Freddie Mercury remembered with Blue Plaque for 70th birthday
Late music legend Freddie Mercury has been memorialised with a Blue Plaque outside his London home, in the week he would have turned 70.
The Queen frontman became the highest-profile victim of the AIDS crisis in 1991, when he died from AIDS-related bronchial pneumonia aged 45. He had been diagnosed HIV-positive several years earlier.
The late singer has this week been commemorated this week with a Blue Plaque outside his semi-detached home at 22 Gladstone Avenue, Feltham, west London.
Blue Plaques are awarded by English Heritage, to commemorate a link between that location and a famous person or event.
Mercury moved to the house aged 17 when his family moved to London from Zanzibar – and it was while living there that he met surviving Queen members, Brian May and Roger Taylor.
It bears the message: “Freddie Mercury (Fred Bulsara) 1946-1991, singer and songwriter, lived here”.
Sister Kashmira Cooke, who attended the unveiling alongside Brian May, said: “Mum and I are so proud and pleased that English Heritage is honouring our Freddie with a Blue Plaque, and that he will be amongst other famous names for ever. “Secretly he would have been very proud and pleased too.”
Dr Brian May said: “It is a pleasant duty to help install this little reminder on Freddie’s parents’ house in Feltham. It was here that I first visited Freddie soon after we had met through a mutual friend.
“We spent most of the day appreciating and analysing in intimate detail the way that Jimi Hendrix had put his recordings together in the studio – listening to Hendrix on vinyl played on Freddie’s Dansette record player – which had stereo speakers on opposite sides of the box!”
Karen Bradley MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, said: “I am delighted that one of Britain’s most influential musicians will be recognised through the Blue Plaque scheme.”
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