Freddie Mercury: The Biography (19 page)

When released on 5 October, the record went gold. It also marked another first by featuring Mercury on rhythm guitar. The
star strummed the three chords only fractionally better than the time he had plagued flatmates ten years earlier. When some
sought to mock this musical debut, Mercury unceremoniously crushed them, retorting, ‘I’ve made no effort to become a guitar
hero, because I can’t play the fucking guitar.’

What Mercury excelled at was surprising people, and he was set to do so again. For him it was the fulfilment of a personal
dream. Since his days at Ealing College, he had been fascinated with ballet. He had attended performances in various parts
of the world, but in particular he admired London’s Royal Ballet Company and had become friends with one of their principal
dancers, Wayne Eagling.

‘I first met Freddie when I was producing a dance gala for mentally handicapped children,’ says Wayne Eagling. ‘I wanted to
widen its appeal to more than just dance fans, and so I went
to see my friend Joseph Lockwood, treasurer of the Royal Ballet, who was then also head of EMI. Originally I asked him if
I could work with Kate Bush, but, unfortunately, Kate’s manager didn’t like the idea, so I asked Joseph to suggest someone
else. He took five seconds to come up with Freddie Mercury, and it was he who initially brought Freddie along to the ballet
school.’

It was an unforgettable first meeting, Wayne Eagling recalls: ‘Freddie turned up already wearing tights and ballet shoes,
and we all took one look at him and nearly fainted. I think some of the group thought, My God! What have we got here? because
Freddie really made an entrance. We were to do two numbers, “Bohemian Rhapsody” and a new song called “Crazy Little Thing
Called Love”, which hadn’t yet been released.

‘I’ll always remember, we were in the middle of rehearsing “Rhapsody”, when in walked the choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton.
He asked me what I was doing, then suddenly scowled at Freddie and demanded in a strangled voice, “And
who
is
he?”
A little embarrassed, I replied, “He’s a famous rock star.” Ashton looked Mercury up and down and snapped, “Well, he’s got
terrible
feet!” Poor Freddie, and I thought he was being rather sweet, trying to point his toes so carefully, but fortunately he thought
it was funny.’

Eagling wasn’t Mercury’s only acquaintance at the Royal Ballet. During these rehearsals he also worked with Derek Deane, another
principal dancer, who fondly recalls the fun they had. ‘We never stopped laughing,’ he insists. ‘Freddie was so Freddie. He
became a great friend of Wayne’s and mine, and I saw right away that he liked to think of himself as a good dancer, but he
wasn’t really. He more than made up for that though by being terribly enthusiastic.

‘One of the first things that struck me was the interest he took in the whole thing, and he wasn’t nervous either. It wasn’t
that serious, and he didn’t have to do anything very strict. But
still there was a big difference to what he was used to. On stage he did his own thing, whereas here he had to be where he
was supposed to be at all times, or he’d throw the whole company out – and we kept trying to hammer that home with him.’

Mercury’s eagerness was to prove legendary in the group. ‘He would try absolutely anything,’ says Deane. ‘In fact a lot of
the time we had to hold him back in case he did himself an injury.’ After practice both at the school and on stage, there
was the costume rehearsal. ‘We were going through our paces when suddenly Freddie began to sing “Bohemian Rhapsody” without
music,’ Deane recalls. ‘His wonderful voice just stopped us all in our tracks. We stared at him, awestruck.’

Mercury had bottled up his nerves for the big night on 7 October at London’s Coliseum, but unnecessarily so, according to
Derek Deane: ‘The audience were major!’ he says. ‘In the main, ballet audiences tend to be quite stuffy, and never in a million
years did they expect a rock star to arrive on stage – but they loved Freddie.’

‘Basically we lifted him around all the time, tipping him upside down and throwing him about, but Freddie was a natural showman,
and he thoroughly enjoyed it,’ Eagling recalls.

Mercury remained friends with Deane and Eagling, often discussing the possibility of future projects. While spending time
together, the contrast between the star’s public persona and the private man was obvious, says Eagling: ‘Freddie would slip
in to see our performances and hardly be noticed. Then again, he loved his wild parties and being flamboyant. Even so, essentially
he was a very shy man. He had to feel comfortable with you before he’d drop his guard.’ When Mercury ended his association
with the Royal Ballet Company, he took with him one of their wardrobe assistants, Peter Freestone, with whom he had struck
up a rapport. Peter joined Joe Fanelli and Paul Prenter as another of his personal assistants. He was with the band the next
month when they set out on what they called
their ‘Crazy Tour’. Instead of playing the famous, big venues, they took their music back to the smaller theatres.

As the decade drew to an end, the change in Mercury’s style was pronounced. His hair had become gradually shorter, until now
it just brushed his collar and only partially hid his heavy sideburns. On stage he was rarely out of leathers and had added
a leather and chain cap to his biker ensemble. He may have recently performed ballet on a London stage, but when fronting
Queen, his image was thrusting and aggressive. Rob Halford, lead singer with Judas Priest, called on Mercury to ride a motorbike
round the Brands Hatch circuit to prove he merited his biker gear. Mercury neatly deflected his challenge by accepting the
offer on condition that Halford first danced with the Royal Ballet. Halford was never heard from again on the subject.

In mid-December Queen played a couple of nights at the Centre in Brighton in the final two weeks of the tour. It was here
that Mercury would meet the man who was to become his first live-in male lover. The star’s weakness lay in the beefcake variety,
muscly men who looked like truck drivers, with big hands and, invariably, a thick black moustache. Still enjoying the gay
scene to the full, after each gig Mercury would set off in search of local talent. It was on one of these excursions that
he found the Curtain Club, where he was to meet twenty-eight-year-old Tony Bastin, a courier for the express-delivery company
DHL.

Mercury took Bastin back to his hotel room, where they spent the night together. After three years of picking up a different
man every night and discarding him the next day, like any other star-struck groupie, this time was different. They hit it
off so well that before Queen headed back to London, the two men had exchanged telephone numbers and promised to keep in touch.

Queen ended the seventies with a Boxing Day charity gig at
the Hammersmith Odeon, organised by Paul McCartney, in aid of the Kampuchea Appeal Fund. It involved a series of concerts,
including performances from Wings, the Who and the Pretenders. False rumours had circulated that the Beatles were considering
re-forming for the event, which had at least increased the media’s interest.

Mercury had once predicted Queen’s life span as five years. He could not have anticipated that by the end of the decade they
would have sold over 45 million albums worldwide. Already the fame, wealth and recognition he had so desperately craved were
his in abundance, and professionally new challenges lay ahead.

In his personal life, he had the best of both worlds – something he managed to maintain almost to the end of his life. Mary
Austin, although no longer his sexual partner, still loved him and worked closely with him in her role with Goose Productions.
At the same time he indulged in the sexual freedom that he had exchanged their relationship for. With his escalating drug
abuse, his existence had become a cliché of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. It was a lifestyle fraught with dangers, some of
which he must have been aware. But not of AIDS. It would not be long, however, before the word would begin to be mentioned
in whispers throughout the gay communities of the world.

Mercury’s intention to keep in touch with Tony Bastin had to be put on hold for the first quarter of 1980. Work at Musicland
Studios, on both Queen’s new album and the
Flash Gordon
soundtrack, kept him in Munich; a situation that suited him. The city’s reputation for a notoriously uninhibited nightlife
was well deserved, and Mercury formed some of his closest friendships there. But weeks of excess, of combining heavy recording
sessions with hectic nightclubbing, had begun to take their toll. It was fortunate that, in March, Mercury had to make a quick
return trip to London.

The new single ‘Save Me’ had been greeted by the rock critics’ usual disdain, but it scarcely mattered. Reviews had long ago
served as the least reliable gauge of the band’s global popularity. ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, in addition to having
topped the US charts, had repeated this success in five other countries. But Mercury’s flying visit to Britain was not business,
nor was it purely pleasure. He was primarily honouring a promise to Kenny Everett to make a rare television appearance on
one of his zany weekly shows. As Everett announced contenders for the ‘British Eurovision Violence Contest’, a leather-clad
Mercury joined him on set, holding a can of carbonated drink. He promptly yanked off the can’s ring pull, so close to Everett
that the fizzy contents spurted all over his face.
‘Good start,’ quipped Everett and carried on talking to the camera. Clearly unscripted, Mercury sprang on the comedian, wrapping
his arms and legs around Everett’s body and unbalancing them both. As they crashed to the studio floor, they rolled around
in a mock brawl.

Mercury’s friendship with Everett would survive into the mid-eighties, but tales would later surface of their acrimonious
split after a bitter row over drugs. This, however, appears to owe more to fiction than fact. In 1995 Kenny Everett died of
AIDS, but his agent, Jo Gurnett, says, ‘Kenny admired Freddie like mad and adored everything he did. They were very good friends.
Their falling out is a bit of a grey area, but I know that it was a minor disagreement between them, after which they just
seemed to drift apart.’

‘Freddie’s career took him away a lot, and certainly Ev’s television work occupied most of his time, too. Kenny didn’t see
Freddie latterly. He would have liked to, but it was just one of those things. Then Freddie was too sick, and Kenny himself
was too sick … I remember Kenny, in the late stages of his illness, when he knew he was dying, saying about Freddie and their
lost closeness, “Oh, well, we’ll all be up there together, and maybe then we will make it up.”’

For some time Mercury’s London base had been a comfortable flat at 12 Stafford Terrace in Kensington, but he had succumbed
to the lure of owning a status symbol luxury mansion. He had no desire actually to move house – content simply to possess
something sumptuous of his own. Mary Austin had been watching the property market for him, and as it appears that Mercury
was unwilling to move out of Kensington, this narrowed his options. Still Austin found a house that hooked him immediately.

Garden Lodge, 1 Logan Place, was a splendid twenty-eight-room Georgian mansion, set in a quarter-acre of manicured garden
and surrounded by a high brick wall. Mercury went to
view it and stepped first into the large entrance hall, dominated by the sweep of an elegant staircase. This alone was enough
to win his heart. Everything had been built to the grand scale that the star adored. Massive double doors flanked the hallway
and opened into well-lit spacious rooms. One room, in particular, was spectacular, with long artist-studio windows at one
end and a minstrels’ gallery at the other. The extensive garden ensured an appealing degree of privacy, and he swiftly decided
to buy, paying £500,000 for it in cash. Garden Lodge had formerly belonged to Hoares, a banking family. As the new owner,
Mercury impudently christened it ‘the whore house’. He had great plans for extensive renovations, which he immediately set
in motion. He then returned to pick up the reins of his life in Munich.

On 30 May ‘Play the Game’ became Queen’s latest single. It fared respectably in the UK charts, but when its video was released,
many fans were clearly unhappy. Their familiar Mercury was slipping away from them – replaced by a singer with cropped hair,
no nail varnish and, what seemed to many the last straw, sporting a bushy moustache. In protest they flooded the band’s Notting
Hill office with gifts of disposable razors and bottles of black varnish. But Mercury proved impervious to the message.

When
The Game
followed a month later, their discontent grew. Queen had always boasted that they did not use synthesisers to create their
music, yet on this album they had done so. Having made such an issue of avoiding this device, many of their devotees felt
let down. They were not prepared to be persuaded by what they saw as the band’s excuse that they had wanted to experiment
with new technology. Not insensitive to their fans’ wishes, still Mercury agreed with the others that it would be unwise to
be restricted by the past.

A part of his own past was at this time threatening to return. Mary Austin had played a key role in realising Mercury’s desire
to own a property of note and was closely involved in all the renovations at Garden Lodge. Perhaps affected by this surface
display of domesticity, Austin appears to have wished to rekindle their old romance. She is said to have asked Mercury to
give her a child. But, when he’d ended their physical relationship, Mercury reputedly told her, ‘I still love you, but I can’t
make love to you.’

For Mercury, four years on, that clearly hadn’t changed, and his response to Mary Austin’s very intimate request was gently
to decline. ‘I’d rather have another cat,’ he said, which was not a facetious snub; his passion for cats was real and in time
he owned about eight of them.