These Are the Days of Our Lives (4:14)

“These Are the Days of Our Lives” is a song by the British rock band Queen. It is the eighth track on the album Innuendo. Though credited to the band as a whole, it was written by drummer Roger Taylor.

The accompanying video was the last to feature the band’s front man Freddie Mercury as he was in the final stages of a battle with AIDS. The majority of the footage used in the video was filmed by Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher of DoRo Productions on May 30, 1991. Although Roger Taylor seems to play the conga in the video, it was actually Dave Richards, the band’s producer at the time, who recorded the conga percussion (albeit a synthesized conga) for the song.

For the promotional video, Mercury, Taylor and John Deacon were present at the shoot, with additional footage of guitarist Brian May filmed some weeks later and edited into the footage, as he was out of the country on a radio promotional tour at the time of the principal film shoot. The video was shot in black and white to hide the full extent of Freddie’s faltering condition. Colour production footage of the video later emerged, showing just how frail Freddie really looked, and justifying the band’s decision to film in black and white out of respect for him.

The version of the finished video serviced to the U.S. market also featured some animated footage produced by animators for the Walt Disney Studios, as Queen’s North American record label, Hollywood Records, is a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.