Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (29 page)

Peter knew instinctively how to keep a low profile and his opinions to himself. He also sensed when it was appropriate to cross professional boundaries with Freddie, and when it was not. Queen’s wild world was an alien realm, and Peter trod carefully. There were times when he felt overwhelmed by the privilege and excess that the band took for granted.

“With each new tour, they had to have that many more lights, that much bigger a sound, a more and more fantastic set,” Peter recalled. “Everything they did had to be never-been-done-before. It was the ultimate show. For that alone they were just so exciting. A few years ago at Wembley I saw Michael Jackson in concert two days in a row. Everything was exactly the same the second day as it had been on the
first. Queen were totally different. You never knew quite what you were going to get. They also had to have the most expensive band meetings ever: actually in the recording studio, where they were being charged a fortune by the hour. Nobody would do that now.”

So harmonious was their relationship, so discreet and easy was this new assistant to have around, that he was quickly given responsibility for all Freddie’s personal needs.

“I’d even pack for him,” Peter says. “I’d arrange the car to pick him up. I made sure he had money, cards, passport, tickets—in fact, I would be the one holding on to the money, the cards, and the tickets. I’d be the one to actually get him on the plane. It was like caring for a child, a lot of the time. I was always with him, literally at his side, in the very next seat on every aircraft. Considering the amount of time we spent in each other’s pockets, we got on incredibly well. While we were in Los Angeles, where we lived for a while when Queen were recording, other people were always around, which took the pressure off me a bit. But when we were in New York, it was just Freddie and me. The easiest way for me to describe the relationship was that there was a line: there’s employer, and there’s friend. The dividing part was never static. After a short period of time, I could judge instantly where it was, depending on what was happening. On whether he needed his employee there doing this or that for him, or whether he needed his friend around to lean on. It had to be like that. That way, he knew he could shout at me—which he frequently did, mainly to work his frustrations out. We both knew why, and that was fine. It would never be mentioned again, and Freddie never held grudges against anybody. He’d have his go, and that would be it.”

Being constantly at the beck and call of a demanding master must have taken its toll at times. Surely Freestone felt like a servant? He denies he ever did.

“Mainly, I think—and this is a dreadful thing to admit—because Freddie never treated me in the ‘do this, do that’ way I used to treat
the servants we had in India. He was incredibly nice to me, most of the time. While admittedly he was paying me a salary, none of us who worked for him ever had to pay for anything. He never expected anybody to pay for a meal or buy him a drink. If we did buy him a drink, he’d be very happy, but it wasn’t expected. If he went out to a bar and there were ten people in the entourage, it would all be on his bill. But he never carried his own money—we’d carry it. He was just like royalty in that respect. But no, it never made me feel awkward.”

With hindsight, Peter felt that he’d had “one of the luckiest lives going” during his years with Freddie and Queen.

“I effectively lived Freddie’s life without the responsibility of having had to earn it. I never had to create music or face the press. But I got to travel by Concorde endless times, stayed in the best suites in the best hotels around the world, shopped for him at the finest auction houses with his own signed blank checks. I lived and spent at his level. How on earth could I have felt like a servant?”

The intense personal friendship that the pair enjoyed until the end of Freddie’s life was based on mutual respect and trust.

“Freddie didn’t trust people that easily,” said Peter.

“He would either trust someone within a relatively short period, or he would never trust them at all. For him to have accepted me in that role was the basis of our friendship, and that happened within the first year. We had only one huge falling-out, in about 1989”—when Peter became aware that Freddie thought he had been gossiping about Freddie’s illness outside Garden Lodge, which he had not.

“But it was pretty short-lived. I told him that I’d had enough, and that I wanted to go. ‘Please don’t,’ he said. ‘I want you here. I
need
you.’ That was all I needed to hear. Everything was instantly forgotten, and I was there for the duration.

“Those of us in his personal group were actually his family. We did everything for him. I would have done anything for him—and not just because he was paying me. I did what I did out of respect. Freddie was
up there on a pedestal to me. But I didn’t do it because I was in awe of him. I did it because I was lucky enough to be a friend. I couldn’t have done it for anybody else.”

Freddie was already indulging in a private life of such lunatic excess by the time Peter came on board that many have since wondered how he managed it behind the media’s back. Relatively easily, thinks Peter. It was simply a matter of keeping himself to himself.

“There are certain members of the rock fraternity who will go to the opening of an envelope,” he points out. “If something isn’t happening, they will create something, simply to keep themselves in the public eye. Freddie mostly went out of his way
not
to appear in the press. He’d do the odd bits of publicity required of him, but he wouldn’t go to any of the big showbiz parties or premieres. He rarely went to other artists’ gigs. He was a private person. Music was his work. The studio was his office. When he was not in the office, he didn’t want to be working.”

Despite the recklessness, Peter insisted that he never felt afraid for Freddie, given the lifestyle he had chosen.

“It was part of the times.” He shrugged. “This was the early eighties. Anything went.”

Freddie was in high spirits for another reason in October 1979. Queen’s fourteenth single, Freddie’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” backed by Brian’s “We Will Rock You,” was a smash with the music press, and reached Number Two on the UK chart. Freddie’s bohemian image long dispensed with, he was now into his “leather” look. Black or red leather pants with macho caps were his stage attire, part of a harder and more aggressive, if short-lived, image. This, too, would soften and evolve, into his final stage-wear preference of plain vest and jeans. Freddie was in control and taking a defiant stance. The focused image was right for a new decade.

“From now on, dressing up crazily on stage is out,” Freddie declared. “I’m going to put our music across dressed more casually. The world has changed. People want something more direct.”

Queen’s long career was taking its toll. The band were feeling restless and jaded. Their relationships with each other flagged as their enthusiasm and energy waned. I have witnessed this often over the years with bands of Queen’s stature; there comes a point when it’s no longer the be-all and end-all, when they are simply not into it as much. Brian, Freddie, Roger, and John were getting older. Adults now, with partners, children, houses, staff, a global public profile, solo commitments, charity work, each one of them was now a mini-industry in his own right, with endless and exhausting responsibilities. Queen could no longer be what they had started out as: a band of supremely talented, driven yet carefree young dudes wenching and wassailing their way around the world, doing as they pleased. Their personalities and predilections gave them different priorities, too. Roger had long felt comfortable with playing the rock superstar, commanding as many column inches as their front man—especially for his colorful private life. Brian was a reluctant celebrity at first but grew more comfortable with stardom after falling in love with future second wife, Anita Dobson, an actress, who understood show business. John was deeply immersed in the sort of “ordinary domestic setup that Freddie had turned his back on and possibly felt alienated by.

I think this stance was born of guilt. John seemed content as precisely the kind of family man Freddie’s parents would have given anything for their son to have been. He was a reminder of all that Freddie didn’t have.

Of all four band members, it was Freddie, surprisingly, who was the least heat-seeking. The way he saw it, he was a musician and performer first, a rock star second. What mattered to him was honing the recordings until they were perfect; belting out a dazzler of a performance night after night and always being the best—for the fans, as well as for himself.

“He was very much the perfectionist,” agreed Peter Freestone. “He would spend hours making sure that there was no better way of
constructing the song, no better tune to express the feeling that he wanted to put over. His music, first and foremost, was for himself . . . It was his own perfection he was seeking, not other people’s.”

Freddie wasn’t interested in the “right” parties or the “important” premieres. He couldn’t be bothered to schmooze. He did not court celebrity friends; he let them come to him. If there was common ground to be enjoyed, he let them in. He could not have cared less about being “seen.” While the flimsier stars of today obsess endlessly over preserving “public profile” and landing the splash headline, to Freddie that was at best boring, at worst the most distasteful and pointless pursuit.

“You’ve got to have nerves of steel to survive the pace,” he remarked. “When you have success it becomes really difficult, because then you really learn the things behind the business. You find out the real baddies. Before, you don’t know anything about it. You have to be very strong and sift them out. It’s like playing rock ’n’ roll dodgems. You’ve got to make sure you don’t get hit too often. Anyone who is successful will always be burned once or twice. There’s no such thing,” he added, obscurely, “as a clean escalator to the top.”

A rock band’s massive global success invariably causes a separation from the fans who took them there. Mindful of this, and nervous of the inevitable knock-on effect, Queen opted to shun vast stadia on their forthcoming tour in favor of more intimate venues, some of which fell ridiculously short of the requirements of a supergroup and its setup. Dubbed the Crazy Tour for the unsuitability of some of the concert halls, and promoted by Harvey Goldsmith, the band played Dublin—their first Irish gig, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, and Liverpool, where Freddie sported one red and one blue knee pad, to charm both Everton and Liverpool soccer fans. They also played Brighton, and modest venues in London, including the Lyceum Ballroom and the Rainbow. Approaching this tour with deliberate enthusiasm, Queen were able to report, for the first time in a long time, that they’d actually enjoyed themselves. This had been a tangible reminder of how great performing
had felt in the good old days, when fortune and fame were still little more than a dream.

After the Brighton show, Freddie confided to a friend that he was partial to “the odd orgy.”

“The night before last, we were in Brighton, and the road crew had one of their parties,” he said. “One of Queen’s things: we’re very good at giving parties. It was full of naughty women, and everybody jumped in. I’m not going to tell you names, but it was very well-cast, and there were props and goodness knows what flying all over the place. It was wonderful.”

What Freddie did not confess to was the passionate night he had spent in the arms of young DHL courier Tony Bastin. Tony would become Freddie’s first long-term homosexual relationship, if no antidote to his promiscuity. Their on-off affair lasted for two years, neither of them under any illusion that he had met his match.

“Tony was not Freddie’s type at all,” Peter later lamented, referring to the fact that blond, smiling Bastin’s average looks and build were not what Freddie normally went for.

“Freddie liked chunky and hunky and a relatively blank slate, someone upon whom he could leave his mark,” explained Peter. “Freddie simply liked the stability of a permanent partner as a secure base from which he could continue to play the field,” he added.

All Freddie’s lovers had very unsophisticated roots. “Although a country boy himself, which he was loath to admit, he had an acquired sophistication which always rubbed off on his lovers and raised their expectations.”

Bastin more or less moved into the Stafford Terrace flat, even bringing his cat, Oscar, and took to joining Freddie at a string of destinations when the band were away on tour. He quickly got a taste for the high life, which he could hardly be blamed for when Freddie was showering him with first-class plane tickets and expensive presents. Not that Bastin appeared to appreciate any of it. It dawned on Freddie eventually
that Tony was using him. Worse, word had reached him that Tony had been seen around town with a slim young blond. It was the first of many similar betrayals.

“He was often let down badly in relationships, and became extremely cautious about who he got involved with emotionally,” reveals David Wigg.

“Once they’d got the Cartier bracelet or the car . . . you know. They weren’t very clever, these ‘friends’ of his. It happens a lot with these people. The entourage have inflated egos, sometimes bigger than the ego of the star they serve. They start to believe that they can do it, too, forgetting the fact that they haven’t an ounce of talent themselves, and are only where they are because of who’s paying them.”

This could explain why Freddie developed such a passion for no-strings sex with ever-changing partners, withholding emotional commitment for the friends he could truly trust.

In the end, Freddie summoned Bastin all the way to the States, ended the relationship, and put him straight back on the plane, with instructions to clear out his things from the flat, but to leave the cat.

Queen welcomed the New Year and a new decade with their fifteenth single, “Save Me,” Number Eleven on the UK chart. The Elvis-esque “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” was seducing the rest of the world, giving them their first mainstream Number One in the States and topping charts in Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Canada, and Holland. The band retreated to Munich to work on new album material, and on the
Flash Gordon
sound track.