Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (10 page)

Living on the fringes of the world’s most exciting city made Freddie restless and rebellious. He wished more than ever that he could afford to leave home and soon took to crashing on a series of friends’ floors.

“Fred lived like a gypsy,” Brian May would recall.

He wanted it all and he wanted it now, right on his doorstep: the fashion boutiques, the record stores and bookshops, the music venues, pubs and clubs. Trendy Kensington Market and the celebrated Biba emporium would soon become his stamping ground.

Ealing College of Art boasted several famous alumni, not least the Who’s Pete Townshend and Ronnie Wood of the Faces, later a Rolling Stone. Former student Jerry Hibbert remembers the place as both progressive and practical, the kind of college that produced graduates ready for the workplace. Arriving there from Oxford, he started two years below Freddie in 1968 but got to know him well through shared musical interests.

“Ealing College was going through many changes at that time,” Jerry remembers.

“New York’s advertising center Madison Avenue was the big thing. It influenced our lifestyle, right down to the way we dressed. We wanted to look like New York ad execs. We cut our hair short and came to college in suits and ties, because hippies were everywhere and art students
like to do something different. It was all pretty stylized. We even had a thing about the way we walked. We were definitely not your Union Bar–type students, all rugby-playing and beer-swilling. The college restaurant was our social center and gathering place. Freddie—he was still Freddie Bulsara in those days—used to hang out there with us all. He was definitely one for style and clothes. He was always very conscious of the way he looked.”

“Art school teaches you to be more fashion-conscious,” Freddie would later remark. “Always that one step ahead.”

Bored by course work, and lacking both discipline and diligence, Freddie quickly lost interest in his studies. He enjoyed, however, the more hedonistic aspects of college life. During lessons, he spent most of his time sketching portraits of his classmates and of his new idol Jimi Hendrix, whose influence was to change Freddie’s life. The African American from Seattle, just four years Freddie’s senior, had been discovered in New York by Chas Chandler, the Animals’ bass player. Persuading the Beatles, Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton to turn up at the “in” clubs to watch his outrageously talented protégé play, Chandler quickly built a huge following for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, which also comprised drummer Mitch Mitchell and bass player Noel Redding. The American left his rivals speechless. Performing tricks he’d picked up from a string of nameless musicians, Hendrix played his white Fender Stratocaster upside down, behind his neck and seemingly with his teeth, displaying a breathtaking range of techniques. Although many subsequent rock guitarists would take the instrument in other directions, few would ever equal Hendrix’s brilliance.

“Jimi Hendrix was just a beautiful man, a master showman, and a dedicated musician,” Freddie would later remark.

“I would scour the country to see him whenever he played because he really had everything any rock ’n’ roll star should have: all the style and the presence. He didn’t have to force anything. He’d just make an entrance and the whole place would be on fire. He was living out everything I wanted to be.”

Freddie’s ambition was crystallized. While still as enthusiastic as ever about the rock ’n’ roll musicians who had thrilled him at school, he was bowled over by Hendrix, and set about reinventing himself in the American rocker’s image. Just as Jimi’s guitar work challenged conventional expectation, Freddie’s future songwriting, arranging, and vocal techniques must do the same. Hendrix’s stage presence and outrageous style left them gasping in the aisles. Freddie knew he had to do likewise. Hendrix was wildly original, performed innovatively, and was so energetic that he exhausted his audiences. Freddie was determined to have the same effect on his own fans someday. Hendrix could take any song, even something mundane, and make it sound as if it were his own unique composition. In 1986 I was to witness Freddie do likewise, live on stage in Budapest, when he brought tears to the eyes of thousands with his rendition of a simple Hungarian folk ballad. The foreign lyrics scrawled on his hand could not have meant less to him. The melody sounded nothing like a rock song. But Freddie performed it as if he meant it, from the heart. The audience was spellbound.

Back in Kensington, the drab walls of his tiny flat plastered with images of his idol, Freddie applied himself assiduously to perfecting the Hendrix style. Brightly colored floral jackets over black or multicolored shirts, skinny colored pants, Chelsea boots, chiffon scarves knotted at the Adam’s apple, chunky silver rings. According to fellow student Graham Rose, “What he wore was no different from what we were all wearing at that time. On the whole, Freddie was a quiet guy, although he was prone to fits of giggles. When that happened, he would put his hand right over his mouth to cover up those huge teeth of his. I remember him as a terrific bloke, very sweet and considerate. There wasn’t a nasty streak in him. A lot of us were very pleased when he went on to become such a great success.”

Jerry Hibbert agrees that Freddie did not stand out at college.

“Except that he was very keen on singing. He used to sit at his desk and sing. He was in the next room from me, and a year or two above. He sat opposite his mate Tim Staffell, and they used to sing together,
in harmony. That was very strange, since at that time we were all into blues stuff. John Mayall and Eric Clapton, pre-Cream. We became quite obsessed with all the underlying influences. For example, we no longer wanted to see Eric Clapton play “Hideaway,” we were more interested in seeing Freddie King play it. Freddie Bulsara definitely had an interest in all that, along with the rest of us. So sitting in class singing harmonies made him look a bit ridiculous. It was out of kilter with what everyone else was doing. That didn’t appear to bother him or Tim. They’d sit there working away, and they’d be singing together.”

“Music was always a sideline, and that sort of grew,” remarked Freddie later.

“When I’d finished with the illustrating course, I was sick of it. I’d had it up to
here
. I thought, I don’t think I can make a career of this, because my mind just wasn’t on that kind of thing. So I thought I would just play around with the music side of it for a while. Everybody wants to be a star, so I just thought that if I could make a go if it, why not?”

As for Freddie’s personality, Jerry refutes the idea that he was any kind of attention seeker.

“No, he wasn’t like that. He was the nicest possible guy. Nor did I have any idea that he was gay. He showed no signs of that at all. He was quiet, friendly. Always polite, always nice. The sort of lad your mum might say was ‘well brought up.’ He used to lark about and sing, using a ruler as a pretend microphone, but that was just for laughs.”

After both had left college, Freddie broke his usual rule of not keeping in touch with people once he had moved on from a stage in his life. He and Jerry maintained their friendship for quite some time.

“It was because of the music,” Jerry explains. “I used to play blues: at college, at parties, at other people’s flats. Freddie would come down and join in. This was in the days before people played records at parties. If you wanted music, you’d get a band in.”

Freddie would eventually confide in Jerry about his dream to pursue a career in music.

“After Freddie left college, I was in a band for about two years.
He came round one day and told me that he was going to concentrate on getting a band together. I told him, ‘Don’t do it, stick to graphics. There’s no money in music. Stick to what you know.’ ”

But Freddie had made up his mind.

“I did see him after that—I bought some equipment, or sold him some, I can’t remember which. He came back to play at college with a group called Wreckage. I didn’t think much of them, to be honest. After that, we just lost touch.”

Jerry went into animation, joining one of the many outfits who worked on the Beatles’ full-length feature,
Yellow Submarine
.

“I completely lost interest in music,” he admits. “I found myself hating everything. Never bought any records, never went to see any bands. About four years later I heard a DJ on the radio talking about a band called Queen. ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ was their first hit. Not bad. But I simply didn’t associate the name Freddie Mercury with my mate Freddie Bulsara from Ealing College. Suddenly there was a lot of publicity. You couldn’t miss him. I was walking past a newsagent’s one day and I happened to see his photo on the front page of
Melody Maker
. A huge picture, with a screaming headline. I stared at it and thought:
Bloody hell, that’s Freddie Bulsara
.”

Quite by chance, Jerry would later collaborate on a project for Queen towards the end of Freddie’s life, but he was never to set eyes on his college friend again.

5

The idea of Queen was conceived by me whilst studying at college. Brian, who was also at college, liked the idea and we joined forces. The very earliest traces of the band go back to a group called Smile. I used to follow Smile a lot, and we became friends. I used to go to their shows, and they used to come to see mine.

Freddie Mercury

To begin with, he was this absolute nerd. A toothy nerd, who grew into his own fantasy. The classic cygnet who turned into a swan. Any band would give their bass and drum away for a singer like Freddie. No one could really match him. Bowie was the only one who came close.

David Stark: publisher, Songlink International, rock aficionado, and drummer

T
he two-part
classroom harmonies had graduated to three-part when Freddie and fellow college crooner Tim Staffell took to hanging out with another student, Nigel Foster. Spending much of their spare time perfecting versions of “Hey Joe,” “Purple Haze,” and “The Wind Cries Mary,” all British Top Ten hits for Jimi Hendrix, these private jam sessions, held ostensibly for their own amusement, would soon bring them to the attention of the boys who would be Queen.

For a while, Tim and Freddie were inseparable. Tim and their other college mates were only vaguely aware of Freddie’s background and of the circumstances that had brought the Bulsaras to England. Since Freddie never took friends home, they were left with the impression that his parents were aloof and reluctant to integrate or adapt. It was even rumored, erroneously, that they barely spoke English, and that they were determined to keep their culture, religion, and language untainted and separate. In fact, Freddie had spoken English since toddlerhood.

By this time, Tim was playing regularly with a semiprofessional band called Smile. Freddie started tagging along to rehearsals. Smile’s lead guitarist was Brian May, a gangly physics, maths, and astronomy student at lofty Imperial College. Unbeknown to either of them, he and Freddie had been virtual neighbors in Feltham, Brian having grown up in a modest home not unlike Freddie’s, just a few streets from the Bulsaras’ house on Gladstone Avenue. Brian, a studious only child, had been playing guitar since the age of six. While still at school and with the help of his father, Harold, he had carved his own Red Special guitar from a discarded mahogany fireplace and some cuts of oak. He played this with silver sixpenny pieces in place of the conventional plectrum. The guitar would later accompany him all over the world.

Brian, like Freddie, had dabbled in amateur bands with school-friends.

“None of the groups really got anywhere, because we never played any real gigs or took it that seriously,” Brian said.

It was at a local dance one evening that he and his pals spotted Tim Staffell, a lad from their school, who stood singing and humming on a harmonica at the back of the hall. They asked him to join their group, and he fronted 1984 at their first official gig in St. Mary’s Church Hall in Twickenham. Showing considerable promise, they were hired, in May 1967, as support act to Jimi Hendrix at an Imperial College gig. A few months later, they won a competition at Croydon’s Top Rank Club. A professional career looked half-set.