Another fight left their hotel room with a layer of broken glass and plaster on the carpet. Before a show at the Milton Keynes Bowl, Mercury got into a massive argument with his current beau, Bill Reid, that culminated with Reid biting Mercury’s hand so hard that it left teeth marks and bled profusely. Mercury was always in his best form at concerts after emotional conflict. At the time of filming, he had only just had a plaster cast removed, a souvenir after drunken horseplay went awry one night in the New York bar in Munich. In the final scene of Queen’s ‘It’s A Hard Life’ video, when Freddie sits down on the steps, he does so very gingerly, favouring one side over the other.
In future years, he started using the piano less on albums so he would be free to dance and run wildly during concerts. As a result, he always dreaded performing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ ( video above) in concert because he worried he would mess up on the piano in the process. Mercury didn’t consider himself a particularly great pianist. Calling him anything but Freddie would not be well received, however – he started using the name ‘Freddie’ prior to ever arriving in England, and ‘Mercury’ when Queen first started. Even his official passport read ‘Frederick Mercury’, despite the fact that his birth name was Farrokh Bulsara.