Twenty years after the death of rock’s most famous singer, and with a lavish book of rare photographs about to be published, his mother, Jer Bulsara, talks to Angela Levin about how she coped with his transformation from Farrokh Bulsara to Freddie Mercury.



Freddie Mercury’s mother was watching the Olympic closing ceremony when her adored son’s image suddenly appeared on a vast screen. “I cried out: 'Oh my dear boy, where are you?’” she tells me. “I miss him so much.” A cheeky smile then spreads across her face. “They showed John Lennon too, but there was much zaidi applause...