The Show Must Go On – Freddie Mercury’s Stamps Live On
Did you know that one of the greatest singers of all time, Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, was also a stamp collector? His collection is held by The Postal Museum in London.
Anyone expecting a collection full of major philatelic rarities worth a fortune will unfortunately be disappointed. Freddie Mercury was wealthy enough to have pursued expensive auction rarities, but he was not the kind of collector who hunted valuable pieces merely to lock them away in a safe.
The young Farrokh Bulsara began collecting stamps in Zanzibar when he was only nine or ten years old. Because his father worked for the British Colonial Office, Freddie had access to many exotic stamps, especially issues from the British colonies, India and Africa. It is therefore no surprise that his album contains mainly British colonial issues, arranged carefully and with a genuine artistic eye.
So this is not the collection of a world-famous rock star, but the carefully kept stamp album of a dreaming little boy. That is what makes it truly special.
What moves me most is that the album also contains two full pages of Hungarian stamps! And that brings out the dreaming little boy in me as well...
In 1986, growing up in the countryside, I could not be at Queen’s concert in Budapest’s Népstadion. But Freddie and his bandmates were there, giving one of the most memorable concerts ever staged in Hungary before 80,000 people. Freddie even honoured the Hungarian audience with a few lines of a folk song: “Tavaszi szél vizet áraszt...” The words were written on his palm and he read them from there.
But how did he end up here? – the child’s mind keeps ticking. I know he wanted to perform in Moscow, but they would not hear of it. Could that small childhood spark, those Hungarian stamps, have played some tiny part in choosing Budapest instead? We will never know – but it is a lovely thought.
And since I began with The Show Must Go On… As an adult, while writing this post, one line from the song kept running through my head: “Does anybody know what we are looking for?”
I hope it is not sacrilegious to draw a philatelic parallel from the words of a singer who knew that death was approaching and was searching for the meaning of life. I think that is why we are here in the world of stamps: so these tiny pieces of paper can tell stories like this. So that we can learn, and so that we can dream.
A piece of the past that we can understand. Or a moment that we can preserve.
Because Freddie Mercury and his family were Zoroastrians, many of his personal belongings were reportedly destroyed after his death in accordance with tradition – but the stamps survived. In 1993, his father put Freddie’s album up for auction together with his own collection. The proceeds were donated to the Mercury Phoenix Trust, an AIDS charity.
The 52-page album became part of the British Postal Museum & Archive collection, now The Postal Museum, where it has occasionally been exhibited under the title “The Boy Who Would Be Queen”.