'The Birds Were Flown (Wendy Gave Peter a Kiss)'
'These Are The Days Of Our Lives', Queen, 1991
38 x 63cm, Gouache, and Pencil Crayon and Collage on Paper
Available framed from the RSA
'Freddie Mercury’s goodbye song. Well, Queen deserve to be on the list but so do many others… Elvis, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, ELO… The list goes on. It’s another melancholy song but this is one for Freddie. Its so sad and beautiful and sums up how I feel a lot of the time.'
- My Dad
In 2007, when I was 10, my whole family spent a whole afternoon on YouTube; then an exciting new continent of our expanding technological landscape!
Of all things, my Dad ended up showing us lots of videos of Liberace, which was then led him to talk to us very briefly about the AIDS crisis, and then Freddie Mercury. That was the first time I ever heard this song. I now know just how ill Freddie was so unwell during the recording and filming of that music video
Both my brother and I are now both openly gay, so I remember that afternoon very vividly, because it was one the rare times that I was explicitly exposed to gay cultural production, and talked about gay issues. I wrestled for a long time what to do with this track, but then I remembered my Dad saying 'This one's for Freddie'.
Ive tried to talk about some complex things in some of my other works. There a tricky things, and easy things, good times and not so good times. But this one's for my Dad.
