Austin still lives at Garden Lodge, a Georgian mansion in Kensington where Mercury spent his final years. Though Mercury was living with Jim Hutton, his male partner of six years, at the time of his death, he bequeathed the lion’s share of his estate to Mary Austin, a woman he dated for a similar length of time in the ‘70s and remained close to. The release offers a timely opportunity to explore Mercury’s complex identity and status as a queer icon, especially since last year’s enormously successful biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, was accused of playing down, or ‘straightwashing’, the singer’s relationships with men. Love Kills is included on Never Boring, a new box set gathering much of the material Mercury recorded away from Queen, including his only solo album, 1985’s Mr Bad Guy, and 1988’s Barcelona, an ambitious LP collaboration with opera singer Montserrat Caballé.
“Everything was about subtext with Freddie Mercury,” says Martin Aston, author of Breaking Down The Walls Of Heartache: How Music Came Out. The song’s lyrics don’t allude to the disease which would claim the singer’s life seven years later, but it’s possible that its title could be a thinly-veiled reference. In 1984, two years after the Gay Men’s Health Crisis organisation was formed in New York to combat Aids, Freddie Mercury scored his first solo hit with Love Kills.
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