Every year, on the anniversary of Queen singer Freddie Mercury’s birthday, give or take a couple of days, is the official Freddie Mercury Birthday Party.
This year’s opens today, “The Great Pretender’s Gala” ahead of celebrating what would have been Freddie’s 80th birthday (from 5 September 1946), and is being held at the Casino Barrière, Montreux, Switzerland - formerly Mountain Studios where Queen recorded some of their albums, and where there is a statue of Freddie Mercury overlooking Lake Geneva.
All proceeds of the event go to the Mercury Phoenix Trust to fight HIV/AIDS worldwide.
Mountain Studios is also the place where the events memoralised in the song Smoke on the Water occurred, when the venue caught fire in 1971, cementing the varied and deep musical connections to the place.