Freddie Mercury

Some voices arrive once in a generation, and Freddie Mercury carried one of them: four octaves of thunder and tenderness fronting Queen, the band he built in 1970 with Brian May and Roger Taylor. Born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar in 1946 to Parsi-Indian parents, schooled in India, then carried by his family to England after revolution in 1964, he became the flamboyant showman who wrote "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Somebody to Love", "We Are the Champions" and "Don't Stop Me Now", and held a hundred thousand people at Live Aid in the palm of his hand.

His Sun sits in Virgo, and here the vitality shines not through ego but through craft: the perfectionist, the master of many arts who refuses to be merely a jack of them, shaping a song note by note until it was exactly right. His Moon in Capricorn tells of the unspoiled soul who grows up fast, stoic and dutiful, private beneath the theatre, disciplined enough to turn feeling into work.

Diagnosed with AIDS in 1987, he kept recording until the end, dying in 1991 at forty-five. The showman's mask, the craftsman's devotion: both live on in every note.