QUEEN frontman Freddie Mercury had lost almost all of one of his feet to complications from AIDS by the time he died, a former bandmate has revealed.

Guitarist Brian May said Mercury — who was 45 when he died in 1991 — didn’t want to let on to anybody how much he was suffering.

“The problem was actually his foot — and, tragically there was very little left of it,” May told The Sunday Times Magazine.

“Once, he showed it to us at dinner. And he said: ‘Oh Brian, I’m sorry I’ve upset you by showing you that’. And I said, ‘I’m not upset, Freddie, except to realise that you have to put up with so much terrible pain.’ ”

May, 69, said he regrets that Mercury couldn’t live long enough to benefit from the “magic cocktail” of antiretroviral drugs that would come just months later and stop AIDS from becoming the death sentence it once was.

“He missed by just a few months,” May said regretfully. “If it had been a bit later, he would still have been with us, I’m sure.”

The singer was bisexual and only revealed his illness to his fans in a statement 24 hours before he died.

Discussing the disease publicly was not something Mercury wanted to do, May said.

“Of course, we all knew [he had AIDS], but we didn’t want to [acknowledge it]. He said: ‘You probably gather that I’m dealing with this thing, and I don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t want our lives to change, but that’s the situation.’ And then he would move on,” May said.

This article originally appeared on The New York Post and has been republished here with permission.