Freddie's language skills and his apparent lack of interest in reading

master marathon runner wrote:

'Fairy Fellers Master Stroke' is a great example of how receptive Freddie was. Taking in the minutae of Dadd's painting and coming up with his masterpiece, in fact a masterstroke !

True - in 1973.

A decade later he was pretty well a completely different person.

The Real Wizard wrote:

master marathon runner wrote:

'Fairy Fellers Master Stroke' is a great example of how receptive Freddie was. Taking in the minutae of Dadd's painting and coming up with his masterpiece, in fact a masterstroke !

True - in 1973.

A decade later he was pretty well a completely different person.

In what way? Could you please elaborate?

Thanks for all the answers, people! I'm going to respond to some of them in this one post. I hope that's ok with you all? It might be easier so I don't spam.

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@andres_clip -- I understand that, and in fact, having gone to a similar school while I was growing up in India (for 10+ years), I also get the fact that those schools give you a fairly good grounding in literature and the arts, but it still doesn't quite compute as I've heard that he began to fall behind and actually failed the Class 10 exams, and then had to do catchup learning for his A-levels in the UK.

@mooghead -- I'm not talking novels, per se. I'm talking just reading. From my research, I get the idea that he didn't read at all. And this is from people who were almost 24/7 with him like Phoebe and Jim. The only possibility is that by the time they were spending time with him, he was already at the stage where he wasn't reading much anymore... just playing scrabble and doing crosswords, etc.

@master marathon said -- "Freddie was extraordinarily receptive to all that was going on throughout his life. Every experience and observation was stored away. Genius."

THIS. It makes the most sense. He learned from life, from talking to people, from observing, from perceiving, and thinking, and letting his experiences inform his creativity. I sometimes wonder what his MBTI indicator would be. Maybe ENFP... he wasn't judgmental at all, I think.

@love2spin -- do you have a link to that Tim Rice quote? I'd love to take a look.

@matt z -- haha. :p

The erudite Freddie that wrote those masterpieces in the 70s was very different from his 80s counterpart. His lifestyle changed, his friends, acquaintances, his priorities, his music. Maybe his reading habits too.
Just listen to his output post 1980. He wasn't writing about fairy fellers and the king of Rhye anymore but rather more universal topics like love, heartbreak, loss, having fun and the like.

he was very humble, timid person in the more than first half of his life.

So when he changed lifestyle in the end of seventees, his then nowdays cravings, desires, circumstances etc. started to reflecting in his lyrics.

Look - the noticeable changes in themes of his songs started circa times of "Jazz". Then it goes more and more rapidly

But it's still wonderful - how did he manage not to touch a theme of AIDS openly or at least hint it somehow!

For a man who already got a mortal desease it's a courage of courages...

I’ve literally just joined to say this, so be gentle with me please!

I think he probably picked it up the same way he picked up a lot of his musical influences: radio.

I have friends whose first exposure to Tolkien and Douglas Adams was from radio adaptations, and there’s still plenty of radio adaptations of classic literature being made.

I bet they listened to BBC world service at his boarding school - for the accents, if nothing else.

Obviously I have absolutely no evidence to back this up!

Wiley wrote:

The erudite Freddie that wrote those masterpieces in the 70s was very different from his 80s counterpart. His lifestyle changed, his friends, acquaintances, his priorities, his music. Maybe his reading habits too.
Just listen to his output post 1980. He wasn't writing about fairy fellers and the king of Rhye anymore but rather more universal topics like love, heartbreak, loss, having fun and the like.

I never even thought about this. Well, to be honest, I wouldn't say that... it's an interesting turn of events, though. A man who consciously controlled his life and output for a certain result.

Did he always say he wrote for love? Or was that just after 1980 etc? Your response makes me want to listen from the beginning all over again. Thanks for the heads up!

Seed_Of_Rhy wrote:

he was very humble, timid person in the more than first half of his life.

So when he changed lifestyle in the end of seventees, his then nowdays cravings, desires, circumstances etc. started to reflecting in his lyrics.

Look - the noticeable changes in themes of his songs started circa times of "Jazz". Then it goes more and more rapidly

But it's still wonderful - how did he manage not to touch a theme of AIDS openly or at least hint it somehow!

For a man who already got a mortal desease it's a courage of courages...

Thanks for adding your voice to what the others are saying about what seems to me to be a fork in the road he took circa 1980.

I wonder if during those walks he took toward the end by the duck lake... if he pondered any of this.

KT2 wrote:

I’ve literally just joined to say this, so be gentle with me please!

I think he probably picked it up the same way he picked up a lot of his musical influences: radio.

I have friends whose first exposure to Tolkien and Douglas Adams was from radio adaptations, and there’s still plenty of radio adaptations of classic literature being made.

I bet they listened to BBC world service at his boarding school - for the accents, if nothing else.

Obviously I have absolutely no evidence to back this up!

Oh, I'm sure he did. I grew up in India until I was 15, and went to pretty much a similar school as Freddie did from when I was 4 till 15, and the education is very, very British mixed in with a healthy amount of respect for Indian holidays and culture. But I'm sure he read copiously during those early days and listened to a lot of stuff on shortwave radio including BBC and also perhaps Voice of America.

Re the accent, I don't think it was BBC which did that. The accent he uses is the exact accent I had when I came to the States. It took me quite a few years to convert to an "American" accent, and even now if I get angry, the clipped quality comes right back. It's what in India gets called "the convent/missionary school accent."

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Damned BOTS!

This is a pretty good topic. One can make assumptions but once again Peter would probably be more in the know. Maybe FM watched plenty good British docs and the like. Hired Tour guides in Japan etc. Pinging info back and forth in conversation may have been a recreational study of sorts

He must have read to keep up with his art and Japanese fascination

The Real Wizard wrote:

master marathon runner wrote:
'Fairy Fellers Master Stroke' is a great example of how receptive Freddie was. Taking in the minutae of Dadd's painting and coming up with his masterpiece, in fact a masterstroke !

True - in 1973.
A decade later he was pretty well a completely different person.

I think a lot of that is "almost" down to songwriting being a "new interest"...in much the same way we're all interested in something new. Difference with song-writing, is after those first handful of LPs, the reality of the "job" set in.

What started off as fresh and interesting soon jaded him. Queen - just like all other major bands at that time; Zep, Purple, Floyd, Who, Eagles etc became established in the same routine "treadmill": Write > Record > Tour > Write > Record > Tour > Write > Record > Tour > ad nauseam.
Think about it, in "normal jobs" if we get fed up we can try to find another job. In song-writing, it's very different - you can't leave being in a band to go and be a decorator "just like that". So I suppose the lifestyle makes it too tempting "tread water" and hope the punters don't notice.

At that point writing songs becomes boring for two reasons:
>> it's just like any other job - working in a shop, building houses, making cars, selling insurance - the routine irks
>> you actually start to run out of "new" things to write about - a lot of what you write touches on familiar subjects "love" "breakups", "world events" "war" etc

There isn't much in Freddie's canon; composition-wise that can touch his lyrics from 73-76. However, (IMO) it's ironic that, Freddie produced three of his writing masterpieces WIAWI, IGSM and Innuendo- when he was unwell. Though, how much of "Innuendo's" lyric is Freddie's or Roger's I don't really know.

I think, that by '82 - they were all struggling, lyrically. For every piece of poetry created, there was another "paint by numbers" one.

Also, he probably was well-read - but probably not so much after college. Those early albums were full of "inspired" stuff. Fairy King more or less lifts a verse from Robert Browning's Pied Piper of Hamlyn.

brENsKi, ree:

>IGSM

Hardly a masterpiece. The bulk of the lyrc for that song is taken from generic phrases used in common parlance that he borrowed and knitted (albeit cleverly) together:

missing one final screw
not in the pink
one card short of a full deck
not quite the shilling
One wave short of a shipwreck
not my usual top billing
really out to sea
knitting with only one needle
driving only three wheels

Had he invented the phrases then, yep - absolutely a work of genius, but......

dudeofqueen wrote:brENsKi, ree:
>IGSM
Hardly a masterpiece. The bulk of the lyrc for that song is taken from generic phrases used in common parlance that he borrowed and knitted (albeit cleverly) together:

Had he invented the phrases then, yep - absolutely a work of genius, but......

I think you miss the point. Since the dawn of language, "everything" derived from somewhere else. The collection of idioms and phraseology are not the genius, it's the lyric itself - in much the same way that Browning is lifted for "My Fairy King".

IGSM is (IMO) lyrical genius for three reasons:

>> Lyric writing is not simply "the collection of words" - it's the combinations, the poetry and the flow.
>> Real lyrical genius, is the ability to take common phrases and put them into verse "like they belong". Freddie went a step further - he took a collection of "madness idioms" and made them work together as poetry.
>> More lyrical genius? writing the whole thing in the style of another classic lyricist - Noel Coward, and making the whole thing sound like something Coward "could" have written.

^^^ this.

Even someone with the lyrical skills if Neil Peart sometimes borrowed lines or phrases. Admittedly his ability to write strongly never seemed to deminish. But the point about the writing process becoming like any other job is quite true for a lot of people.