Queen’s internal dynamics have been discussed in the accounts of the surviving members with the careful selectivity of people who loved each other, worked with each other for decades, and have decided that what is owed to the dead is a form of honest protection — not concealment of what happened but not full exposure of every wound either. Brian May and Roger Taylor have spoken about Mercury with consistent warmth and with the specific quality of grief that does not resolve because the person lost was not simply a bandmate but the organizing principle of something that cannot be recreated.
The specific crisis that came closest to ending the band in its commercial peak — the period between News of the World and The Game, when Queen were simultaneously the most successful rock band in Britain and a group whose internal relationships were under significant strain — has been addressed in partial accounts that converge on a period in 1979 when Mercury’s growing investment in his solo pursuits, his relationship with Paul Prenter who was exerting significant influence over his professional decisions, and the specific tension this created with the other band members produced something that went beyond the ordinary friction of a working band.
May has described the period with the diplomatic language of someone who is being as honest as they have decided to be and no more. Taylor has been slightly less diplomatic and slightly more specific. What emerges from both accounts is that Mercury made decisions during this period — about his time, about his energy, about where his creative attention was directed — that the other band members experienced as a form of abandonment, and that the conversation that addressed this was among the most difficult any of them had experienced in a professional context.
The song Mercury wrote in the immediate aftermath of the most acute version of this conflict is not identified in any account with complete certainty — the timeline of Queen’s songwriting process makes precise attribution difficult. What is identified, in the accounts of people who were around the band during this period, is a specific session where Mercury arrived at the studio in a state that the engineers and musicians present have described as charged in a way that was different from his normal creative energy.
What he produced that session was a piece of piano composition that May heard through a studio wall and that he has described — in the most specific account available of the incident — as the most complete musical statement he ever heard Mercury make in a private context. Not a performance. Not a recording that was going to be worked up for an album. A man at a piano, alone, saying something that the circumstances of the previous weeks had generated.
The song was not released in that form. Its relationship to anything in the Queen catalog that followed is speculative. What May has said about hearing it is not speculative — he has said it changed what he understood Mercury to be carrying, and that understanding changed how he heard everything Mercury recorded afterward.