Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (13 page)

Freddie remained frustrated. He knew he had what it took but sensed that something was wrong. Whether he had been expecting an instant three-album deal with a major record label, or whether he simply
felt out of tune with Wreckage’s general musical style and ambition, he couldn’t say. He soon quit the band, resolved to wait for Brian’s and Roger’s pennies to drop, and auditioned for a band called Sour Milk Sea.

*   *   *

“Sour Milk Sea” was a song written by George Harrison during sessions for the Beatles’ so-called White Album. Recorded by Apple artist Jackie Lomax and released as a single in 1968, it was one of the few non-Beatles songs to feature at least three of them. With George Harrison and Eric Clapton on guitar, Paul McCartney on bass, Ringo Starr playing drums, and Nicky Hopkins on piano, it so impressed Chris Dummet (who later changed his surname to Chesney) and Jeremy Gallop, a pair of public school friends from St. Edward’s, Oxford, that they changed the name of their common-room band Tomato City to that of the song. Sour Milk Sea’s lineup also featured drummer Robert Tyrrell, who had played at Charterhouse School with Mike Rutherford and Anthony Phillips in pre-Genesis group the Anon. Sour Milk Sea’s debut took place at Guildford City Hall, where they opened for emerging acts Deep Purple, Taste, Blodwyn Pig, and Junior’s Eyes—whose everlasting claim to fame would be for having acted as David Bowie’s backing band during 1969. Junior’s Eyes founder member and guitarist Mick Wayne would join Rick Wakeman as a guest musician on Bowie’s breakthrough, “Space Oddity.” Sour Milk Sea turned professional in June 1969, well aware that they lacked
je ne sais quoi
. It arrived in the form of Freddie Bulsara, who rocked up to a Dorking church crypt to audition as lead singer and front man. With his flowing black hair and sporting dandy velvet clobber, he oozed nonchalance and style. He was several years older than the Sour Milk Sea boys, and it showed. He introduced himself as “Fred Bull.”

“He had an immense amount of charisma, which was why we chose him,” remembered Jeremy “Rubber” Gallop, who subsequently became a guitar teacher, and died of pancreatic cancer in January 2006, “although we were actually spoiled for choice that day. Normally at auditions you’d get four or five guys who were rubbish, but we had two other strong contenders. One was a black guy with the voice of God, but
not the looks of Fred, and the other was folksinger Bridget St. John, later known as ‘the female John Martyn.’ ”

Freddie joined the band and was in business. Sour Milk Sea soon landed a high-profile gig in the ballroom of Oxford’s Randolph Hotel, attended by debutante types in posh frocks.

“Our sound wasn’t great,” admitted Gallop.

“Freddie definitely managed to get what people were there in the palm of his hand, just by sheer aggression and his good looks. He was very posey and camp and quite vain. I remember him coming into my house once and looking in the mirror, poking his long hair about. He said, ‘I look good today, don’t you think, Rubber?’ I was only eighteen at the time, and I didn’t think it was very funny.”

The only other significant Sour Milk Sea gig featuring Freddie as front man was a benefit for homeless charity Shelter, staged at Highfield Parish Hall, Headington, Oxford, in March 1970. The band gave an interview in the
Oxford Mail
, which also published the lyrics to Freddie’s song, “Lover,” with the immortal opening line “You never had it so good / the yogurt pushers are here.” Following this promising start, however, old school friends Chesney and Gallop fell out.

“Freddie very quickly wanted to change us,” explained Gallop.

“On stage, he became a different personality. He was as electric as he was later in his life. Otherwise he was quite calm. I’ll always remember him being strangely quiet and well mannered. My mum liked him. Rather shamefully, I ended the band.”

Jeremy Gallop was Jonathan Morrish’s half-uncle. Former CBS Records and Sony executive Jonathan, who became Michael Jackson’s publicist and confidant for twenty-eight years, remembers attending that Oxford gig as a teenager.

“At that stage, Freddie, to me, was Martin Peters,” Jonathan tells me, referring to the 1966 England World Cup soccer legend described by manager Sir Alf Ramsey as being “ten years ahead of his time.” Peters was blessed with such versatility that he was deployable in every position at West Ham United, including goalkeeper.

“Freddie was this flamboyant showman at a time when bands went on stage dressed in whatever they’d been wearing all day,” says Jonathan.

“That Freddie understood showmanship was plain for all to see, even then. It’s hard now for people who weren’t there to understand what developing rock music was like. You were in it to be a musician. You were ‘musician-ly.’ You lived the life. What Freddie knew, intuitively, was the golden rule of showbiz: you make a show. It was what Epstein did with the Beatles. ‘
Mach Schaul!
,’ the German promoters used to yell at the boys in Hamburg’s Star Club. In other words, it was not just about singing. It was also about the lapel-free jackets, the hairstyles, the bashful grins. The Beatles then spent the next eight years rebelling against all that, as if trying to prove that music was the only thing that mattered. Freddie, even as an embryonic performer, knew otherwise.”

Jonathan knew Michael Jackson intimately until the end of his life. The reasons behind the eventual bond between Freddie and Michael, he says, were obvious to those who knew them both.

“Neither one was simply a musician or a singer. What Freddie did with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Michael re-created with ‘Thriller.’ The point being that the great artists just get it. They know instinctively how to be multimedia. Freddie’s genius was understanding, not just the song he had written the words and melody to, and how it all sounded, but how you deliver it in a contemporary fashion which the audience will comprehend and absorb. How you record it, how you present it on stage, how you style the video, how you dress. You can just picture him on the shoot: ‘Guys! Makeup, frocks, action!’ Who the fuck wore makeup? Men didn’t. In 1970, if you wore moisturizer you were dismissed as ‘queer’—the word of the day. Yet all these years later, the men’s cosmetics industry is worth billions. As I said, he was way ahead of his time. Even in 1970, Freddie was saying ‘NO, guys,
this
is what showbiz is about!’ ”

*   *   *

For as long as Queen have existed, an error has prevailed regarding alternative names that the band considered calling themselves.

“Brian and Roger had both read the same trilogy of books by
C. S. Lewis during their childhood—
Out of the Silent Planet
—from which the phrase the Grand Dance had come,” explained Jacky Gunn and Jim Jenkins in Queen’s “official biography”
As It Began
(1992). This information has been repeated in so many Queen and Freddie Mercury books that it has become “fact”—even appearing as such on Queen’s official website, where Queen expert Rhys Thomas, in “A Review” (7 March 2011) discusses the Grand Dance, the Rich Kids (later picked up by Sex Pistol Glen Matlock as the name of his new group), and Build Your Own Boat as other names that Queen had discussed. In an interview with
Q
magazine, March 2011, Brian said, “We had a list of suggested names, and Queen had come from Freddie. One of the others was the Grand Dance, which I don’t think would have been very good . . .”

In fact, the reference is erroneous.
Out of the Silent Planet
is the first novel of the Lewis sci-fi trilogy referred to as “the Space Trilogy,” “the Cosmic Trilogy,” or “the Ransom Trilogy.” The other two volumes in the collection, which was itself inspired by David Lindsay’s
A Voyage to Arcturus
(1920), are
Perelandra
and
That Hideous Strength
. In the
second
novel,
Perelandra
, Lewis introduces a new Garden of Eden on the planet Venus, an alternative Adam and Eve, and a new serpent figure to tempt them. The author explores what might have come to pass had Eve resisted temptation and avoided the Fall of Man. It is in
Perelandra
that we find our Queen reference: a description of the mystical experience of seeing directly into “the GREAT Dance”—not “Grand”—of the multidimensional space-time-consciousness continuum that is the time cosmos: “So with the Great Dance. Set your eyes on one movement and it will lead you through all patterns and it will seem to you the master movement. But the seeming will be true. . . . There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre. Blessed be He!”

One-word titles work better, Freddie argued. They are infinitely more memorable. They have more punch. Freddie’s own outrageous suggestion was “Queen.” The others resisted with snorts and scorn, primarily because of the word’s homosexual connotations. “Gay” was a
word rarely heard at that time. It probably emerged eventually in defiance of “queer,” its disparaging predecessor. Although Freddie had not “come out”—nor would he ever officially do so—he was used to being called “an old queen.” He rather liked it. He swooned at its androgyny and adored its regal whiff. Even better, the name would give him the perfect excuse to camp it to the hilt on stage. Brian and Roger soon came round, having seen the funny side. The point being that no male could be more macho, more straight, nor more besotted by women than those two. In their terms, to be called “Queen” was ironic, and it worked.

Having agreed the band’s identity, Freddie set about renaming himself. Bulsara was dropped in favor of Mercury, the ancient Roman messenger of the gods. Like Hermes, his Greek counterpart, Mercury was represented with winged sandals and a staff entwined with snakes. Also the name of the common liquid metal long ago familiar in Chinese and Hindu culture and found in ancient Egyptian tombs, “Mercury” identifies the planet closest to the Sun as well, which has no moons.

Many theories have arisen over the years as to why Freddie chose that surname. According to Queen fan and author Jim Jenkins, “Freddie told me himself in 1975, that it was after the messenger of the gods. I remember it as if he’s just said it to me. People have said since that it was after Mike Mercury in TV’s
Fireball XL5
, but I can tell you for sure that it was nothing to do with him.”

According to Brian May’s memory: “Freddie had written this song called ‘My Fairy King,’ and there’s a line in it that says, ‘Oh Mother Mercury what have you done to me?’ [The lyric actually reads: “Mother mercury mercury / look what they’ve done to me / I cannot run, I cannot hide.”]

“And it was after that that he said, ‘I am going to become Mercury as the mother in this song is my mother.’ And we were like, ‘Are you mad?’

“Changing his name was part of him assuming this different skin,” adds May. “The young Bulsara was still there, but for the public he was going to be this god.”

Although it has been widely assumed that Freddie changed his
name by deed poll in or around 1970, nothing exists to prove this. While they were able to supply Elton John’s, there is no official entry for Freddie at the Public Records Office, now the National Archives, in Kew, West London. As an official there told me, “Only ten percent of name changes are registered through the Supreme Court and therefore appear on our records. These days, in fact, it’s about five percent. It is not a legal requirement: you can call yourself whatever you like. Chances are that Mr. Mercury changed his name through his solicitor. When the documentation is drawn up, he’d keep half and the solicitor would keep half.”

Freddie later revealed his fascination with mythology and astrology by designing Queen’s now legendary logo. Its principal figure is a spread-winged phoenix, the symbol of immortality remembered fondly by Freddie from the crest of his alma mater, St. Peter’s in Panchgani. The logo also incorporated the zodiac signs of each band member: two lions, for the Leos, Taylor and Deacon, a crab for Cancerian May, and a couple of fairies for Virgoan Mercury, complete with a stylized
Q
and elaborate crown.

Other commitments notwithstanding, the band were ready to play their debut gig as Queen: a Red Cross benefit at City Hall, Truro in Cornwall, Britain’s most southwesterly point. The show, which took place on 27 June 1970, was coarranged by Roger’s mother Win Hitchens, and the lineup featured Mike Grose on bass (he lasted only three shows). Their opening number was “Stone Cold Crazy,” based on an energetic Wreckage number. But it fell a bit flat in that half-empty venue. Observers remembered that the band were not yet “tight” enough, nor Freddie coordinated enough.

“Freddie was not like how he became,” commented Roger’s mum Win. “He had not got his movements off properly.”

But: “Freddie had real ambitions for the band,” remembers his sister Kashmira. “He had this complete determination to succeed.”

A show at Imperial College on 18 July followed, their set made up almost exclusively of cover versions—everything from James Brown and Little Richard to Buddy Holly and Shirley Bassey—and just two original
compositions: “Stone Cold Crazy,” which featured the whole group as cowriters, and “Liar.”

“We did more heavy rock ’n’ roll with the Queen delivery to give people something they could get hold of—get on, sock it to ’em, get off,” commented Brian.

Mike Grose was replaced by bass player Barry Mitchell, who performed with Queen at eleven shows from summer until Christmas, in London colleges, Liverpool’s famous Cavern Club, and a couple of church halls. Queen still hadn’t found the one they were looking for.

Now that Roger had enrolled at North London Polytechnic to study biology, he would get a grant to supplement his meager income. This left Freddie the only Queen member not engaged in postsecondary education. Not that it bothered any of them. Queen threw themselves at the live circuit with renewed vigor. That September, Brian arranged a showcase at Imperial College and invited a number of top London booking agents. Although several turned up, none was impressed enough to offer Queen a tour. Hungry for fame and success, they took this badly.