by Mark Blake
It would prove to be a difficult time for the family: living in modest circumstances in a cold, unfamiliar country where they were now immigrants. According to his family, Freddie was delighted to be in England. During those difficult early months, it was he that stayed upbeat, encouraging his parents and convincing them that they had made the right move. Like India, Zanzibar was now a memory. Freddie would never go back. Later, when friends wheedled information out of him, Mercury recalled his birthplace without affection. ‘I’d ask him, “What was it like in Zanzibar? It must have been so exciting,”’ said one old confidante, ‘and he’d say, “Dirty place! Filthy place, dear.”’
Freddie now had to decide what he was going to do with his life. ‘He knew we wanted him to be a lawyer or an accountant, because most of his cousins were,’ said Jer Bulsara. ‘But he’d say, “I’m not that clever, Mum. I’m not that clever.”’ Subash Shah insists that Freddie never completed his education in Zanzibar because of the revolution. In England, Bulsara was desperate to attend art school; partly, it seemed, because many English pop stars had done so. However, his lack of qualifications was an issue. In September 1964, the eighteen-year-old Freddie began an arts foundation course at Isleworth Polytechnic. If successful, it would give him the A-level he needed to be accepted at Ealing Technical College and School of Art, alma mater of The Who guitarist Pete Townshend.
According to one of Mercury’s friends, ‘Freddie wished his life had begun aged twenty-one in Feltham.’ This is supported by the fact that he never referred to his time at Isleworth Polytechnic in any interview. Yet his stint at the college formed a crucial two years in his adult life. A 35-minute bus ride from his family home, the Polytechnic finally brought him into contact with the music, films, drama and fashions he had only read about from thousands of miles away. There were eight other students on Freddie’s arts foundation course, including Adrian Morrish, Brian Fanning and Patrick Connolly. ‘We all met at induction and were put into a class together,’ recalls Adrian Morrish now. ‘Freddie, Brian Fanning and I all became close friends. My first impression of Fred was that he was charmingly shy, but also very engaging.’
Initially, Freddie stood out from his fellow students on account of his clothes and hair. ‘He dressed weirdly in drainpipe trousers that weren’t quite long enough and middle-aged jackets that were slightly too small,’ remembers Adrian. ‘I suppose he’d brought those clothes with him from Zanzibar or India. He seemed very gauche, but he desperately wanted to fit in.’
‘He struck me as quite lonely at first,’ offers Patrick Connolly. ‘But I liked him because he was sensitive and caring and not quite so jack-the-lad as some of the others. You could tell he’d come from a cultured background, and was just seeking a way for himself to develop.’ What soon became apparent to his college mates was their new friend’s musical ability. ‘During break-time we would drift into the assembly hall,’ recalls another ex-Isleworth student Geoff Latter. ‘Fred was always playing this upright piano. He’d never sit at it. He would always stand. He could play our favourite pop songs by ear. I was into surf music, especially The Beach Boys. So he’d do “I Get Around” for me. He could just play it, off pat.’
‘He’d hear a pop song on the radio in the morning before college, then come in and play it on the piano,’ adds Patrick Connolly. ‘Then he’d go, “But we can do this or we can do that?” and start improvising, to try and make it sound better.’
Intriguingly, the issue of the name change comes up again. Brian Fanning insists that the name Fred (rather than Freddie) was given to him at Isleworth: ‘His name was Farrokh, but he felt that an Anglofied name would help his integration. I recall it seemed to be an important issue for him. So he was christened collectively by us as “Fred”.’
Lectures at the Polytechnic were broken up by trips to the local cafe and pub (‘Fred and I would run a critique on the latest jukebox offerings,’ remembers Fanning, ‘things like Otis Redding’s “My Girl”’). Though in Adrian Morrish’s case, lectures were sometime skipped altogether. ‘There was one occasion when I was so engrossed in a young lady’s charms that I decided to miss Liberal Studies. Freddie burst into the student common room, mob-handed, and he and a couple of others physically lifted me up and carried me into the lecture room. Freddie was always telling me off. His favourite phrase was always this rather effeminate, exasperated “Oh, Adrian!”’
By Christmas 1964 Freddie had joined the Polytechnic’s youth choir (Brian Fanning had a tape of the choir’s performance, sadly lost) and appeared in the role of Dimitri in The Kitchen. ‘He was rather nervous and unsure, but, at the same time, you could tell he loved doing it,’ says Morrish. ‘He liked the attention and he liked being onstage because he was also quite full of himself. That was the first indication we had that he could also be an exhibitionist.’
Alan Hill appeared alongside Freddie in The Kitchen and again in a later college production Spectrum, ‘a theatrical review,’ as Hill remembers: ‘It was made up of all different pieces. In one, we were supposed to be punting along a river in a boat. In another, we were doing a mime of undying love for this woman.’
Morrish and Connolly both spent time at the Bulsaras’ house in Gladstone Avenue. ‘We’d sit in his room and play records and talk about the things teenagers talk about,’ says Morrish. ‘I recall him showing me his father’s stamp collection, which had these stamps with printing errors that made them very valuable. Later on, I think they were auctioned as Freddie’s collection, but I always remember them being his father’s.’
Fred also opened up to Patrick Connolly about his background: ‘He told me what luxuries his family had in Zanzibar, how he’d lived in a house with an ivory-white piano. I think there were times when he missed the life they’d had.’ There was also a darker side to the memories. ‘After the revolution, Fred said his father was under threat and was told that if he didn’t leave, the rebels would cut his father’s head off.’
Undeterred, Freddie was eager to socialise outside of the college (‘Dances, clubs, parties, as many as possible,’ recalls Alan Hill), although this sometimes meant falling foul of his parents. His sister Kashmira Cooke later remembered her brother and mother ‘arguing about it constantly, but he was determined to do what he wanted. There was quite a lot of door slamming.’
‘A friend of mine remembers us picking Freddie up from his house in my friend’s car to go to a gig,’ says Morrish. ‘His parents took a very dim view of the idea, and he stormed out of the house.’
To fund his social life, Freddie found part-time work through Alan Hill. ‘I used to design the artwork for the National Boys’ Club magazine,’ he says. ‘Fred wanted to earn a bit of money, so because I had the contacts I got him some work, doing layouts.’ However, Patrick Connolly is less sure about how suited he was to the job: ‘To be honest, Fred was no great artist. He didn’t have a clue. The thing about Isleworth Polytechnic was that you didn’t have to be very good, you just had to show an interest in the subject. Art was never his thing. Fred’s thing was always music and singing and being onstage.’
Through 1964 and 1965, The Crown folk club in Twickenham staged performances from the likes of Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Duster Bennett. The Eel Pie Island Hotel had once been known for its jazz and big-band acts, but now played host to the fledgling Rolling Stones and Yardbirds, The Tridents (featuring the young guitarist Jeff Beck), Howlin’ Wolf and the Butterfield Blues Band. Once an ornate building, now crumbling into disrepair (George Melly once likened it to ‘something from a Tennessee Williams novel’), it was situated on an isle on a stretch of the River Thames in Twickenham, accessible only by a footbridge. The hotel was a short trip from Isleworth, and became an occasional haunt for Freddie’s crowd on Sunday evenings.
‘Fred joined us at Eel Pie a couple of times,’ says Brian Fanning. ‘We went to see Rod Stewart, Long John Baldry and tap-dancing one-man band Jesse Fuller. But even then Fred left early and sober … or comparatively sober.’ Also at Eel
Pie that night was a friend from outside the college, Ray Pearl. ‘Fred left Eel Pie early as he wanted to practise his piano,’ recalls Pearl now. ‘In my memory, he was quiet and retiring and culturally very different from his college mates.’ Ray Pearl’s diary from 1965 offers a tiny glimpse into Freddie Bulsara’s social life that year: ‘It’s all stuff like: “Went with Bri, Ade and Fred etc to the National Gallery and saw a great exhibition” and “Saw The Knack [film] in Hounslow with Ade, Shelagh [another Isleworth student] and Fred. Had a laff!”’
Although he was still compliant enough to appease his mother and go home early for music practice, by drinking in pubs, watching groups and frequenting college parties, Freddie was being, as Brian Fanning puts it, ‘a curious sponge soaking up all the influences’. ‘Fred was never at the centre of things in terms of drawing attention to himself,’ elaborates Fanning. ‘But he was trying to pick up as much as he could on the new culture that he was so desperate to become a part of.’ Freddie was similarly eager to see something of England beyond his tiny corner of suburban West London. On the Easter weekend of 1965, Fanning, Morrish and Pearl planned to take him on a hitchhiking trip to John O’Groats. Whether it was parental intervention or a genuine illness that intervened, Freddie told his friends he had flu and never made the trip.
Two months later, Brian Fanning bought an 8mm cine camera to college. Over two days he shot around three minutes of silent footage of Freddie, Adrian and others fooling around in the grounds of the Polytechnic. As film was so expensive, Brian saved money by shooting only single-frame sequences at a time. Freddie features in three or four clips, still wearing the ‘middle-aged jacket’ that Adrian Morrish remembers, but with the quiff grown out and teased into a Beatle fringe. In one scene he slips his top lip over his teeth to conceal them; in another he flaps his arms in an almost identical gesture to one used onstage with Queen. What Fred doesn’t look like is a pop star. As Ray Pearl puts it: ‘Where did that extrovert butterfly come from?’
Neither Adrian Morrish nor Brian Fanning recall Freddie ever having girlfriends of his own while at the Polytechnic. ‘But neither do I recall him giving any impression of being gay,’ insists Brian. ‘But then there was less acceptance in those days.’ However, Alan Hill’s memories differ: ‘Fred was very interested in the opposite sex,’ he says. ‘When I went out with a girl, he used to go out with her afterwards.’
By 1966, the end of his time at the Polytechnic, Freddie had swapped the outmoded clothes for more fashionable threads. He’d also lost some of the gaucheness he’d had when he’d first enrolled. ‘He’d changed his look by the end of Isleworth,’ remembers Hill. ‘It was all Levi jackets by then. That was the look. I had a white Levi jacket and he was forever borrowing it. I think he wore it more than I did. Before we went out together, he was always preening himself and plumping up his hair in the mirror. We were always saying, “Come on, you look good, Fred, you look good. Now let’s go!”’
Fred was also showing an interest in making music again. He and another student, would-be sculptor Paul Martin, remembered by Patrick Connolly as a ‘keen guitarist’, had begun meeting at Gladstone Avenue and, as Connolly recalls, trying to write songs together.
‘The three of us would sit around his piano and sing,’ says Patrick. ‘A favourite, believe it or not, was “Puff The Magic Dragon” [a 1963 hit for the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary]. Paul could play, I couldn’t sing, but Fred’s enthusiasm brought us together. He’d actually encourage me: “Look, Patrick, you’re singing, you can do it.”’ Years later, Jer Bulsara recounted finding ideas for songs written on scraps of paper, which Fred would put under his pillow before heading off to college in the morning. (‘He’d say, “Don’t throw it away, Mum, it’s very important.”’)
Also by 1966, the student union was booking bands for dances at the Polytechnic. That year saw the Mike Cotton Sound and the Graham Bond Organisation playing the college hall. With Patrick Connolly and Paul Martin’s help, Freddie decided to audition musicians for a group of his own. ‘I designed a poster and we sent it to all the colleges and schools in the area, anywhere we could think of,’ reveals Connolly. ‘I was interested in marketing rather than the music, but we had quite a response. Thinking back, that was quite something in the days before mobile phones and the internet.’ Patrick can recall as many as forty would-be musicians turning up to be quizzed by Freddie in a room at the Polytechnic. ‘There was this one amazing guitarist that I remember Fred really liked. Yes, of course, years later, I always wondered if it was Brian May …’ Regrettably, any further information on the Isleworth auditions has faded from the memories of those involved. ‘Keen guitarist’ Paul Martin never re-surfaced in the lives of any of Freddie’s classmates, and Patrick Connolly can never recall any group coming together from the auditions.
Freddie graduated from Isleworth Polytechnic with the precious A-level he needed for art school. But it was not easily acquired. His coursework painting of a crucifixion scene had been finished with a little help from his friend. ‘I ended up doing some of the figures for him,’ admits Patrick Connolly. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that.’
By Easter of 1966 Dusty Springfield’s ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’ was blasting out of the pub jukebox where ‘Fred, Ade and Bri’ had once held their lunchtime music critique sessions. Three months later, British blues singer John Mayall would release his Bluesbreakers album, showcasing the prodigious talents of guitarist Eric Clapton. On 10 December 1966, Freddie and friends attended Isleworth Polytechnic’s Christmas College Dance. The group booked to play were Clapton’s new outfit Cream. They were paid £600 and had to be dragged out of the nearby pub during the interval to complete the second half of their set.
Before they both left to take up their places at art school, Freddie and Alan Hill accompanied two female friends to a college party. Once there, fuelled by loud music and booze, Freddie’s attention was increasingly drawn to another female guest. His date for the night was not best pleased. Freddie’s ardour, not to mention his carefully teased hair-do, was dampened when she emptied a pint of beer over his head. ‘The extrovert butterfly’ was starting to emerge from his cocoon.
On 16 December another influence crashed into Freddie Bulsara’s life in the form of black American guitarist Jimi Hendrix, who made his UK TV debut on the pop show Ready Steady Go. It offered suburban England its first sighting of a musical force of nature. Just three days after arriving in the capital, Hendrix, then a complete unknown, had jammed with the house band at the Speakeasy club. Here, he’d torn into a version of The Troggs’ pop hit ‘Wild Thing’ and a cover of the folk-rock standard ‘Hey Joe’, splattering both songs with wild solos and howling feedback.
Within weeks, word of Hendrix’s revelatory appearance had spread among the capital’s musicians. In London, Hendrix recruited an English drummer and bassist to form the The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Paul McCartney and John Lennon were among the musicians crowding London night spots such as Blaises and the Bag o’ Nails that summer watching Hendrix make, to quote one eyewitness, ‘everyone’s fillings fall out’. In October, Hendrix joined Cream onstage at London’s Regent Street Polytechnic. Earlier in the year, the words ‘Clapton is God’ had been spray-painted on a wall near a North London train station. That night, though, in Clapton’s words, ‘Hendrix beat me, hands down!’
Freddie’s attraction to Jimi Hendrix was instant: his playing, his clothes, his hair, his colour, his music … everything about Jimi was fascinating. ‘He really had everything any rock ’n’ roll star should have – style, presence …’ said Mercury later. ‘He’d just make an entrance and the whole place would be on fire. He was living out everything I wanted to be.’
Brian May’s house isn’t the most ostentatious in the country lane. That accolade goes to his next-door neighbour, an Arab sheik, whose property is flanked by forbidding gates and a state-of-the-art security camera. May’s own nineteenth-century country retreat, in the
same Surrey village of Wyndlesham that Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York calls home, is less imposing. But then as the guitarist often says, ‘I’m not very good at being a rock star.’
It is June 1998, May has a solo album to promote, but will patiently submit to the usual round of questions about Queen and, especially, their late singer Freddie Mercury. Today, he will admit that, yes, he does still have dreams about Freddie, and will pinpoint the exact seat on the number 9 London bus that the singer occupied during his regular journeys twenty-five years earlier.
Inside the house, the first thing you notice are the guitars and amps propped up around the living area, and the absence of what interior designers might condescendingly describe as ‘a woman’s touch’. May reveals that his partner, the actress Anita Dobson, is away ‘doing a play’ and that she rarely visits this house. In an adjacent workshop, his homemade guitar, the cherished ‘Red Special’, is being taken apart and reassembled; a process that, you suspect, leaves the guitarist feeling a little vulnerable. May still sports the snug jeans, the garish shirts and, of course, the hair that have become his recognisable uniform. Other things remain unchanged also. When he first lopes into the room, Brian’s opening gambit is to complain of a cold (‘I feel a bit fluey’). It’s an excuse he’s used more than once before in interviews.
But he is a paragon of politeness and good manners, and displays none of the airs and graces you suspect Freddie Mercury might have been prone to in a similar situation. But May is one of life’s worriers. Being the lead guitarist in one of the most successful rock bands of all time may have bought him recognition, money, the adoration of fans and the respect of fellow musicians, but you sense that at no time has he ever sat back and just relished it all. At this stage in his career, the notion of Queen going back on the road with another singer seems incomprehensible. But without Queen, Brian May sometimes seems a little lost. ‘I’d like to be viewed as something alive and relevant,’ he says, with a rather harried look. ‘Not some fossil.’
