Mary Austin was by Mercury's side during the entire Queen saga, and he left her his house and most of his most cherished items when he died in 1991

Three years ago, Mary Austin – Freddie Mercury‘s closeset friend who inherited the Queen singer’s home and most of his worldly possessions – made the difficult decision to finally part with the collection via auction. The items were breathtaking, including the handwritten lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Killer Queen,” “Stone Cold Crazy,” and “We Are The Champions,” in addition to his stage costumes, piano, and even the front door to his house. Not a single item was left unsold, and it grossed £39.9 million.

The items are now in the hands of private collectors, but the general public can experience it thanks to Austin’s recently released book A Life in Lyrics: The Official Creative Legacy of Freddie Mercury. It contains detailed photographs of the key items from the collection, and traces the story of Austin’s incredible friendship with Mercury. In this exclusive excerpt, Austin discusses her decision to part with everything, and the process of combing through the home and finding the treasures Mercury left behind.When Freddie died in 1991, he left me his cherished home, Garden Lodge, in Kensington, west London.

Garden Lodge was not to be a museum, he’d said, though it was filled with enough artefacts, antiques and works of art to warrant one. And while the idea of living among Freddie’s possessions felt almost overwhelming at first, I realized in time that he’d left me a memory box filled with love and joy. It was a source of great comfort as I grieved the loss of a man I loved very much. His sanctuary became mine. But time passes, and three decades on, I knew I had to decide how to steer what Freddie had left me into the future. The question was how.

It wasn’t an easy decision. But in the end, the answer was simple. Love.

Love had always been the thread that bound everything at Garden Lodge together. Freddie had loved the house itself and everything he’d filled it with, just as I had when he passed it all on to me. Almost everything in the house was antique; each piece carried a history of its own, the years at Garden Lodge forming just one chapter in a much longer story. I began to feel that sharing his collection with others would allow that thread to continue – it was time for his treasures to journey onwards.

After much thought, I decided to hold an auction. I felt Freddie himself would have liked the idea. I’d seen first-hand the joy he had got over the years from hunting down the perfect piece of art, porcelain or furniture for his home. There were dozens of auction catalogues still in the house, some with his handwritten notes about pieces he was interested in buying, or the prices they had sold for.

And so, over several months in 2022, myself and my two sons, Richard and Jamie, embarked on a journey of wonder and discovery, unpacking spaces that I had hardly touched in all my years living there. Investigating the loft, for instance, was like finding a door to a secret world. It was filled with the packing trunks we had used when Freddie moved into the house. Nestled beneath the rafters, they’d been slowly obscured by boxes of Christmas decorations and other belongings our family had accumulated over the decades we’d lived at Garden Lodge. I had a general sense of what the trunks contained, but I’d never looked inside them. Everyday life had a habit of getting in the way, and I was not ready to stir up memories I knew would be painful.

Slowly and carefully, we unpacked, catalogued and stored everything; until, one morning in early 2023, representatives from Sotheby’s – the London auction house based on New Bond Street, Mayfair, known for handling art, jewellery and important private collections – visited Garden Lodge. We had begun exploring what a sale might involve the year before, and this was their first time seeing Freddie’s collection in person.

Once they had left, the house fell quiet again, and my youngest son Jamie and I found ourselves in the sitting room of Garden Lodge. It is a particularly beautiful room. The house, with its distinctive brick exterior, was extensively renovated in 1908 for painter Cecil Rea and his artist wife, Constance Halford; huge windows overlooking the garden were added to the sitting room to create a light-filled studio. Freddie had also used that room creatively; it was where he often composed. His Yamaha grand piano stood where it always had, tucked against a wall about ten feet away from the windows, to protect it from sun-bleaching.

Courtesy of Mary Austin ca.rollingstone.com

We stood there, talking over the visit and how Sotheby’s had been particularly taken with a selection of Freddie’s lyrics. Jamie glanced around the room and said, ‘Can you think of anywhere we haven’t looked?’

Our attention went to the piano stool. Made of lacquered satinwood, with a seat upholstered in black-and-gold silk, it had been a favourite of Freddie’s for many years.

‘Have you looked in there?’ I asked.

Opening the lid, Jamie lifted out old childhood piano books to reveal a cavity divided into two neatly packed sections – Freddie was always meticulous. On one side were cassette tapes, the kind Freddie had used to record himself when he was writing, while the other half contained notebooks of lyrics, a black binder and a copy of a book called Chopin’s Musical Style, Chopin being a composer Freddie greatly admired. Within the binder we discovered lyrics and compositions written on loose sheets of British Midland Timesavers paper (the same paper he had used for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’), including those for ‘We Are the Champions’ and ‘Somebody to Love’.

Carefully lifting everything out, Jamie found a final, ring-bound, yellow notebook, the sort you can buy in any stationery store, resting on the bottom of the compartment. Opening it, we found it contained the words for ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. More than fifty years on from our first meeting, Freddie still had the capacity to surprise – and delight.

****

The auction of Freddie’s collection, in September 2023, was everything that we, as a family, together with the remarkable team at Sotheby’s, had hoped for: a celebration of Freddie’s life and work. Titled Freddie Mercury: A World of His Own, a pre-sales exhibition at Sotheby’s transformed the galleries into a celebration of his life, drawing more than 140,000 visitors.

Meanwhile, the sales themselves were comprised of six meticulously curated auctions, each achieving a rare ‘white-glove’ result, with every one of the 1,406 lots sold. Spanning art, jewellery, furniture, porcelain and costume, the collection expressed so many facets of Freddie’s layered, fascinating self, with many pieces finding new homes with collectors and fans across the world.

Among the lots were gifts from Elton John. When Queen were managed by John Reid, Freddie had become friendly with Elton, who was also managed by John. Elton and Freddie saw a lot of one another socially, and their friendship continued even after John’s time as Queen’s manager came to an end. They shared a love for gift-giving and exchanged many thoughtful pieces over the years. Elton’s gifts to Freddie included artworks, an onyx and gold bracelet, a Cartier ring and, later, Lalique vases. These were never grand for their own sake – they were personal and chosen with great care – and Freddie treasured them because they came from affection, not obligation.

Elton remained close to Freddie until the end. He came to see Freddie during his final months and still arrived with gifts, just as he always had. When the time came and those items were sold at auction, I donated the proceeds to the Elton John AIDS Foundation. It felt like a way of honouring the kindness between them and returning those gifts, in another form, to something that mattered deeply to Freddie.

Even more personal and illuminating than the antiques and collectibles were the lyrics, notes and musical workings we had found. They mattered so deeply to Freddie that we wanted to share them with his audience. In doing so, we hope to offer a clearer sense of the dedication and discipline behind the music, and of the painstaking work that went into bringing each song to life. That, in a nutshell, is the purpose of this book.

Freddie, as anyone familiar with his music will know, always insisted that his lyrics were about nothing in particular. He wanted them to remain open, allowing listeners to find their own meanings. Yet he was constantly writing, revising and drafting, and I’ve long felt that this process was a form of catharsis for him. Looking through the lyrics now, memories are inevitably sparked, and while I have always respected Freddie’s privacy, and will continue to do so, I hope to offer some context and a few insights into the man I knew, in celebration of his creative work. The one who sat at the piano and composed, who worked tirelessly to hone his craft, who got up in the night to scribble lyrics into notebooks; the man who envisioned Queen and carried that ambition even while working on a stall in Kensington Market, and who poured the same creative drive into everything he touched, from these lyrics to costumes, videos and the home he created around himself.

The world knew him as Freddie Mercury. But for me, the person captured within the pages of his lyrics, doodles and notes is Freddie Bulsara. This is the man I knew. And in sharing his work more widely, my hope is to honour a person who stood so humanely, and captivatingly, among us. To celebrate the magnificent creativity that was the core of Freddie.

Excerpted from the book A Life in Lyrics. Copyright © 2026 by Mary Austin. From Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by Permission

This story was first pubished by Rolling Stone.

Tim Armstrong, Travis Barker, Billie Joe Armstrong, C.J. Ramone, and Billy Idol perform at the Ramones 50th Anniversary Tribute

Onstage in a red — though not raspberry — beret, a bearded John Travolta introduced the inaugural performance from punk all-stars Cretin Family for the Ramones 50th Anniversary Tribute by resurrecting the geriatric cemetery joke: people were literally dying to get in. There was no rim shot from Blink-182-Cretin drummer Travis Barker, but the raucous performance by the Cretins, rounded out by Rancid guitarist (and the event’s musical director) Tim Armstrong; Green Day singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong; and Ramones bassist CJ Ramone, could have raised the dead.

In this legendary internment oasis in the middle of a gritty Hollywood neighborhood, the departed “audience members” include classic cinema stars Rudolph Valentino and Jayne Mansfield, along with classic punk rock star Dee Dee Ramone, who rests not far from the imposing 8-foot guitar statue/cenotaph honoring his musical brother, guitarist Johnny Ramone.

The onstage vocal guests were as diverse as those below ground, and the confused curiosity about Travolta’s participation and the post-concert screening of his amiable autobiographical film, Propeller One-Way Night Coach, faded as the nascent band kicked off their set with “Rockaway Beach,” marking, as Billie Joe noted, the first time he’d ever performed with hard-hitting superstar drummer and multi-hyphenate celeb Barker.

From “Cretin Hop” into “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment,” West Coast punk honored their East Coast legends and forefathers, the revered and influential Ramones tied only with Motorhead in the cool and ubiquitous T-shirt category. The Ramones’ appeal and fame crosses genders and ages, as onstage vocal guests — and an audience that included toddlers on shoulders — proved. Fred Armisen, who has his own Ramones covers band, delivered 1980s lyrically detailed and poignant Joey Ramone tune “Danny Says” as the first guest star of the 20-song set.

If the Ramones have been covered and honored by everyone from U2 to Rob Zombie to Sonic Youth, their own covers are likewise diverse, leaning into old American gems including the sped-up wonder of Bobby Freeman’s 1958 “Do You Wanna Dance.” The Cretins were doing a cover of a cover. It’s easy to imagine the late classic Ramones lineup of Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny, and Tommy appreciating the evening’s aural tributes in their own decidedly Noo Yawk manner, but it was especially hard to resist L.A.’s the Linda Lindas, whose vocals and youthfully energetic goofiness shone on the Riveras’ surf-rock hit “California Sun.”

Following her onstage stint and hanging with her mom, Linda Lindas guitarist-singer Lucia de la Garza, 19, tells Rolling Stone, “We grew up listening to the Ramones in the car and at home. We learned, ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ [which they performed with the Cretin Family] at the very beginning, I must have been 11 or 12.” Her band has toured with Green Day and Rancid, but she’s “pretty sure” they were initially invited to participate in this anniversary show by Johnny Ramone’s widow, Linda, who they’d met at their 2024 album release show. “This is just such an honor,” de la Garza said. “And we really wanted the chance to meet CJ and Travis.”

Linda Ramone is a key player in the band’s history and songs, and keeper of the Ramones flame through this annual official event that benefits Ellison Medical Institute for cancer research. (Johnny died of prostate cancer in 2005 at the age of 55.) Resplendent in lavender sequin cape and dashing cavalier hat, Linda was the belle and impetus of the hotly anticipated and sold-out Official Ramones 50th Anniversary Tribute. A busy and behemoth backstage found folks like Motley Crue occasional guitarist John 5 lining up at the In-N-Out Burger truck, with Starcrawler singer Arrow De Wilde, Foo Fighters/Nirvana/Germs guitarist Pat Smear, and other local musicians mingling in the large parking lot, surrounded by graves and massive mausoleums.

Across decades of banddom, the leather-clad Ramones radiated on sunny songs including another cover favorite, “Surfin’ Bird,” done ably by the Cretins. The “Family” band even had a guest “pinhead” with a “Gabba Gabba Hey” sign onstage, the character known to Ramones fans from Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. It might have been an “if you know you know” moment. But most in the thousands-strong crowd knew, and appreciated.

The strident and staccato “Rock and Roll Radio” was a standout, but it was all phone cameras aloft when Billy Idol took the stage, performing a song perfect for his patented snarl, “Beat on the Brat.” He and the Cretins also did a good version of one of his own older songs with Generation X, “Ready Steady Go.” Idol contextualized the tune and his own debt to NYC’s own, telling the crowd, “it’s like the Roundhouse in London in 1976. We all sped up our music after we heard the Ramones. It was fucking great.”

There’s no replicating the classic Ramones vibe, playing, or energy, but if Barker was almost too beefy and hard-hitting a player, and the guest stars breaking up the flow of a classic, frantic Ramones concert, the spirit, joy, and songs were undeniable.

While a large portion of the crowd filed out after the Cretin Family debut, Hollywood Forever is renowned for its outdoor film series, and many people were spread across the lawn — and grave-adjacent — for a post-concert movie. It was certainly a classic — the Brian De Palma-directed, Stephen King-created Carrie — but why not King’s film Pet Sematary (which features two Ramones cuts, including the title track), or the most iconic film associated with the band, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School?

Still, as Travolta pointed out as he introduced his own film post-concert, five cast members from Carrie were on hand (he played high schooler Billy Nolan in the film), including Nancy Allen and P.J. Soles, the latter portraying spirited super-fan Riff Randell in Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. But they declined to join Travolta onstage despite his urgings.

It’s been 50 years since the Ramones’ self-titled debut launched, 14 iconic songs wrought in less than 30 minutes. All four original members have been gone since 2014, but the legacy lives large across generations: “Blitzkrieg Bop” was redone into a song for kids; “Beat on the Brat” escaped any woke policing despite its (humorous) imprecation to violence, and one can only imagine (hope) that “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” would likewise be granted immunity. The Cretin Family band may live onstage — and who knows if the tribute be a one-time event — but the Ramones’ own cretin family of fans clearly live everywhere for all-time.

Taking Back Sunday showed up at Warped Tour in Montréal this weekend wearing matching brown suits, arguably not the most punk-rock way to prepare for a day of sun, sweat and thousands of fans. The look was deliberate, though. As the band worked on their latest record, so did a visual world built from mood boards and images collected along the way.

"We had a lot of mood boards," frontman Adam Lazzara reveals. "I've been collecting stuff for a while, just as the record was taking shape."

The actual shopping trip was considerably less elaborate. "We were like, okay, we're all going to go to the store together, we're going to get suits," he says. "And then we didn't even go and really shop around too much. We found these at the first store, and we were like, ‘Okay, they're good.’"

After spending much of their career trying to avoid dressing like they had "real jobs," the band has apparently come around. "We hustled so hard so we wouldn't have to wear them," says bassist Shaun Cooper. "And then it became more comfortable to wear them than sweating through jeans every night."

That is the kind of perspective that comes with nearly three decades in a band. Taking Back Sunday have grown from young musicians chasing the next show into adults trying to reconcile touring with marriages, children and lives that exist outside the road. "We're still trying to figure the balance out," they admit, one of them joking that their child thought they worked at the airport because they were there so frequently. "We weren't too good with balance for a long time."

Once upon a time, the band's instructions to their agent were simple: "We don't care if we're home. Keep us working. Keep us out, we want it." These days, they try not to book anything longer than four or five weeks.

The contrast is particularly striking considering that, in 2003, they toured with Saves the Day for three months. When they reunite with Saves the Day this fall, alongside Thrice, they will be approaching the road from a very different place in life.

Warped Tour itself provides an even longer timeline. Guitarist John Nolan's first experience with the festival came in 1995, when he was still in eighth grade. He remembers seeing Sublime, L7 and Quicksand, buying a No Use for a Name hat and discovering Fat Music for Fat People Volume 2 for three dollars.

"It was just a core memory," he adds. "It was the summer after eighth grade before I started high school, and it was just such a great time with all my friends there sweating it out in the parking lot."

Now, the people who once inspired Taking Back Sunday are part of the band's own history, while the festival they once experienced as fans has become something they can return to as veterans. "It's amazing," Lazzara says. "Like John and Shaun were just saying about having these core memories, so it’s amazing to be able to say that you got to be a little part of that story too."

For them, Warped Tour represented something that was difficult to find before the internet made music discovery effortless. "They were bringing this music that you could only find out if you were in a record store or had a zine from another city," Nolan says. "Like, no internet, and they were bringing this whole culture, this whole community to these off-the-beaten-path places."

That sense of community is still what they see when they look out from the stage. Their audience now includes people separated by decades, but the gap disappears once the music starts. "There's people from all different chapters of life, ranging like a huge age gap for like 30, 40 years," they say. "But all getting lost at the same time to the same thing."

It is a fitting idea for a band that has spent so long refusing to become static. Asked how they have managed to survive when so many of their peers have broken up or moved on, they point first to stubbornness.

"We're all pretty stubborn," Cooper jokes. Then comes the more serious answer: they still have somewhere to go.

"We all have a kind of an idea of how we want the band to evolve," they explain. ‘’Whether it's wearing suits now, or where the sound is going to go or how we're going to shape the songs and the direction and continue to grow and evolve. The three of us have a kind of shared vision in that. And when we can bounce ideas off each other, that keeps exciting and fresh.’’

That might be the secret. Taking Back Sunday have been doing this long enough to know exactly what it takes to keep a band alive, but not long enough to lose the feeling that made them want to do it in the first place.

As Lazzara puts it: "I wanted to do this for as long as I can remember. And I'm able to. So I’ll keep doing it, by any means necessary."

Mick Jagger onstage at the Rolling Stones' 1976 Knebworth Festival.

The second season of Laverne & Shirley had just gone into production when Cindy “Shirley” Williams came down with viral pneumonia, forcing producers of the hit ABC sitcom to shut down production for two weeks. “You can bet Cindy received posies from The Fonz since she’s been hospitalized,” reads a report by Shirley Eder that ran in the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph on July 22, 1976, conflating the fantasy world of the Happy Days extended universe with reality in a very odd way. “I don’t know about a romance, but they have been good friends for years.”

With that important update out of the way, Eder turned her attention to the music world. “The Rolling Stones will headline the Knebworth Fair August 21, and 100,000 fans are expected to attend this medieval festival 40 miles from London,” she writes. “The whole fair will be under the Stones’s direction this year – including historical sideshows from acrobats to jousting matches.”

That’s the extent of Rolling Stones info in Eder’s entertainment column, which goes on to note that Norwegian actress Liv Ullman brought Shirley MacLaine “three pounds of imported caviar” while visiting her backstage at New York’s Palace Theater, and new footage was being shot for the 1974 movie Earthquake in preparation for a three-hour TV broadcast, but there was much she didn’t mention.

Most significantly, Keith Richards lost his ten-day-old son Tara due to SIDS on June 6. Just a few weeks before the tragedy, the guitarist was detained by police in London following a car crash where they discovered cocaine in his vehicle. “Since then, the London Daily Mirror has reported the Stones as the unknowing couriers of a drug syndicate,” read a July 15, 1976, report in Rolling Stone. “Under headlines reading ‘Drug Smuggling Shock for the Stones’ and ‘Cocaine Hidden in Pop Star’s Bentley,’ news stories told of police suspicion that cocaine and cannabis had been hidden in clothing, jewelry and equipment carried by the ‘unsuspecting’ Stones and their entourage during their 9-country, 36-day tour.”

Richards somehow had the fortitude to continue a grueling European tour in the middle of all this chaos and sorrow, but a stadium run through America at the end of the summer was simply too much to ask. He was in desperate need of downtime to process the loss of Tara and deal with his growing drug problem.

But the band decided to go forward with their plan to stage a massive concert in Knebworth, England, on Aug. 21, with special guests 10cc, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Todd Rundgren, and Hot Tuna. “It may be the most memorable rock festival ever staged in Britain,” read an Aug. 19 report in the Belfast Telegraph that seems to be discounting the 1969 and 1970 incarnations of Isle of Wight. “The Stones seem certain to go on making records and they are currently asking for a large sum of money to put their signature on a recording contract, but they may have finally decided it is time to fade away from festivals and concerts after 13 years of gigging. Says Jagger (33): ‘I would hate to think I would still be singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m forty.'”

The ludicrous notion that the Stones were going to call it quits after the Knebworth show was all over the U.K. press, likely spread by promoters hoping to move tickets. “Some people close to the group say that, because of the magnitude of the 12-hour event, it could be the Stones’ Swan Song,” read an Aug. 21 article in the Leicester Mercury. “The stage was still being built in the early hours of the morning – a day surrounded by polythene lips in the shape of the now familiar emblem – a gaping mouth. In front of the stage is a hundred-yards-long catwalk which Mick Jagger will use during a two-and-a-half-hour concert – possibly his longest ever.”

“[The stage] is understood to have cost about £100,000 to build,” the article continues. “The 12 hour long pop concert at the stately home will be staged in an arena capable of holding up to 200,000 pop fans. Thousands of fans – who pay about £4.50 for the concert – were already camped outside in tents, wigwams, and make-shift overnight homes early today. People already camping by the site for the concert – which starts at 11:00 am – were urged not to light cooking fires because of the danger of grass fire.”

As the Stones learned the hard way seven years earlier, grass fires weren’t the only possible dangers at an enormous festival. But unlike Altamont, Knebworth was organized over several months as opposed to a matter of days. And the festival grounds held events in 1974 (Allman Brothers/Doobie Brothers/Van Morrison/Tim Buckley) and 1975 (Pink Floyd/Captain Beefheart/Monty Python/Steve Miller Band) that provided them with a framework.

That doesn’t mean everything was easy. “The British Army will come to the rescue of the Rolling Stones Knebworth Festival on August 21,” an Aug. 2 article in the Press-Telegram read, “by agreeing to install 400 portable toilets on the grounds of the Knebworth estate.”

The morning of the event, an ominous item appeared in The Daily Telegraph that surely sent the Stones’ camp into a panic: “Hundreds of Hells’s Angels are expected to descend onto site. Police can call on neighboring [police] forces if there is trouble, and all leave in the county has been cancelled.”

Unlike Altamont, the Hell’s Angels were unwelcome visitors this time rather than an unofficial security force. And a combined unit of public and private officers was brought onto the grounds to maintain order and avoid any chance of a repeat of 1969, though they apparently were unconcerned about drug use. “There was a carnival atmosphere and the usual wafts of marijuana smoke, but police said they had made no arrests by early evening,” read a report the Monroe Morning World filed midway through the show. “Marijuana, hashish, and pills were sold openly at the site, but organizations set up to deal with drug users on bad trips said there had not been much demand for their services.”

The Stones were supposed to take the stage around 9 p.m., but technical issues throughout the day delayed their set by over two hours. During the downtime, the middle portion of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” played on a loop as rumors spread the Stones might cancel. But all was forgiven when they took the stage and burst into the song that Jagger didn’t want to still be playing at 40, but was happy to sing at 33.

It was their first live rendition of “Satisfaction” since 1972, and an early sign this was going to be a very different show than the one they brought around North America and Europe earlier in the year, even though they were once again joined by pianist/singer Billy Preston and percussionist Ollie Brown.

The surprises continued with their first cover of Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around” since 1966, their first cover of Willie Dixon’s “The Little Red Rooster” since 1965, and their first “Let’s Spend the Night Together” since 1967. They were technically supporting Black and Blue with this tour, but only played four songs (“Fool to Cry,” “Hand of Fate,” “Hey Negrita,” and “Hot Stuff”) from it to make room for standards like “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Wild Horses,” and “Happy.”

Near the end, Jagger handed over the mic to Preston so he could play his recent solo hits “Nothing From Nothing” and “Outa-Space,” before wrapping up the night with fierce renditions of “Midnight Rambler,” “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It),” “Brown Sugar,” “Rip This Joint,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and “Street Fighting Man.” They played 28 songs across two-and-a-half hours, one of the longest shows of their entire career, wrapping up after 2 a.m.

The Sunday Telegraph sent an older writer, Ronald Payne, to report from the scene like an anthropologist. “Had even a good regiment of infantry been forced to wait hours in the sun in such conditions there would have been a mutiny,” Payne writes. “But they sat, the big battalions of pop in their unisex uniforms of blue jeans and T-shirts, apparently happy. Up the hillside there ever pours in reinforcements, clutching cans of beer and occasionally flags…There is something about it all of a children’s crusade, the young people look so innocent and take their pleasure so gravely. Yet over them loomed the music, which I fail to comprehend, of such a high decibel count as to make the roar of Concorde seem like the whirring of a clockwork toy.”

(It’s fortunate the music was so loud, since there were somewhere in the ballpark of 150,000 to 250,000 attendees — estimates vary wildly — and only two screens with nothing close to the fidelity we’re accustomed to at shows today, even if they were state-of-the-art by 1976 standards.)

In The Guardian, writer Robin Denselow compared the event to the Republican National Convention, which nominated Gerald Ford for his first proper term as president just a couple days earlier. “Even with the wildest stretch of the imaginations, it’s difficult to equate Jagger howling through ‘Street Fighting Man’ with Betty Ford’s victory waltz across the platform to the strains of ‘I Could Have Danced All Night,'” Denselow writes. “But in terms of style, both were vast-scale marketing exercises that drew enormous audiences, and both star attractions used old-fashioned showbiz techniques to win the lumps in the throat, wet eyes, and applause.”

Once the show was finally over, the group was happy to admit they had no plans to actually stop touring. “We are planning a tour of South America at the moment for next year,” bassist Bill Wyman told the press. “Before that we are going to the south of France to rest. If possible we should like to come back here again some time next year for concerts.”

The future didn’t unfold quite as Wyman envisioned. The Stones somehow didn’t hit South America until 1995, a couple years after Wyman quit the band. And there was no European tour in 1977. The only dates they played that year were the infamous pair of shows at Toronto’s El Mocambo, where they billed themselves as the Cockroaches.

The band spent the rest of 1977 dealing with the fallout from a second Keith drug bust, this time a much more serious incident where he was caught with heroin in Canada and faced the possibility of serious jail time, and beginning the recording of Some Girls. (With typical Stones luck, the judge was merciful and ordered Keith to play a benefit concert for the blind, when he could have locked him up for seven years.)

Today, Knebworth remains the site of the biggest concerts on the U.K. summer calendar. And while nothing has been even remotely confirmed, there are persistent rumors that Oasis might return in 2027 for a repeat of their legendary 1996 two-night stand.

And despite all the speculation that the Stones were going to call it quits after their 1976 Knebworth show, they remain an active band 50 years later. But they haven’t played in two years, and Keith has indicated he has no desire to tour again. The idea of residencies has floated around. If they stage one in England, expect it to take place at Wembley or Twickenham Stadium. Their fans no longer want to schlep out to Knebworth and deal with festival “seating,” which means no seats at all.

If the Stones ever want to revisit Knebworth, their best bet is to officially release the surviving audio and professionally shot film from 1976, about 95 minutes in total. Sadly, it appears that there’s about an hour missing from the footage that may simply not exist. That’s not too shocking since it was a chaotic day, but at least they got through it without the Hell’s Angels beating anyone to death. From that perspective alone, it was a tremendous success.

Becky G, Karol G, Tokischa (from left)

It seems the girls can’t stop crying in the club in 2026. In the past few months, Karol G, Becky G, and Tokisicha have all released major albums, cementing their roles as powerful forces in Latin pop music. Tokischa finally shared her long-awaited debut, Amor & Droga; Karol surprised fans with No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto; and Becky G dropped her most unapologetic LP yet, Baraja Bendita. Though each release has its own focus and blend of genres, there’s one element they all share: a sad perreo song filled with dancefloor introspection.

Karol G, Becky G, and Tokisicha have used reggaeton rhythms to power some of their biggest releases to date, including club-ready perreo tracks with frenetic snares that you can’t help but move to. But with songs like “Perreo Llorando,” “Bebiendo Lágrimas,” and “Perreo Triste,” all three of them are taking a sound more typically associated with partying and pairing it with melancholy emotions instead. For these three, living it up can also mean dancing through the pain.

“The reason I decided to put the record out is simply so that people let themselves feel,” Karol told Rolling Stone recently. “Living is about feeling — feeling things, feeling every moment, and feeling it to the fullest.” Becky G and Tokischa are clearly inspired by a similar school of thought. Below, we break down each tear-filled track below and explore how some of Latin music’s biggest stars display the compelling duality of sad perreo.

Tokischa pulls no punches on Amor & Droga as she showcases all of her dark thoughts. “You guys think I’m just a horny bitch? I have a lot of feelings,” the Dominican musician told Rolling Stone back in April. That’s apparent on “Perreo Llorando,” which translates, more or less, to “Crying While Twerking.” Tokischa tries to hide her heartbreak while out partying without much luck: “Tú me ve perreando, por dentro toy sufriendo/Moviendo el culo y llorando por dentro” (“You see me dancing, but inside I’m suffering/Shaking my ass and crying inside”), she sings atop a sexy, insistent beat crafted by Puerto Rican producer Súbelo Neo. “I like raw reggaeton. I want to feel that drum hit. I want to feel the bass,” Tokischa said. “I made this when I first came to Miami in 2021 and I saw how everything was sad … rich people with all the money in the world, all the Gucci, and everything is still sad.” Rather than run from that sadness, she leaned into it.

On No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto, Karol G traces all of the messy phases of heartbreak. By the time the Colombian superstar gets to the third track, “Bebiendo Lágrimas,” which translates to “Drinking Tears,” she’s sorely disillusioned by love, writing it off entirely as she drinks to forget her ex. The result is a sassy cut that expertly weaves in sorrowful lines like “Porque hoy hasta las lágrimas me vo’a tomar para olvidar” (“Because today I’m even going to drink tears to forget”) over thumping bass with the help of her trusty producer, Ovy on the Drums. “The message of that song is, ‘I’ve reached my limit in matters of love. I’m burying it, and at least for now, I’m going to enjoy my peace, myself, being alone, enjoying who I am — my career, my friends,” Karol told RS. She also revealed that it was one of the first tracks she wrote for the album, which makes sense considering it’s not the only sad perreo track to appear on No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto: “Maybe” and “Con Quién Andará?” also pair lovelorn lyrics with classic reggaeton beats.

“I made a decision to be the most vulnerable I had ever been in my music,” Becky G recently told Rolling Stone. “It was almost like I hit a hidden artery or a vein, and it just bled such rawness.” That emotional depth is all over her latest effort, Baraja Bendita, especially on “Perreo Triste,” which translates to “Sad Twerking.” The Mexican singer paints the picture of dancing with someone new to get over an ex but just like with Tokischa and Karol, the sadness envelops her. “Toy borracha y no me deja de doler/Me duele, pero me hago la que no contra la pared” (“I’m drunk and it won’t stop hurting/It hurts me but I act like it doesn’t against this wall”), Becky sings over a rousing reggaeton beat. It’s like an inverse version of Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” but make it perreo.

Ten years ago, during the same week that Frank Ocean released his mixed-media tableau — the short film/album Endless, the rarefied Boys Don’t Cry zine, and his seminal album Blonde — Werner Herzog’s film Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World arrived. In the film, the German documentary filmmaker considers the heady question of what the internet might be doing to us humans. He makes contact with a community whose members swear they’re allergic to Wi-Fi. The film ominously warns of an inevitable solar flare on the scale of the 1859 Carrington Event, one that, once unleashed, would reduce all communications networks, the foundations of so much of our modern world then and even more now, to dust.

And so, on “Seigfried,” Frank explains: “A moment one solar flare would consume, so why not/Spin this flammable paper on the film that’s my life?”

In the decade since its release, Blonde, like Herzog’s documentary, has come to feel like the final stamp on a discrete moment in history. Released less than three months before Trump’s first election, the album now lives as an artifact of a prehistoric world; yet emotionally, Blonde feels more expansive than any frame of time can contain. That has always, of course, been Ocean’s skill as a writer: his ability to occupy emotion untethered from time or place, instincts and sensations jumbling into one another with chaotic, maybe even euphoric, abandon. On 2012’s Channel Orange, he arranged that gift into scenes populated by taxi drivers, rich kids, dealers, and doomed lovers. Blonde loosens the plot, leaning into the unreliability of memory and the false truths that occupy the gaps between love and certainty.

It’s the way that last “Good!” pierces the second half of “Ivy,” landing closer to the punk instincts that flash elsewhere on the album, in sonic conflict with the song’s shimmering opening turn. Or how, on “Nikes,” Frank trapezes between sonic registers and perspectives, painting a kaleidoscopic view on his own sexuality, all under the banner of the most iconic brand in the world.

Across Blonde, what feel like dispatches from another dimension arrive like warnings from the past and future about the very romance the narrator finds himself sliding into. In one of the handful of interviews he’s given, Ocean described the album’s competing narratives as a “collage or bricolage,” saying that memory has a way of arriving as overlapping images. Each song, too, has its own overlapping instincts. The deceptively mellow “Self Control” manages to mourn a lost love with existential clarity. It features vocals from Slow Hollows’ Austin Feinstein, who sings the devastating “Keep a place for me” refrain before Frank takes us into the stratosphere on a swell of strings arranged by Jon Brion, repeating, “I know you gotta leave,” until his voice splits into a choir.

Even bite-size moments like “Good Guy” contain universes of their own. The interruptions imitate the way an old relationship returns to you with a flash of potent sensation. That construction has kept Blonde from aging in place. The person who heard “Self Control” at 19 and the person returning to it at 29 are effectively hearing two different songs. At first, its plea to remain somewhere in an old lover’s life can feel like the whole tragedy. Later, the more devastating recognition may be how much time has passed since asking.

“Why am I preachin’ to this choir/To this atheist?” he sings on “Close to You,” acknowledging the futility of trying to convince someone who knows the story but no longer believes in it. Like with Channel Orange, Frank is narrating life from 10,000 feet up, able to communicate pain and lust and longing with a kind of precision that, if nothing else, should prove how singular the human spirit truly is. An AI could never create Blonde precisely because of how deeply human an album it is. “This is not my life, it’s just a fond farewell to a friend,” Frank sings on “Seigfried,” before the song effortlessly widens from one failed romance to contain the meaning of existence itself. It’s something that no machine can ever understand.