Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (2 page)
Read Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury Online
Authors: Lesley-Ann Jones
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Designed by Ruth Lee-Mui
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Lesley-Ann.
Mercury : an intimate biography of Freddie Mercury /
Lesley-Ann Jones.—1st Touchstone hardcover ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Mercury, Freddie. 2. Rock musicians—England—Biography. I. Title.
ML420.M389J66 2012
782.42166092—dc23
[B] 2012017271
ISBN 978-1-4516-6395-2
ISBN 978-1-4516-6397-6 (ebook)
Picture acknowledgments appear at
the end of the book
.
Contents
For my mother and father
For Mia, Henry, and Bridie
W
e didn’t
write it at the time. We took notes, as journalists did in those days, by committing quotes to memory, then making our excuses and heading for the bathroom, where we’d scribble into our notebooks before the booze set in. We had tape recorders, sure, but you couldn’t use them. They were conversation killers, especially if you found yourself somewhere compromising. Where it wasn’t cool to be up-front about being a hack.
So we—a couple of scribes and a snapper—had broken rank from the media-fest raging up the road at the conference center, and had slipped out for a quiet pint at the only pub on Montreux’s main drag. Intimate little place, the Blanc Gigi, they called it: the White Horse. Freddie happened to be in that night, with a couple of tight-slacked friends who might have been Swiss or French. This typically English pub was a favorite haunt of his, which I think we must have known. Freddie didn’t need a bodyguard. He needed cigarettes. The new bloke from the
Express
was an addict, he always carried four packs. Nights were long for young showbiz reporters. We came prepared.
This was not the first time I’d met Freddie. We’d been in each other’s company several times before. A rock fan since childhood—I’d met Bowie when I was eleven, and Hendrix died on my birthday in 1970 (had to be a “sign”; wasn’t everything?)—I was introduced to the thrilling, complex music of Queen the summer I left school by sisters Jan and Maureen Day, fans from Aldershot. This was when I found myself traveling alongside them on a wheezing coach bound for Barcelona and the beaches of the Costa Brava. When everyone had a guitar, and a plectrum that had belonged to George Harrison. No amount of finger stretches was going to get the instrument to weep for me.
Never destined to be a Chrissie Hynde or a Joan Jett, from the early eighties until around 1992 I reported on rock and pop for the
Daily Mail
, the
Mail on Sunday
, its supplement
You
magazine, and
The Sun
. It was as a rookie journalist at Associated Newspapers that I first encountered Queen. I was sent to interview Freddie and Brian at Queen’s Notting Hill offices one day in 1984, and a lopsided acquaintanceship was struck: they called, you came. The years that ensued now seem surreal. The business was simpler then. Artists and journalists routinely flew together, limo’d together, stayed in the same hotels, ate at the same tables, painted far-flung cities the colors of hell.
A precious few of those friendships got to last.
Things hardly ever happen that way today. Too many managers, agents, promoters, publicists, label folk, and hangers-on, all on points. If they’re not, they pretend. It’s in their best interests to keep the likes of me behind the barrier. Back then, we cheeked our way in everywhere—with or without the laminate or an Access All Areas pass. We sometimes even hid them, just to keep our hand in. Blagging was part of the fun.
I had watched from the wings as Queen performed at Wembley for Live Aid the previous year—I wouldn’t get a look-in today—and was invited along to a string of destinations on the “Magic” tour in 1986. In Budapest, I would attend a private reception in the band’s honor at the British Embassy, and would witness their historic Hungarian show behind the Iron Curtain, which was perhaps their greatest live moment
ever. I like to think I blended in: just another skinny twenty-something freckle-face who loved rock ’n’ roll.
What always surprised me was how much slighter Freddie was than you remembered him. Perhaps it was the diet of nicotine, vodka, wine, cocaine, little appetite for food, and being hyped up as a performer. He was so larger-than-life up there on stage that you expected him to be imposing in real life. He wasn’t. On the contrary, he seemed quite small, and endearingly boyish. You wanted to mother him, all the girls did. He aroused the same instincts as Culture Club’s androgynous Boy George, who became the housewives’ favorite after “confessing,” if disingenuously, that he preferred a nice cup of tea to sex.
In the White Horse, Freddie was looking around, eyebrows raised, murmuring “ciggie” in that distinctively clipped and faintly camp voice of his. It struck me that night what a tangle of contradictions he was. That he could be as humble and unassuming away from the stage as he could be arrogant on it. Later on, I heard him mutter “pi-pi” in a childlike tone, and watched, fascinated, as one of his number toddled him off to the gents’. That was it, I fell for him completely. I wanted to take him home, stick him in a hot bath, get my mum to cook him a roast. Thinking about it now, it couldn’t have been that the big-shot rock star was so helpless that he was unable to go to the john alone. Freddie would have been the most vulnerable of targets in a toilet.
Roger Tavener, the
Express
guy, offered him a Marlboro Red. Freddie wavered before accepting—he’d have preferred Silk Cut. He watched us from his pitch with vague interest as we sparred with the barflies. Perhaps because we didn’t pay him too much attention, he came back for another fag. Where were we staying, then? The Montreux Palace: right answer. Freddie had lived there; he’d had his own suite. He and Queen owned Mountain Studios, the only recording complex in this dignified Swiss resort. Mountain was reckoned at the time to be the best in Europe. It was his round now. More of whatever it was we’d had before.
After an hour or so: “You obviously know who I am,” he said, a flicker of recognition in his ebony eyes. Well, obviously. He was what
we were there for. A few vodka tonics earlier, he might have figured our names. Dispatched by newspaper editors to attend the annual entertainment TV festival and Golden Rose Awards (the Rose d’Or was at its peak in Montreux in May 1986), we also covered its sidekick, a widely televised rock gala that was a thinly disguised excuse for the media to misbehave.
We thought he wouldn’t want to be bothered, but he was the one who seemed keen to talk. He didn’t care for hacks as a rule. Having been ridiculed and misquoted in the past, he trusted few of us. David Wigg—at that time the
Daily Express
show business editor, and also in town—was a good friend of Freddie’s. More often than not it was he who got the scoop.
We were getting too close. Throwing away, we knew, the chance of an official interview. Come morning, Freddie would have sussed us. More to the point, his management and the publicists would have, too. Having overstepped the mark, as they’d perceive it, we’d probably never get near him again. This was his bar, his territory. Even so, he seemed vulnerable and edgy, far removed from the star we thought we knew.
“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “This is only two hours from London, but I can breathe here, and I can think and write and record, and go for a walk, and I think I’m going to need it these next few years.”
We sympathized. We joined in about the pain of fame: his problem, not ours. We were keeping a lid on it. Trying to be cool. Willing the killer instinct to subside, the one that would have had us flying at the phone to call our news editors with the scoop of the year, that we had rock’s most sought-after showman cornered in a foreign boozer; we swallowed a couple more shots and waited. This was a priceless opportunity. Tavener and I were new partners in crime, out to impress each other, and the titles we wrote for were bitter rivals. We should have been circling each other like great whites. We reassured Freddie that we were used to working with celebrities, that we knew about privacy. That it’s the first thing they sacrifice, the last thing they realize they want back. This struck a chord with him.
He squinted into his vodka, swishing the glass.
“Do you know, that’s exactly the thing that keeps me awake at night,” he mused. “I’ve created a monster. The monster is me. I can’t blame anyone else. It’s what I’ve worked for since I was a kid. I would have killed for this. Whatever happens to me is all my fault. It’s what I wanted. It’s what we all strive for. Success, fame, money, sex, drugs—whatever you want. I can have it. But now I’m beginning to see that as much as I created it, I want to escape from it. I’m starting to worry that I can’t control it, as much as it controls me.
“I change when I walk out on stage,” he admitted. “I totally transform into this ‘ultimate showman.’ I say that because that’s what I must be. I can’t be second best, I would rather give up. I know I have to strut. I know I have to hold the mic stand a certain way. And I love it. Like I loved watching Jimi Hendrix milk his audience. He got it, and so did the fans. But he was a pretty shy guy off stage. Maybe he suffered by trying to live up to expectations, of being the wild man he wasn’t really, away from the lights. It becomes an out-of-body experience for me up there. It’s like I’m looking down on myself and thinking, “Fuck me, that’s hot.” Then I realize it is me: better go to work.
“Of course it’s a drug,” he said, “a stimulant. But it gets tough when people spot me in the street, and want him up there. The
big
Freddie. I’m not him, I’m quieter than that. You try to separate your private life from the public performer, because it’s a schizophrenic existence. I guess that’s the price I pay. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no poor little rich guy. The music is what gets me up in the morning. I’m truly blessed.”
What could he do about it?
“I’m being a drama queen about nothing, aren’t I!” A flash of the big guy. “Money pouring in, adulation, we’re talking about me living in Montreux and in the flashiest part of London. I can buy in New York, Paris, anywhere I want. I’m spoilt. The guy on stage can do that stuff. His public expects it. I do worry about where it ends up,” he confessed, at last. “What being part of one of the biggest bands in the world can mean. It brings its own problems. It means I can’t just wander about and
have an afternoon bun in a lovely
tea shoppe
in Kent. I’ve always got to weigh that up. It’s a heck of a journey, and I’m enjoying the ride, I assure you. But there are times. . .”
Through the casino and out the other side, we were nowhere near dawn. Freddie and a couple of pals, bunked down in some villa beneath the jagged Alps, which Freddie said guarded ancient mysteries and lost treasure, some of it stashed by Nazis during the war. The chilled night air was spiked with pine. Moonlit mountains cast shapes across the yawning lake.
What was evident was how much Freddie adored this retreat: a chocolate-box picture on the Vaud Riviera, famed for its annual jazz festival, its vineyards, for Nabokov and Chaplin, for “Smoke on the Water”—the inimitably riffed track penned by Deep Purple in December 1971, after a fan misfired a flare at a Frank Zappa gig. The whole casino burned down, the fumes billowing out across Lake Geneva as Roger Glover watched from a hotel window, bass guitar in hand.
“Just throw my remains in the lake when I go,” Freddie jested. He repeated this at least twice.
Talk turned to the importance of enjoying the simple things in life. The elephant in the room, as we call it now, was that rock-star wealth could buy him the kind of fantasy life here that the likes of us could visit only in dreams.