Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (12 page)

Would-be producer Yeardon arranged a late-night studio session at Pye for Smile. Acetates of the tracks “Polar Bear” and “Step on Me” were cut, giving Smile professional audition material which they were free to take to other labels. Not that Yeardon expected to see so much as a grin of Smile again.

Brian, Roger, Tim, and a couple of musicians from a northern band called Ibex were by now living in a one-bedroom flat in a semi called Carmel in Ferry Road, Barnes. Two sisters, Helen and Pat McConnell,
had seen Smile play in their local pub and had also fallen in with the gang. That cramped, damp flat would be remembered with myopic hindsight as “bohemian.” In fact, the flatmates had lived in stinking squalor, most of them sleeping on filthy mattresses on the floor. To make matters worse, they had recently acquired yet another roommate: Freddie Bulsara. What did
he
think they should do?

6

I was saying to Brian and Roger, “Why are you wasting your time doing this? You should do more original material. You should be more demonstrative in the way you put the music across. If I was your singer, that’s what I’d be doing!”

Freddie Mercury

You play better when you ham it up a bit. You are different from the guy who goes out on stage. The trick is making sure you are not still the performer when you come off stage. Bowie had it down to a fine art. He was a completely different person every week, practically. Freddie took that ball and ran with it. I’d lay odds that he never choreographed a single move. His showmanship, everything he did, was instinctive. That’s an art form in itself. I have no idea what he might have done had he not been a performer.

Rick Wakeman

S
till obsessed
with Jimi Hendrix, and inspired by Brian’s guitar playing, Freddie had obtained a secondhand guitar which he got Tim to refret and modify to suit his needs. Then he went out and bought some Teach Yourself manuals, and started to learn to play. Freddie must have known that he would never make an axe hero. This was
not, however, his objective. Suddenly anxious to write and compose original songs, he simply needed to know enough guitar to be able to work out the chords. Those initial attempts at composition were like everyone else’s: raw, clumsy, excruciatingly personal. He would soon learn to take a more abstract approach, to delve beneath the surface of his emotions, and to look beyond his own experiences, experimenting with universal themes.

*   *   *

The Ibex boys living at Ferry Road were soon joined by the rest of the group from Liverpool, who had convened in London to seek a record deal. Guitarist Mike Bersin, bass player John “Tupp” Taylor, and drummer Mick “Miffer” Smith were road managed by young Ken Testi. Ibex were occasionally joined by Geoff Higgins, who would take a turn on bass so that Tupp could play the flute. Ibex played cover versions of hits by Rod Stewart, the Beatles, and Yes, and usually kicked off their show with “Jailhouse Rock,” a mega-hit for Elvis Presley some twelve years earlier. Impressive though they were, Freddie couldn’t help but notice that they lacked a decent vocalist. Just as he would do with Smile, he had taken to turning up at their rehearsals and gigs, and would occasionally get up and sing with Mike Bersin.

“He gave the same kind of performance he did at the peak of his career,” remembered Ken Testi. “He was a star before he was a star, if you know what I mean. He’d strut around the stage like a proud peacock.”

The band were still based in Liverpool, where Freddie became the short-term lodger of Geoff Higgins’s family. The Higginses lived above a pub called Dovetale Towers on Penny Lane, a street immortalized by the Beatles. Freddie slept on the floor in Geoff’s bedroom, but he never complained, determined as he was to honor his own parents by being the perfect houseguest. Geoff’s mother Ruth is said to have adored him.

“My mother liked him because he spoke properly, because he was from the South,” Geoff explained to Mark Hodkinson, author of
Queen: The Early Years
. “Freddie was very, very kind to her.”

Although the band played as much as they could around the UK
throughout 1969, no record deal was forthcoming. Eventually they talked about calling it a day. Miffer had family problems, and needed to earn a regular wage. Friend of the band Richard Thompson replaced him as drummer. The new lineup played a single disastrous gig. Everything that could go wrong—lights, sound, equipment—did go wrong. Even the microphone fell short of expectations. Whenever Freddie did a turn as front man, he would twirl his mic around like a majorette’s baton. This one came complete with a cumbersome heavy stand. At one point he seized the mic and attempted to swing it, but the bottom part fell off. Unfazed, Freddie carried on with the top half. A trademark was born.

The strange contradictions of Freddie the performer and Fred Bulsara the person were becoming too extreme to ignore. Even on a makeshift stage, and without ever having been appointed official lead singer, Freddie projected supreme confidence, every gesture and movement flamboyant and melodramatic. Offstage, he would cower in kitchens and cupboards, the make-do dressing rooms of the pub and club circuit, where he’d struggle coyly into handmade skintight outfits so skimpy that, once on, he could barely breathe in them, let alone sit down. Relatively small, slight, and not conventionally handsome, Freddie knew that he stood out thanks to his dark skin and swarthy looks. His features at times embarrassed him. He took to hiding his dark eyes behind a floppy fringe and his buck teeth behind his hand whenever he felt the urge to smile. His inherent shyness would get the better of him when he attempted to chat to fans after a gig. He could never think of much to say. Worse, although he enunciated English beautifully, his speaking voice was whispery and hesitant. He also lisped a little, probably because of all those teeth. Of these, he was painfully self-conscious. Only when he felt relaxed among friends did his humor and “real-life” personality shine through, and would he let himself laugh openly. The rest of the time, when not on stage, he tried his hardest to blend into the background. Not yet in the habit of getting blindly drunk or out of his head on drugs—he couldn’t afford to, so would make do with the odd “girlie” port and lemon in pubs—Freddie never mastered the art of
projecting confidence among strangers. However happy and at ease he felt at his own parties, he was a fish out of water at anyone else’s.

Freddie grew tired of hacking up and down to Liverpool, of never making ends meet, of crashing out on other people’s floors in whichever town the band found themselves. He quit Ibex just after his twenty-third birthday, headed back to London for good with Mike Bersin, and applied himself to scouring the ads.

As Ken Testi would later put it, “I think Ibex filled a gap for Freddie. He wanted to be singing in a band, and Ibex benefited enormously from having him. It was a marriage of convenience for all parties. We were all very naïve . . . to Freddie, it was like his first secondhand car, the sort of thing you buy when you can just scrape a bit of money together. Eventually, you want a better one.”

No one blamed Freddie for the band’s demise. They all adored him regardless, touched as they were by his ambition, abandon, and exhilarating appetite for life. Ken Testi spoke for everyone when he commented: “It was an education knowing Freddie. He was very committed about everything. He had a certain tenacity, a single-mindedness, a desire for excellence.”

Bersin and Taylor returned to Liverpool. Thompson evaporated into the London music scene. The rest of them continued to cram into their overcrowded West London flat. Freddie without a band, and Roger and Brian without a lead singer. Why didn’t they simply snap him up?

“The Smile people thought of Freddie as a little bit of a joke,” their friend Chris Dummett later admitted. “They used to send him up, take the piss a bit . . . in an affectionate way, I suppose.”

Often the solution under our noses is the one we notice last.

*   *   *

As if he didn’t have enough to worry about, Freddie had started to struggle with his sexual orientation. Despite the fact that he’d already had girlfriends, in particular a young woman called Rosemary Pearson, some remember him showing a passionate interest in meeting gay men but never having the confidence to act on it.

As one former art college associate puts it, “He thought he liked women, but it took him quite a while to realize he was gay . . . I don’t think he could face up to the feeling it caused inside him. He was obviously terribly interested in homosexuality but was afraid of it as well. I suppose he was squeamish, and frightened of accepting himself as gay.”

Another friend remembers Freddie paying regular visits to a bunch of gay flat-sharers in Barnes. He concealed these visits from his own flatmates, at a loss to explain to his friends what he couldn’t comprehend himself. Worrying constantly about the impression he was making, Freddie would from time to time retreat into his shell and become quite reclusive. At around the same time he began to reveal less attractive traits. He could be self-centered and egotistical, not to mention petulant and sulky, as if an overwhelming internal struggle was getting the better of him.

We all have our dark side. Freddie was fundamentally a kind, generous, and considerate human being. Averse to using others to get what he wanted, he rather seemed happy to allow himself to be used, expecting nothing in return. Perhaps his worst characteristic was his vanity. He would fiddle endlessly with his hair and his clothes, and obsess about his appearance ad nauseam. His endless declarations that he was going to be “a legend” could get on people’s nerves.

His preoccupation with keeping up appearances didn’t help: while living hand to mouth, as most of his cohorts did, Freddie refused to use public transport, preferring to spend the last coins in his pocket on taxis home when he should have been feeding himself. Friends began to despair of him. What would become of Freddie, they wondered, should he fail to make it in the music business? Despite his graphic design qualification, they knew he’d never hold down a nine-to-five job.

Lacking stability and direction in every aspect of his life, no wonder he felt insecure. Freddie knew that he was not like most people. He also knew that he had to pay the bills. While he still had a bedroom of his own at his parents’ Feltham house, to which he could return any time he wanted, he was reluctant to admit defeat and slink home. He knew
that his family would struggle to understand the life he was leading now, and never took friends home to meet his parents or sister.

“As a parent, you worry—but you have to let your child get on with their life,” his mother Jer said.

Freddie continued to go home for dinner once a week or so, and his mother would always cook his favorite meal, Dhansak: a delicious if laborious Indian dish popular in the Parsee community, which marries aspects of both Persian and Gujarati cuisine. The recipe comprises vegetables and lentils, garlic, ginger, and spices, with meat—usually mutton—and pumpkin or gourd. It seems likely, given his poverty-stricken status at the time, that this was the only square meal Freddie ate all week.

The first cold weeks of 1970 saw him trudging around the London agencies with his art portfolio. Austin Knight, in Chancery Lane, Holborn, agreed to represent him, and to pitch for design work on his behalf. But Freddie ran out of patience, unable to bear all the sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. He went freelance and started placing ads. But he spent so much time hanging out with Smile at rehearsals and gigs that his focus was distracted, his heart not in finding himself regular work. There was only one thing for it: he would have to get his own band together. Pulling in Ibex’s sometime drummer Richard Thompson, Mike Bersin, and Tupp Taylor, Freddie reinvented Ibex as Wreckage. Their first live gig was at Ealing College of Art, attended by a bemused Brian May, Roger Taylor, his flatmates, and a loudly encouraging Kensington contingent. Brian and Roger, who hadn’t altogether figured out that camp, opinionated Freddie really did “have something” as a front man, were completely taken aback. If the band was musically underwhelming, at least Freddie was an eyeball magnet. The gig was a success, and Wreckage were booked to play Imperial College, with a string of rugby club dates to follow.