches Wembley

The song had a different purpose when the surviving members of Queen played it at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert on April 20, 1992. Elton John took the lead vocal at Wembley, with Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi joining on guitar. The performance was part of a concert for AIDS awareness that brought guests from across rock and pop together to remember Mercury.

The Wembley recording gives the arrangement a different kind of momentum. There is room for Iommi’s guitar alongside May’s, and Elton brings his own phrasing to a melody that audiences already knew in Mercury’s voice. Hearing the two versions together makes it easier to pick out what each singer does at the top of the melody.

What makes May’s recollection worth returning to is how specific it is. He remembers a single passage he could demonstrate, a choice about how to sing it, and Mercury asking him to start the tape. You can still hear the result in the last stretch of Innuendo.