In the 1970s, British popular music had two figures who were, simultaneously and in full public view, redefining what a rock star could be — not in the same direction, not through the same methods, not with the same relationship to their own identities and their own performances, but with an equivalent completeness that made their parallel careers the most important story in British pop for a decade and that produced, between them, a competitive awareness that has been described by people who knew both men as one of the most productively combustible relationships in the history of the form.
Elton John and Freddie Mercury were friends. This is established and genuine — their friendship was warm, long-running, and affectionate in the specific way that flamboyant people who have found a peer are affectionate, with a humor and a mutual recognition that the people around them did not always fully follow. They called each other Sharon and Melina. They attended each other’s events. They supported each other in the specific way that people who understand each other’s specific loneliness support each other.
They were also competing. Not in the hostile sense — not with the specific antagonism that has characterized other famous music rivalries — but in the productive sense of two people who were measuring themselves against the only available standard that felt adequate, which was each other. Elton’s commercial dominance in the early 1970s — the run from Madman Across the Water through Goodbye Yellow Brick Road that made him the biggest-selling artist in the world — was something that Mercury tracked with the competitive attention of someone who was building toward his own equivalent dominance. Queen’s rise through the mid-1970s — the Live Killers tour, Bohemian Rhapsody, the emergence of Mercury as the most theatrical live performer in British rock — was something that Elton received with equal competitive awareness.
Brian May has said that Queen’s approach to live performance in the late 1970s was shaped partly by awareness of what Elton John was doing and partly by a specific desire to do it differently — to find the thing that Queen could do on a stage that Elton’s format, however spectacular, did not accommodate. The thing Queen found was Mercury — the specific quality of his relationship with a live audience that no production, however elaborate, could substitute for and that Elton’s own performances, for all their considerable power, operated in a different register from.
Elton has said, in interviews given since Mercury’s death in 1991, that losing Freddie was the loss of the one person in his professional life who understood what he was doing from the inside — not from observation but from the same place, the same specific experience of being a gay British pop star of enormous commercial success navigating a public life in which that specific identity required constant management. He has said the friendship contained things that the public warmth of their relationship only partially expressed — that the specific mutual understanding between them was more complete than the accounts of their friendship usually convey.
The decade they occupied together — 1974 through 1984, when both were at their respective commercial and creative peaks — is the most concentrated period of British pop achievement in the form’s history. Neither produced it alone. Whether they produced it in relationship to each other — whether the specific knowledge that the other was out there, making something that required response, was the condition that made each man’s best work possible — is the question that the available evidence suggests but cannot definitively answer.
Mercury died in November 1991. He was 45. Elton performed at his tribute concert at Wembley. He has said in the years since that the loss of Mercury changed something about his understanding of what the music was for — that the removal of the one audience whose opinion he cared about in the specific way that the opinion of a peer who has the same gifts matters produced a reorientation of purpose that the subsequent decades of his career have been, in part, a response to.