Queens drummer goes brutally honest about Freddie Mercury's voice

Queens drummer Roger Taylor is looking back at how their famed vocalist Freddie Mercury's voice needed a lot of work before it became iconic.

The drummer, 75, was speaking at the launch of the band’s remastered eponymous debut album, which originally released in 1973.

"I don’t think you realise how dreadful he sounded before," the musician said of Mercury, before detailing how the late singer's famously operatic singing voice even left his mother horrified when the band first started out.

Roger said Freddie—who died in 1991 of bronchial pneumonia resulting from AIDS—eventually "turned out to be wonderful," but the distinctive vibrato that made him a crowd pleaser took some fine tuning.

"I mean, he sounded like some manic goat. He sounded extraordinary, his vibrato. My mother’s face when she saw him," Taylor added.

Taylor then moved to the good part, remembering the Bohemian Rhapsody lyricist and lead vocalist as "our wonderful Freddie whom we will never forget." 

"He became this colossal force who could reach to the back of any gig or a stadium in Argentina. He reached everyone," the drummer recalled.

After the band split following Freddie's death at the age of 45, Roger and Brian May continued to tour under the band's name with lead vocalist Adam Lambert.

The launch event held at London's Ham Yard Hotel celebrated the newly mixed, mastered, expanded edition release of Queen's iconic self-titled debut album.

Brian claims the album is now in a better state than it was upon its initial release in 1973, per Guitar.com.

"I’m not saying the original version was bad – it just wasn’t what we dreamed of. Freddie and John, too, were always conscious of this thing in our past which seemed like it couldn’t be fixed," he told the outlet.

He shared that "every instrument has been re-examined from the bottom up," explaining "the guitars were originally recorded very dry, so we’ve remedied that."