Freddie Mercury 's death in 1991 due to complications from AIDS shook the music world forever. The disease, which only began to gain notoriety in the 1980s, was still very recent when the singer contracted it, and the treatments that today allow people living with HIV to lead normal lives did not exist at the time.
In a recent interview , Brian May recalled the moment when the general population became aware of AIDS and lamented the fact that Freddie Mercury contracted the disease "too early".
“If he had contracted [AIDS] a few months later he would have survived because that wonderful cocktail of drugs had evolved and it basically dealt with the symptoms and allowed people with AIDS to live a normal life,” said the co-founder of Queen .
“Freddie didn’t have that privilege. He had the privilege of the greatest specialists in the UK and the world, but they didn’t have the necessary knowledge at the time to save him. We will be eternally saddened by the way things happened,” he concluded.
Brian May also said he remembers Queen reading newspaper articles about the first cases of AIDS in San Francisco, but, according to him, it all seemed "very distant" from the band's reality. "I remember we talked about it briefly and thought we should be careful, but we didn't discuss it much. Freddie certainly didn't talk much about it, but it was definitely something that stayed in my head, and probably in all of ours, for a long time," he recounts. "Two and a half years later we started to see Freddie suffering from something we didn't know what it was."
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