during a time of change and lessening discipline, Freddie began what was his greatest, and perhaps only true, love affair: music.

For the next twenty plus years, music would be the essence of Freddie's life. His entire existence would revolve around it and it would sustain him and rule him, help him and destroy him. He would live with it, sleep with it, eat with it and it would eventually steal away his life.

To be a part of the culture of any form of artistic expression is to surrender yourself to that art. Each participant searches for their masterpiece and then searches beyond that to find the item that would surpass even that. The Classical Greeks knew of the cruelty of the muse and of the passion that it engendered in the artist. Many great legendary and folkloric figures ended up maiming themselves, or being maimed or killed once their masterpiece had been created as they knew that it would never be bettered by them, nor did they ever want to sink into obscurity. Pygmalion crafted his Galatea, his masterpiece, and never created again falling

in love with the statue instead. Daedalus was imprisoned after creating his masterpiece, the labyrinth at Corinth and, although he escaped his son, Icarus, fell from the heavens and died, destroying the creative muse within the artificer. Art in any form is a cruel master with the search for perfection driving its adherents. More so when these people are at the level of genius.

Freddie wrote, and performed, and lived his life with his beloved music. It obsessed him and possessed him, bringing him to life and sustaining him before raising him on wings of music to the status of a god of rock, creating a legacy of life that flows forever from his star.

This mistress enveloped him and took him with her through his time with Queen, guiding him in his life choices and existence through the seventies and into the eighties and enveloped him in a sheath of musical life best seen in the huge temple-like stadia of the eighties.

All other loves fell by the wayside before this all-encompassing, all-uplifting, all-engulfing lover.