Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (7 page)

In 2006, the Association for Islamic Mobilisation and Propagation (UAMSHO), a Zanzibar Muslim group, protested vociferously against plans to celebrate Freddie’s sixtieth birthday on the island. Claiming that he had violated Islam with his openly gay, flamboyant lifestyle until his untimely death in 1991 from AIDS, the angry group called for a “gay-tourist” beach party to be scrapped, and for thousands of fans heading for the celebration from every part of the world to be sent packing.

It hardly came as a surprise. When Zanzibar officially outlawed gay relations in 2004, the move attracted criticism from gay communities everywhere. But UAMSHO head Abdallah Said Ali insisted defiantly that the event would “send out the wrong signals.”

“We do not want to give our young generation the idea that homosexuals are accepted in Zanzibar,” he said. “We have a religious obligation to protect morals in society, and anyone who corrupts Islamic morals should be stopped.”

Islamic morals notwithstanding, there had long been the faith of Freddie’s own family to consider. He loved and respected his parents and sister with all his heart. He also knew too well that orthodox Zoroastrians support the suppression of homosexuality—perhaps the primary reason why Freddie tried for so long to suppress his own inclinations. In the sacred Zoroastrian text the
Vendidad
, it is stated: “The man that lies with mankind as man lies with womankind, or as a woman lies with
mankind, is a man that is a Daeva (demon): this man is a worshipper of the Daevas, a male paramour of the Daevas.”

For Parsees, homosexuality is not only sinful, but a form, unimaginably, of devil worship.

Let’s see this in context. Consensual homosexual activity between adults remains illegal in some 70 of the 195 countries of the world. In 40 of these, only male-male sex is outlawed. Sexual acts between two adult males became legal in England and Wales in 1967, but not until 1980 in Scotland, and 1982 in Northern Ireland. During the eighties and nineties, gay rights organizations lobbied for the age of consent for heterosexuals and homosexuals to be equalized. Today, the age of consent in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland is sixteen.

“Freddie did not live like us,” his cousin Diana had said. “He was of another life.”

Naked truth, better than the best-dressed lie. Freddie had apparently forsaken his African homeland for the most fundamental of reasons.

Perhaps what he felt in his heart was
hiraeth
. No single word translates its ancient Welsh meaning. What it evokes is melancholy, a deeply rooted sadness for what is lost. Did Freddie, like most of us, secretly mourn his spent innocence, longing for chapters of his past he could no longer reach?

Sometimes we go back. We revisit. We console our adult selves with quiet remembrance. Freddie never could. He would always have to fill the void elsewhere. Some believe he made peace with his past in “Seven Seas of Rhye,” the band’s first hit, in 1974. A hard-rock anthem on an otherwise progressive album, its lyrics were based on a fantasy realm created by young Freddie with his little sister Kashmira. Could it have been the mysteries of their Persian roots, and in particular the prophet Zarathustra’s epic journey, which fueled their flights of fancy and inspired their fairy tales of Rhye? It seems likely, according to BBC Radio 2 producer, music archivist, and renowned record collector Phil Swern.

“It has always been my impression, from remarks he made in interviews over the years, that ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ was about his life in
Zanzibar,” says Phil. “It was where he escaped to—in his mind, at least. He always had that, when reality got too much.”

In one radio interview, Freddie described the song’s subject as “a figment of my imagination.”

“My lyrics and songs are mainly fantasies,” he said. “I make them up. They are not down to earth, they’re kind of airy-fairy really. I’m not one of those writers who walks out onto the street and is suddenly inspired by a vision, and I’m not one of those people who wants to go on safari to get inspiration from wild animals around me, or go up onto mountaintops or things like that. No, I can get inspiration just sitting in the bath.”

Whatever else, Rhye proved to be a recurring theme. Other early Queen songs also featured the fantasy land, such as “Lily of the Valley,” “The March of the Black Queen,” and “My Fairy King.” Its allure was to prove ever further-reaching and enduring. In Queen’s futuristic jukebox stage musical
We Will Rock You
, which debuted in London in 2002, the Seven Seas of Rhye is a place to which the rebel Bohemians are transported after being brain-wiped by Khashoggi, commander of the Globalsoft police.

As the final bars of “Seven Seas of Rhye” fade, an old English bucket-and-spade ditty crooned by a raucous saloon bar crowd echoes fleetingly: “Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside.” Further allusion to Freddie’s once carefree beach life, to the palm-fringed, pristine coral reefs of youth?

We can’t know. What we know is that there could never have been a welcome in the hillside for the man who fractured the code of his family’s faith.

3

I was . . . a precocious child, and my parents thought boarding school would do me good. So when I was about seven, I was put in one in India for a while. It was an upheaval of an upbringing, which seems to have worked, I guess.

Freddie Mercury

Freddie’s parents sent him away to school in India, and it saddened me greatly to see him go. But here in Zanzibar at that time, the standard of education for boys was not so good. Also, I believe it was about the same time as his parents were transferred for work to the island of Pemba, and there was certainly nothing of a high enough educational standard there. They felt that the best solution was to send him to Bomi’s sister, also called Fer—my auntie, in Bombay—where he could study properly.

Perviz Darunkhanawala, Freddie’s first cousin

I
n November
1996 I was invited to a cocktail party and private preview of the Freddie Mercury Photographic Exhibition at London’s Royal Albert Hall. It was to commemorate the fifth anniversary of his death. Everyone in the room that night had a direct link to Freddie and Queen—from Marje, Freddie’s cleaning lady, and Ken Testi, the band’s
first-ever manager, to Denis O’Regan, a regular Queen photographer. Freddie’s frail old parents were also there. When I introduced myself, they greeted me warmly. His father Bomi Bulsara held my hand.

“It is wonderful to see all these photographs displayed, and to see all these people here in honor of our dear son. We feel very proud,” he said.

The exhibition would tour the world, visiting numerous relevant cities including Paris, Montreux, and Mumbai. After the London opening, a number of fellow journalists chose to “out” the Great Pretender for having “hidden his Indian roots.” Under headlines such as “Bombay Rhapsody” and “Star of India,” Freddie was “exposed” as Britain’s first Asian pop star. Despite the fact that there was less than a sentence of truth in it, the yarn made several sensational page leads. Freddie’s Persian origins were thus disputed. Widespread discussion ensued. This caused offense within London’s Persian Parsee community. Not that Fleet Street’s finest gave a toss about that.

“Just because our people have not lived in Persia since the ninth century, that does not make us any less Persian,” declared a spokesman for the Parsee community in London.

“While Parsees are described as ‘Indian Zoroastrians,’ we descend from the Persian Zoroastrians who fled to India in the seventh and eighth centuries to escape Muslim persecution. The fact that we migrated to India does
not
make us Indian. If you are a Jew, but your family have not lived in Palestine for the past two thousand years, does that make you less Jewish? There is a great deal of difference between race and nationality. Between roots and citizenship. The Persian Parsee may not have a place to call home [the land which was once their territory being modern-day Iran]. Nonetheless, he remains Persian in his heart.”

As far as Freddie was concerned, you only had to look at him. His classic Persian looks were indisputably at odds with what is commonly considered “Indian.” Every picture, those extra teeth notwithstanding, tells the tale.

Born pre-independence in colonial India, Freddie’s parents Bomi and Jer were both British subjects, their nationality British-Indian. This
was recorded officially, both at the time of their own births, and at that of their son. Significantly, they declared their race to be Parsee. Freddie was born in Zanzibar, so was considered Zanzibari. It must be mooted that he was more African than Asian. “Britain’s first Asian pop star” was stretching it: yet another new hook from which to dangle old frames. Why did his family not object to this blurring of their past, to such dismissal of their sacred heritage? Their behavior has often seemed puzzling.

Quiet and diligent people, unmaterialistic and content with their lot, the Bulsaras did things at a measured pace, observing the rituals, rules, and restrictions of their religion and culture. Both were physically small, almost delicate in build. Freddie took more after his mother in terms of looks, inheriting in particular her full lips, open smile, and unusual teeth. Keeping themselves politely to themselves in public, Bomi and Jer were always kind and convivial behind closed doors, if a little on the restrained side. While they were dutiful family members with a strong sense of tradition and who knew their place, Bomi was neither a dominant role model nor macho hero to his son. More comfortable among the matriarchs of the family, Freddie never showed a shred of inclination to follow in his father’s clerical footsteps. While his mother has said that she was keen for him to study law, the thought of working in an office left him cold.

Being so reserved and undemonstrative, there was little in the way of physical contact between the Bulsaras and their children, as Freddie would later reveal to his lovers Barbara Valentin and Jim Hutton. When the family still lived in Zanzibar, their children were cared for day to day by a nanny, Sabine. While neither Freddie nor Kashmira was chastised with beatings, they were never cuddled much either. According to Jim, Freddie would ponder from time to time whether that lack of affection during his early childhood was what led to a “disproportionate obsession with physical love in adulthood . . . a craving which all too often manifested itself in meaningless sex, because he generally couldn’t get the one without the other. Sex was never a substitute for the thing he
wanted most, which was affection . . . proof that he was loved. He was quite childlike about it. All the petting and stroking which he lavished on the cats, for example: it was what he wanted for himself.”

On 14 February 1955, according to the official school records, when he was only eight years old, Freddie—then still Farrokh—was enrolled as Farookh Bomi Bulsara (note the change in spelling compared to that on his birth certificate) at St. Peter’s Church of England School in Panchgani, where he was admitted to “Class Three.” He would remain there for a decade, seeing his parents only once a year, for a month each summer. Little wonder that his relationship with his mother and father became distant, as evident from the respectful but unemotional letters he wrote to them. Despite the stiff upper lip and brave face that he was encouraged to maintain, it is impossible to imagine that Freddie did not feel vulnerable and lonely so far away from home, without even the luxury of a telephone to enable him to speak to his parents whenever he missed them, which was often.

“He was six when I was born, so I only had a year of him, yet I was always aware of my proud older brother protecting me,” recalled his sister Kashmira in an interview with the
Mail on Sunday
in November 2000.

“He didn’t always come home for the holidays—sometimes he’d stay with my dad’s sister in Bombay, or with my mum’s sister, and it was she who got him started on playing the piano and drawing. He was talented in all areas. It made me feel sick, of course. Mum and Dad kept all his school reports.”