We’ve heard of cat people. People who absolutely love anything and everything about cats. But Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, aka the Ultimate Cat guy REALLY loved his cats. So much, in fact, he even wrote a song for his cat Delilah!
Freddie Mercury did not hide his love for these adorable felines – he often posed for pictures with them and proved that his love for cats was unconditional.
1.
2.
3.
Back in the 1970s, Mary Austin, Freddie’s girlfriend at the time, bought the couple a pair of cats – Tom and Jerry. The singer would always call Mary to check up on them when touring, according to his assistant Peter Freestone.
4.
5.
6.
“He’d get to a hotel, we’d dial through, and he really would talk to his cats,” said Freestone. According to him, the singer even had Mary turn up the receiver when calling so that the cats could hear his voice.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Freddie had up to 10 cats at one point – Tom, Jerry, Tiffany, Dorothy, Delilah, Goliath, Lily, Miko, Oscar, and Romeo. Freestone says that the cats were Freddie’s family and that the singer filled the cats’ stockings with presents every Christmas.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Jacky Smith, a long time leader of the Official Queen Fan Club said, “Most of them were from rescue centers. We have a charity [in the United Kingdom] called The Blue Cross, which takes care of sick animals. Freddie got at least two from them.”
15.
16.
Delilah, one of the songs from the last album Mercury recorded with Queen, sounds like a song about a woman – until the part about her peeing all over his Chippendale Suite, that is. The song, in fact, was made out to one of Freddie’s cats of the same name and even features a guitar solo by Brian May that sounds like cat meows.
17.
18.
19.
Delilah was the most famous out of all of Freddie’s cats – he adopted her in 1987 and she quickly took over the house and acted as she pleased.
20.
“Freddie treated the cats like his own children,” he explained in his memoir Mercury and Me. During the day the cats had the run of the house and grounds, and at night one of us would round them up and bring them inside.”