# For Brian May, One “The Show Must Go On” Is Almost Unbearable to Hear
**LONDON — Brian May has played “The Show Must Go On” hundreds of times. Thousands, perhaps. But one version remains almost unbearable.**
The song, written for a dying Freddie Mercury, hides an act of shocking bravery in its recording — a moment that still brings May to tears decades later.
Released in 1991, “The Show Must Go On” stands as Queen’s most poignant farewell. May wrote the music. Mercury delivered the vocal — a performance of such power that listeners assumed he was healthy when they heard it. He wasn’t. AIDS had ravaged his body. He could barely walk. He knew he was dying. Yet he walked into the studio and delivered one of the most commanding vocals of his life.
May remembers the session vividly. They weren’t sure Mercury could sing at all that day. His strength was fading. Every movement cost something. Then he opened his mouth.
“I said, ‘Freddie, I don’t even know if you’re able to sing this,'” May recalled. “He just looked at me and said, ‘I’ll fucking do it, darling.’ Then he drank a bottle of vodka and went out and delivered that performance.”
The vocal take is flawless. Defiant. Alive. What the world didn’t know — what the microphones couldn’t capture — was what it cost him. After delivering that vocal, Mercury would collapse. Rest. Then get up and do it again.
“People hear that song and think, ‘Oh, he must have been okay,'” May says quietly. “He wasn’t. He was dying. He just refused to let you hear it.”
That refusal — that final, defiant act of showmanship — is what breaks May.
Mercury died less than a year later. The song became his epitaph, his final statement, his proof that some spirits won’t be silenced.
“It’s almost unbearable to hear,” May admits. “Because I know what was happening in that room. I know what it cost him. And I know he did it for us.”
