Original subtitles

We were fairly expert at playing to very large stadium audiences.

Maurice is doing his thing in stadiums

in another part of the artistic landscape.

It's a very similar concept.

It's like, let the audience be part of this and it will make

the whole thing grow into something new and different.

I wouldn't have dared to marry our music with a ballet,

but what they did made me see some of our music

in a different light.

What Béjart was doing was colossal.

It was like a Busby Berkeley revue, but in ballet.

Their music is just incredible.

The costumes of Gianni Versace,

and everything together it was just a dream to do.

We had this wonderful interaction with ballet

and with one of its greatest creators

at a time when Queen was sort of already over, in a sense.

It was a tribute to Freddie Mercury

and to the people who died too young.

'Ballet For Life' is very important

because it spreads to the public

the agony that people went through before they died.

It was life triumphing over death, in a way.

I think with Freddie's death,

we just thought it was all over, you know?

We hadn't planned on ever playing again.

We really regarded it as over. 'It' being Queen.

We thought, "We've done this, we've built it and there it is."

We always said if one of us could no longer do it,

that was it.

We ran away to the four corners of the Earth.

But then we came back to make the 'Made In Heaven' album.

This kind of labour of love,

which was to make the best of what was left.

Freddie left a lot of scraps, quite deliberately.

We all worked so that we would have things

from Freddie to work on when he was gone.

We got used to hearing Freddie's voice,

without him actually being there.

And it was strangely cathartic

and I think it was a very emotional record.

We all went to inaugurate Freddie's statue in Montreux.

And it wasn't a nice feeling at all.

It was a feeling of resentment and upset

and, I suppose, anger

It was like, this is all that's left of my friend

and we're supposed to be happy about it?

This sort of piece of metal?

This statue is a gift from us,

the family and friends of Freddie,

to the people of Montreux,

who have always been so kind to Queen

and gave Freddie a kind of sanctuary

in the last few years of his life.

The place you feel closest to Freddie,

is actually in Montreux.

The last song that he wrote, was written there.

He loved being in that apartment

and just 20 minutes down the lake,

a couple of years later, Maurice Béjart created this ballet.

It's always very difficult to know

when you start and why you start.

But sometimes it's a shock.

Of course the main meaning of the ballet, for me, it's love.

I must be in love with the music.

I must be in love with the idea.

I must be in love with the dancers.

It's really a story of love.

I was a great fan of Freddie Mercury.

And I knew the music of Queen.

I was really in love with that music.

And then I bought the last record

and I saw a photo on the record.

And I've got a house on top of Montreux in Switzerland

with exactly the same view.

He died just one year before my main dancer, Jorge Donn.

And then lots of things came together.

I met Maurice Béjart

at the unveiling of the statue to Freddie.

He was an entrancing man

and these steely blue eyes that lit up,

and he would carry you along with his enthusiasm.

We had one very illuminating conversation,

basically about people who died too young.

Maurice had a very brilliant dancer,

called Jorge Donn.

Soon after Freddie died,

Jorge also died of the same thing.

There was a definite parallel there,

because we'd lost Freddie

and Maurice had lost Jorge, the love of his life,

and this wonderfully talented man and so had we.

So I think they were both creative processes

that happened after those twin losses.

So it's like destiny took me by the hand.

I had to put Freddie and Jorge Donn, together.

And in that case, it was love and death.

We were delighted that somebody wanted to do something

so creative with the music.

So, why not?

How could we possibly say no to a giant

of another discipline in art?

Coming to us and asking us if he can use our music.

What a wonderful thing to happen.

I mean, yeah.

Freddie was never just a singer.

He just burned when he sang.

And every movement that he made,

was as if he was a dancer.

I made 'I Was Born To Love You', the video, with Freddie.

I would say what I wanted

and he would give it more than I could have ever imagined.

He's so creative. He's physically creative.

He strutted around the stage like Rudolph Nureyev.

Absolutely pulled up.

Presenting to the audience.

He's this magnificent specimen.

You look at him in 1986 on the stage there,

he's a picture of health, vitality, and strength.

I just think that there are sort of balletic moments

in our sort of repertoire.

I would like to go and take ballet lessons.

It's nice if I could just study

some of the routines or exercise,

so that I would know how to put them across on stage.

At the moment, what I do is mock ballet.

Freddie Mercury came to the ballet all the time

and to the opera.

And when we'd go home with him afterwards,

he'd take us to dinner, we had no money.

He was very generous, by the way.

And we'd go back to his and, guess what would go on the TV?

A ballet or an opera.

He would try and get information from us about,

"Well, if you do this step, what's fifth position?"

And he would practise it.

And then he got one of the Royal Ballet

to actually choreograph his video of one of his numbers.

He saw classical ballet as this big, extravagant world

that he wanted to enter and develop through his world.

Freddie wanted to take ballet to the masses.

He's what I love about what I consider to be art.

He goes, "This is what I feel from my heart.

This is why I do my art.

But I care about what people think about it,

so I will listen to people

and I will feel what they feed back to me

and I will walk this line between being commercial,

which you can interpret as being successful, if you like,

and being the artist that I wanna be."

Now, Maurice exactly fits that line, to me.

I think I was the first one to play in a big arena.

We tried to have a different audience.

Just to give new blood to the ballet audience.

Béjart was one of the greatest creators

of stage formations we've ever seen.

I mean, it was a huge company.

And he would use them dramatically.

He would tell a story sometimes, through the lines, the circles,

the different shapes that he made.

He's someone who totally understands and empathises

with traditional ballet, but has his own thing.

Again, like Freddie. Freddie's the same.

He was conscious of what the rules were

and very conscious that he liked breaking them.

As a dancer, I started my career in London.

I was 20 and I was in a very classic company.

English company, dancing 'Swan Lake', 'Sleeping Beauty'

and all the classic ballet.

And from there, I escaped in other fields.

Béjart took the pure classical form and he pushed it

so that when he used contemporary music,

they took the music as a way

to redefine a classical movement.

And he took it, I think, beyond any other company, at the time.

He's a very free spirit.

There's nothing expected in what he does.

Everything is quite a shock and that's part of his genius.

When I first saw Maurice Béjart at The Coliseum Theatre,

I was overwhelmed.

I saw a whole 'corps de ballet' of men.

Normally the 'corps de ballet' is made out of 32 women.

These were 32 men in these cloaks,

running round the stage and there were no women in it.

I thought, "Wow, we've arrived!"

Béjart takes a classical form,

and bends it in every different way.

I think so, with Queen.

I don't know what really first attracted

Maurice Béjart to our music.

I suspect it was that eclectic mix

of sort of semi-pseudo classical pieces

and sort of mock-operatic pieces and mixed in with rock music.

Queen's music cries out for this big,

rock, opera, classical dance piece.

He knew what his concept was and he just went off and did it.

He didn't really interact with us

as regards, "Which piece am I gonna use?"

And we were happy with that, because we knew he was a genius.

Oh, la-la la-la.

If you can.

Good.

I joined the company in 1995,

so I was there when Maurice Béjart created this ballet.

For me and I think for all the dancers of the company,

it was really new and a big challenge.

Even the work in the studio was really different.

I started with the piece, 'Heaven For Everyone'.

Because that's the last album, the new album.

And of course, when I started with the music,

it was really a joy.

I tried to work on each song like a video clip.

Each song was an entity.

I didn't try to start with a story.

With the dancers, we were thinking

how the ballet was going to be.

"What will be the message?"

Because at first, he didn't say anything.

I choreographed one song, another song and another one.

Then the story went by itself.

The story of two people,

one singer, one young dancer and death.

A lot of it's about Freddie's music,

but Freddie's no longer there.

It's also about Jorge Donn, who's also no longer there.

And there we all are making music about life and death.

And Maurice is finding things in our music

that we didn't know were there.

I think if you write a song, it can't be too specific.

It's got to appeal to a lot of people.

It has to have sort of general themes

which might touch a lot of people.

You can't be too specific, I think.

These are sort of eternal themes.

You start writing about something very concrete

that you feel something about.

Gradually you become aware that it's part of a bigger picture.

And so the song becomes about a picture,

which hopefully everyone can relate to.

When we started to understand what it will look like,

I think we were all very moved.

Béjart always said it's like an homage

to the people who died too young.

At the beginning of the ballet,

when the curtains open, we're lying on the floor like this,

and we wake up one by one.

In the beginning when we're all...

everyone is like... because you don't expect it.

Because you just see the white floor

and then there's life over there.

You're kind of looking for the eternal in that piece of music.

It's a place we'd never gone in Queen when Freddie was alive

and I think we're trying to hold onto him.

It's still great to hear him there

and it's like he's all around us still.

It was really like, "Let's just listen to our hearts."

We started with the tiniest things,

but we got inspired to weave it into a big tapestry.

And of course that's what Maurice is doing visually.

Each vision is made by the song.

Not so much by the words.

The music is my food.

Béjart was not afraid to take whatever he had seen

and use it to push ballet over the edge.

Usually, I go on stage as a classical dancer,

but Béjart said, "OK, listen,

I don't want to see you on stage as a dancer.

Show me the rock star you could be."

I know when he did this solo for me,

Maurice said to me, "Be like Nureyev, really classical.

And then after, break the movements."

Nureyev for Maurice was a big friend.

They worked together for many years.

So that's why maybe he wanted to include Nureyev too

to pay homage to him.

Rudolph Nureyev was a household name.

It would be like a pop concert,

the end of a ballet with him in it.

He was to ballet, what Freddie was to rock 'n' roll.

I mean, he really was that powerhouse.

Both of them were at their peaks

at the same sort of time in the '70s, '80s.

Both of them dying from AIDS-related illnesses

and within 18 months, two years of each other.

So, he told me to be perfect like Nureyev was.

I tried.

And then all the movement after, it breaks.

So, it's a contrast between the classical and Maurice Béjart.

And I love it!

In this ballet, I have like 13 different costumes.

These costumes from Versace, they are really inspired

from the original costumes of Freddie Mercury,

so you never have these kind of costumes in classical ballet.

We always had a rule of wearing either black or white on stage.

And Gianni Versace did the wonderful costumes

and he stuck to that sort of rule.

They're very immaculate and I think they look terrific.

Maurice really took on board

some of the aspects of our live performance,

even including colouring, colours and lighting.

It looks very alive. It looks very modern.

And, actually, strangely enough, about Versace,

I suppose he could really join the triumvirate

of lives cut tragically short.

After working a moment with Queen,

I don't know how we came up with the idea of Mozart.

Mozart died very young, he was only 35, even younger.

It works very well, Queen and Mozart together.

I thought it was a great compliment.

You know, to be on the same bill.

A lot of people raised their eyebrows at that time.

"Mozart and Queen?"

But it's the genius of Maurice which made it work.

I'd never thought of the two in the same breath.

No, it's a very daring piece, really.

It's a daring piece.

I think in this period, we were talking a lot about this,

about AIDS.

So people were worried

and they wanted to know what it was exactly.

People died from this.

I have friends that died from AIDS.

It was during this period that we spoke really a lot about it.

At the time, when AIDS started to spread,

there were more and more fears amongst people

who even discovered that they didn't have AIDS,

but they felt their life was only about living with death.

They saw it all around them.

And I think even today,

they still feel there's a finite moment

when death will descend.

So many people, when hearing the term 'living with AIDS',

really just take it that it's the person who has the disease

Who is living With AIDS.

But that is not true.

It is everybody,

including that person, and everybody around them

who is actually living with the disease.

I have to say that we weren't really aware.

Or if we were aware, we were in severe denial.

Because we always thought, "It's Freddie. He can't die.

This can't really be... No, of course he can't."

Somebody is gonna find a way of dealing with this,

which they nearly did.

If he'd been in that situation, probably two years later,

he would still be around now.

When Freddie accepted his diagnosis in 1987

it was a death sentence.

All I could feel was that I could make him comfortable.

But that there was nothing that I could do

that was actually going to save his life.

In 2006 I got the chance to do this part.

I mean, I've been doing this for ten years.

But I was so young and I think I didn't really understand

what I needed to see in this variation.

I was focused in getting it right in Maurice's style,

because it requires precision.

But when I had my own experience,

in love, like every human being,

I think I started to realise what I needed to express.

Maurice loves not just when you're dancing

and showing that you're suffering,

but that you're actually feeling it.

Sometimes I feel I'm an innocent person,

who maybe also got ill with AIDS.

And maybe I am sensing Death,

that he's right here and wants to take me away.

If you listen to the music and the lyrics, you understand.

When I'm moving like, "I will find you",

it's already like, "I will find you."

I turn away and then, I'm like, "Oh, no, please."

He's coming, you know?

He may look into my eyes, and I'm hiding.

Because, maybe I don't want him to hurt me again.

It's chilling. It's really chilling, isn't it?

Even talking about it sends shivers up your spine.

To find that in the music. And yet, it's not despair.

It's looking for beauty, even in those thoughts of death.

The first time I experienced anyone with AIDS

was in 1979, and no one knew what it was.

I was working on a film called 'Can't Stop The Music'

with The Village People.

And Bronte Woodard, our writer, got very sick.

Other friends in Los Angeles became sick.

And nobody had a name for it.

They were going in hospital and coming out again.

And in the hospital, and coming out again.

Suddenly, it seemed everywhere I went,

friends, dancers, were getting very sick and passing away.

And you suddenly realised you were enveloped in this world

that nobody knew a great deal about.

Nobody seemed to have any success

in finding any medication to help people survive.

And I felt that I was travelling from hospital to hospital

in New York, Germany, London, Los Angeles visiting people.

And my heart was breaking.

AIDS seemed to hit gay people at first.

It was the gay disease

that no straight person thought they'd ever get.

Therefore, nothing was done about it.

Of course, in people's minds, and that's where it all starts,

the ballet world was rife.

We all suffered from the stigma, that was attached to us

because we were gay, of having AIDS.

I don't have it.

But the press wanted to expose anybody

who was famous or a celebrity,

if they had an inkling they might have contracted AIDS.

The press started to come to my door,

and one shouted through the letterbox,

"Come out, we know you're dying."

People were dying of it, people wouldn't go near them.

And you couldn't get into a hospital if you had AIDS,

at the beginning.

Nobody would take you in with a disease they knew nothing about,

because they thought it could contaminate the ward.

A friend of mine, they thought he was dying of AIDS,

so on his door, they'd write, "No admittance. AIDS patient.

Wear rubber gloves. Do not touch."

It was 'the gay curse'.

It was, you know, it was God's curse on gay men.

I remember where we were, of course everybody remembers,

when the news of the death of somebody close to them happens.

But we all gathered around together, John, Roger and myself

and just sat there kind of stunned.

And then we put on the TV and on the TV it said,

"Freddie Mercury today died of AIDS."

It was a shock.

It's only then that we believed it, I think.

There's both feelings in all the ballet.

Because there's death, but there's also life.

So we have to carry on.

Everything depends in the way you take it, you know?

I was born to love you, but you're not there anymore.

And then you can think also,

I was born to love you, so it's nice.

I think about an imaginary husband,

that he's gone, and I go through all these different feelings.

When I think of him, I'm happy,

and then I'm angry because I think,

"Why did he leave me? Why did he die?"

And I'm angry, "I don't want this."

And then I think, "Yeah, but I have to move on."

That's a great insight.

I'm sure that wasn't built into the song in the first place.

That's purely a stroke of genius from Maurice.

That was a big sort of work to make 'I Was Born To Love You'

to bring it to life and make it sound like

we were all there in the studio having a great time.

It never happened. He wasn't there.

So for Maurice to take that

and take it to a completely different place

and have this tragedy built into it,

it's a masterstroke.

That's the world, it's like this.

There are people dying,

but at the same time there are people who continue to live.

Good, good, good, good. OK, good.

Some days it's hard because your body is in pain.

But when you start to dance, you forget about everything

because we love to dance.

Check. One, two.

The first proper public show was due to be in Paris.

And we talked about being there,

we said, "We'd like to be there."

We thought, "Oh, dear."

Because it's a strange thing for us to do.

Firstly, we hadn't played for God knows how long.

We don't have our singer.

It's one song and you have to get a whole production

for one song, one performance.

And then this message came from Elton, saying, "Let's play."

We all remember, the performance, of course,

when we did the finale with the whole group,

Queen and Elton John.

Let's sit down.

For us, for everybody, it was "Wow."

According to the newspapers, this is the first in a series

of concerts we are doing together.

A series of concerts, yeah!

I think we'd probably be able to sell out

the Shepherd's Bush Empire.

Give or take a few seats.

And that was John's last ever performance.

I could tell he wasn't happy, cos he was chain smoking

and very, very nervous.

Had been severely traumatised by losing Freddie.

'Deaky', our dear friend John, I think he didn't arrive

at the same place as we did.

And John is there, but John is so desperately

uncomfortable with the whole thing.

You can see him, his whole body is reacting against it.

And at the end of it, he says, "I can never do this again.

I can't do this."

And it was true, that's the last time

he ever played with us, John, in public.

Check. One, two.

It was literally like preparing for a whole tour,

because you have lights, sound, production rehearsals.

But there's just five minutes

where you will be operational for 'The Show Must Go On'.

- Loud. Lovely. - Let's do it loud.

There were moments when I was watching Maurice

make changes to the choreography,

right there and then.

It's such a living, breathing thing with him.

He's like a sculptor.

He shapes every performer at every instant.

- Yeah, right. - Remember this.

I'll be there, stuck in position.

It's a lovely tribute to the guy.

It's fantastic.

It's immense.

He's a rock star. Isn't he? He really is.

You just look at him and you realise that, yeah.

He loves it. Course he loves it. It's all about performance

and all about getting that feeling back from the audience

which tells you that you moved them.

He's so conscious of his audience.

And you see it when he takes his bow.

The curtain goes up at the very end and he doesn't do anything.

He's just there.

You know, it's masterful.

He's the ultimate showman, isn't he?

And he's able to be there, because it's real art,

it's what he feels, but he's playing to his audience

and he's not ashamed of it.

The audience is the most important thing.

Because really, a performance, again, it's a love story.

Then we are two, we're on stage and they are there.

And we make a connection.

The show must go on.

In that world of dance,

you live by the words 'the show must go on'.

And I think for every dancer, there's a moment when you think,

"I can't do this. I'm too sick. I'm too tired."

But some spirit inside you

tells you to pick up and just go one more step.

Lower.

Flat.

The music is magnetic. It's in your DNA.

Everyone knows Queen music.

And you think, "Will young people know Queen?" They do.

It goes on and on and on.

There's people that don't really know about dance

but they come to see the performance, because it's Queen.

And then, they like dance.

And then, they follow us forever.

After they come out of a performance, they're like this.

And then they say, "We love ballet."

Then for us, it's a pleasure to bring new people.

Freddie would have loved it.

It was absolutely right up his street.

He'd have absolutely loved it. He'd have loved Maurice Béjart.

Freddie Mercury brought ballet to the people

through Maurice Béjart.

Part of Freddie's legacy was to enable us

to set up The Mercury Phoenix Trust,

so we help AIDS projects all around the world.

People don't really realise.

It's like, "Oh, AIDS is dealt with, it's fine."

It's not. It's still there.

You can live with HIV now,

which you couldn't when Freddie died.

So, in the richer countries, that's lessened the mortality.

But, of course, in the Third World,

there's still a lot of ignorance out there.

So that's what they're trying to fight.

Ignorance.

I'm not the judge of my work.

I love my works. Of course I love very much the last one.

I love very much the one that people loved,

because it's natural.

But an artist will never turn to watch his past.

I was very pleased to have the music allied with Mozart,

Versace and Maurice Béjart's wonderful ballet.

It took us to another sphere.

It did something very big for us.

It changed the way we felt about

the continuing life of Queen music in the world.

And I'm very happy, very proud of that moment in time

when Queen music and Mozart

and Maurice Béjart came together in one place.

Oh, yes!