February 18, 1990 – Freddie Mercury’s last public appearance at the 11th Brit Awards were Queen received their award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music.
At the time, Freddie’s appearance may have been the best thing that happened during that night, but little did people know that would be his final public appearance.
Freddie and his colleagues already knew that he was in bad shape – but still kept it private due to his wishes even though there were already rumors roaming around the British tabloids.
Freddie Mercury has been diagnosed with AIDS, but a lot of people were unaware of Mercury’s illness. When Freddie and the rest of his bandmates appeared on stage to receive their Outstanding Contribution to British Music honor, he already appeared thin, gaunt, and was seemingly silent during the night – so Brian took the stand and spoke on Queen’s behalf:
“Everyone in the industry — and, perhaps more importantly, outside the industry — who stuck behind us all these years” with giving the band “a lot of freedom to pursue what we loosely call our art to any extent we felt like at the time,” May marveled at the way they’d wandered out on “a lot of strange limbs which seemed very precarious at the time, but we didn’t quite fall off.”
He continued with a joke:
“A special thank you to the British petroleum industry for giving us this magnificent award in recognition of all the amounts of vinyl which we’ve recycled over the years.”
Watch Freddie’s final public appearance below: