Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (23 page)

“Get far enough away from it and perspective changes everything,” points out Paul Gambaccini.

“It’s hard to get excited today about your three-and-a-half-minute rock song or pop record when lengthy masterpieces like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ ‘MacArthur Park,’ ‘Hey Jude,’ ‘Light My Fire,’ and ‘American Pie’ have already been made. No one aspires to that level of musical achievement any more. We can now look back on these works as artistic achievements of the highest order. Don McLean didn’t make ‘American Pie’ to be a single, because he couldn’t imagine it was possible for it to
be
a single. It was eight and a half minutes long. It was the record company who divided it in two. Don was a pure artist who couldn’t even have conceived ‘American Pie’ as a hit. It was clearly a masterpiece, but he recorded it as one long album track. The same goes for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ which was the last track on Queen’s 1975 album
A Night at the Opera
.

“OK, yes, Freddie wrote the song,” adds Paul, “but Brian did that incredible guitar passage in the middle, Roger did the high notes, and John contributed, of course. To spread out the contributions in that way is fantastic, as they would later do with their own individual compositions, and I’m sure it’s what helped keep them going as a group. It took the genius of Kenny Everett to hear and see ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as a classic single.”

Everett, known as “Ev,” a close friend of Freddie’s, was a Merseyside-born former Radio Luxembourg presenter and friend of the Beatles, who made his name as a Radio 1 DJ, and as presenter and comedian of his own
Kenny Everett Video
and
Kenny Everett Television
shows. He was diagnosed with HIV in 1989, and died of AIDS complications in 1995, aged fifty. In 1966, Ev married former pop singer “Lady Lee”
Middleton, singer Billy Fury’s former girlfriend, who would eventually become the psychic and spiritual healer Lee Everett Alkin. The couple separated in 1979, when Everett came out. It is widely believed that he was infected by his promiscuous Russian lover Nikolai Grishanovitch, who was infamous in gay circles (“that careless twat Nikolai”) for having done more to spread HIV around London during the early eighties than any other individual. A former Red Army soldier who succumbed to the disease himself in 1990, Grishanovitch is sometimes named as the person who infected Freddie—although several people I spoke to believe it was the late Ronnie Fisher, a former CBS/Sony publicist.

“I don’t think the dates fit on the ‘Nikolai-infected-Freddie’ theory,” reasons Paul Gambaccini.

“I don’t recall meeting Nikolai until the year [1987] the government made the original AIDS-awareness ads—because I remember meeting him with Freddie when the ads were about to come out. Freddie showed his first symptoms within one or two years of this. Bearing in mind that the average time between infection and onset of symptoms was ten years, this is just too short a time. Besides, I knew Freddie had been what our parents would have called ‘loose’ since the late seventies, which is a perfect match for the ten-year average. It’s not impossible that it was Nikolai . . . but really unlikely.

“I don’t know where Freddie and Nikolai met,” adds Paul, “but I would not have been surprised if it had been at the Coleherne in Earl’s Court. This was one of Freddie’s favorite pubs [the other being the London Apprentice in Shoreditch], and had the distinction of being within walking distance of Freddie’s home. This was the pub in which it is commonly assumed HIV was introduced to London by an American visitor. His entire circle fell to the disease.”

As “Ev” and Freddie were movers and shakers on the same gay and music business scenes, it was inevitable that their paths would cross.

“I never thought that Freddie and Kenny were lovers,” says Paul. “Had they been, I would have thought that everyone in our circle would have known. The reason I never entertained the thought they were is
because their sexual personae were too similar. Of course, that means nothing in terms of one-nighters amongst two curious persons, but the idea just doesn’t gain traction in my head. To be blunt, they were just silly together.”

Everett played a pivotal role in getting “Bohemian Rhapsody” released as a single and was famously first to air the track. A demo was sent to him with strict instructions not to broadcast it, but simply to get back to Freddie with his opinion. Everett adored the track, and played it fourteen times over one weekend, claiming to his boss on every play that “his finger slipped.” While his cheek helped bring the most popular track of all time to the attention of the metropolis, it is disputed as to whether he made it a nationwide hit.

“In 1975 I had my own daily BBC Radio 1 show,” says “Diddy” David Hamilton, of his hugely popular program which attracted sixteen million listeners daily.

“The lineup was Noel Edmonds on the
Breakfast Show
, Tony Blackburn midmorning, Johnnie Walker over lunch, me after lunch. We’d all have our Record of the Week. It would obviously have been very easy to pick ABBA or the Bee Gees, as all their singles were automatically hits. But sometimes you’d think outside the box. That October, along came the well-known record plugger Eric Hall to see me.

“I was living in a flat in Hallam Street behind BBC Broadcasting House, and I’d often get records dropped off to me at home,” remembers Diddy.

“Eric turned up this particular day with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ going ‘Monster! Monster! This could be a big hit!’ When I listened to it, I remember thinking that it was totally different from any pop record I’d ever heard before. It was innovative. Operatic. It soared and swooped and got under your skin. You couldn’t stop humming bits of it. It got very mixed reviews in the office. Tony Blackburn said he didn’t understand it. No one else seemed to like it very much. Compared to the disco sound going down at the time—KC and the Sunshine Band’s ‘That’s the Way I Like It’ and all that—it was unique. Queen were so different. The
Stones were the traditional rock band. This band could rock, but they were not essentially rockers. There is a difference.

“I told my producer Paul Williams that I wanted it as my ‘Hamilton Hotshot.’ He agreed. The record, of course, went on to be Number One for a record nine weeks, and by January 1976 had sold more than a million here, was a multimillion seller all over the world, and is arguably the greatest pop song of all time. I like to think that I played my part in that. I was always very proud of my Hotshot choices, and that one didn’t let me down. Much has been made over the years of Kenny Everett having stolen a copy of the single ahead of release, playing it endlessly on Capital Radio, and then claiming that he introduced it to the world. He gave it enormous backing, and then took a lot of the credit for it having become a hit. But Capital was in those days exclusively a
London
station. Nobody else in the UK was hearing it at that time. Radio 1 never got the credit for bringing the single to the attention of the nation!”

The single would reach Number One again for five weeks in 1991, when it was rereleased following Freddie’s death. It became the UK’s third best-selling single of all time and topped charts around the world. In the United States, the record made Number Nine in 1976, and then returned to the chart there in 1992 thanks to the massive popularity of the movie
Wayne’s World
, which famously paid homage to “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

The late Tommy Vance, one of the biggest names in rock broadcasting, with shows on London’s Capital, Radio 1, Virgin Radio, and VH-1 rock TV for MTV, described “Bohemian Rhapsody” as “the rock equivalent of the assassination of JFK.”

“We all remembered what we were doing when we first heard it,” he told me. “I was doing the weekend rock show on Capital at the time. I heard it and thought it was a lunatic asylum of a pop song. It was so magnificently obscure, it had to make it. Technically, the song’s a mess. It follows no known conventional nor commercial formula. It is just a string of dreams, flashbacks, flash-forwards, vignettes, completely disjointed ideas. It changes sequence, color, tone, tempo, all for no apparent
reason—which is exactly what opera does. But the intent was remarkable. It was the ultimate optimism. It had an indefinable quality, some remarkable magic. It is brilliant. And it is still revered as an icon today. What other song stands up against it? Absolutely fuck all. But try to dissect ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’s’ lyrics, and you’ll find that it’s meaningless.”

Oscar-winning lyricist Sir Tim Rice, cocreator of some of the greatest shows in stage-musical history, including
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ, Superstar
, and
Evita
—and cowriter of songs with Freddie for the 1988 Montserrat Caballé extravaganza
Barcelona
, begs to differ.

“It’s fairly obvious to me that this was Freddie’s ‘coming-out song,’ ” he tells me.

“I’ve even spoken to Roger about it. I heard the record very early on, and it struck me that there is a very clear message contained in it. This is Freddie saying ‘I’m coming out. I’m admitting that I’m gay.’

“Yes, he was admitting his homosexuality to himself initially . . . but then, by default, to the rest of the world, because it was such a huge hit everywhere. ‘Mama, I just killed a man . . .’ He’s killed the old Freddie he was trying to be: the former image. ‘Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead’—
he’s
dead, the ‘straight’ person he was originally. ‘Mama, life had just begun, but now I’ve gone and thrown it all away . . .’ I mean, this is just my theory, but it
does
fit. He’s shot and destroyed the man he was trying to be, and now this is him, trying to live with the new Freddie. It’s very obscure, of course. But think about that middle bit: ‘I see a little silhouetto of a man . . .’ that’s him, still being haunted by what he’s done and what he is. It works for me. Every time I hear the record on the radio, I think of him trying to shake off one Freddie and embracing another—even all these years after his death. Do I think he managed it? I think he was in the
process
of managing it, rather well. Freddie was an exceptional lyricist, and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is beyond any doubt one of the great pieces of music of the twentieth century.”

An echo, then, of the song’s composer himself? Freddie resolutely avoided explanations.

“Does it mean this, does it mean that, is all anybody wants to know.” Freddie sighed. “Fuck them, darling. I will say no more than what any decent poet would tell you if you dared ask him to analyze his work: if you see it, dear, then it’s there.”

As far as Brian was concerned, it was vital that the song’s meaning remain obscure.

“I don’t think we’ll ever know, and if I knew I probably wouldn’t want to tell you anyway,” he said.

“I certainly don’t tell people what my songs are about. I find that it destroys them in a way, because the great thing about a great song is that you relate it to your own personal experiences in your own life. I think that Freddie was certainly battling with problems in his personal life, which he might have decided to put into the song himself. He was certainly looking at re-creating himself. But I don’t think at that point in time it was the best thing to do, so he actually decided to do it later.”

I believe Brian meant that Freddie was resisting the inevitable: having to end his relationship with Mary to start a new life as a homosexual. But the thought of doing so terrified him, so he kept putting it off—not least because he dreaded the effect it would have on his parents. Coming out could have made his life so much easier in the long run, as it had for Kenny Everett, who alienated neither his fans nor his wife with his honesty. As Lee Everett told me, “He was what he was. Didn’t stop me loving him. We remained devoted to each other until the end.”

“Had Freddie come out to the world, it would have been as no one else coming out,” points out Simon Napier-Bell.

“It wouldn’t have been like George Michael, who only came out when he was forced to, and anyway wasn’t really a rock star, just high-class pop. Had Freddie come out, he would have rubbed homophobe noses in their own hypocrisy, and it would have been a smaller step than he thought—because to all his friends he was already out, and outrageous.

“When he said he was different in his private life from the performer he was on stage, what he really meant was that he was forced to
retire into his shell because of the fear his Parsee family would have had of him coming out. Had he come out from the beginning, his long, slow death would have been something that the gay community could have thanked him for. They would have used it to their advantage, turned it into something wonderfully, tragically show business, and made him the new Judy Garland. He might even have found himself enjoying it!”

“Bohemian Rhapsody” may well have been an allegory of the new, liberated Freddie killing the old persona and reveling in his true self, once hidden but at last revealed, according to the Searchers’ bassist Frank Allen:

“But it might be something different entirely. I am not privy to the information, and I never asked him. When Don McLean was asked about the meaning of ‘American Pie,’ he replied, ‘It means I don’t ever have to work again.’ Perhaps the reality of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ contains a comparably innocent and more direct truth. I’m not clever enough to judge. I am content just to enjoy it as a beautifully constructed major work in pop music. Magnificently assembled, it resulted in a three-piece suite of different time signatures and moods that approximated the great classics. In a pop sense, it worked in a way that no one had experienced ever before.”

As Tommy Vance pointed out, what really proved the worth of “Bohemian Rhapsody” was neither its groundbreaking lyrics nor those brain-scrambling melodies. No amount of speculation as to its meaning, nor even unprecedented airplay, made it a hit. What did so was television.

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