by Mark Blake
The Chase Bridge rehearsals and occasional gigs continued, but minus John Sanger, who’d taken up a place at Manchester University. ‘I had no grand plans to be a musician,’ he said (though he re-joined 1984 years later). The group continued on as a five-piece, with Tim and Brian having weekly rehearsal competitions to see who could hit the highest note. ‘Their ambition was to see who could sing higher than John Lennon,’ recalls Garnham.
Brian was chaperoned to school halls and youth clubs in his dad’s Javelin, while the older ‘Jag’ transported as much of the group’s equipment as he could cram into his Isetta bubble car. ‘My dad used to take my drums in the car,’ remembers Richard Thompson. But on one occasion, the band came close to losing a vital piece of equipment. ‘Before one gig we arranged to meet Brian on Putney Bridge,’ says Thompson. ‘We picked him up, drove to the venu and when we got there Brian realised he’d left his guitar, the actual Red Special, on the bridge. We got back there an hour later and, incredibly, there it was, propped up against the bridge where he’d left it. Brian could be a little scatterbrained.’ For a few gigs, Garnham and Dilloway even swapped instruments, with ‘Jag’ playing Dave’s homemade bass. ‘But it was a bit of a plank,’ says Garnham, ‘not of the quality of Brian’s Red Special.’
The ‘schoolboy cabaret’ also faced stiff local competition. ‘There was another popular band in the area called Fire,’ remembers John Garnham (Fire’s guitarist Dave Lambert would later join The Strawbs). ‘We all kept up with what these groups were doing, especially a group called The Others.’ In October 1964 – just as 1984 made their live debut – The Others, a band comprised of five Hampton Grammar pupils, three from the same year as May and Dilloway, released a single, ‘Oh Yeah!’, a song recorded by Bo Diddley. ‘That made them mini-heroes at school,’ recalls Dave, and Garnham adds that ‘they used to do early Stones stuff, things like “Route 66” … they had a bit of attitude.’
‘The Others were big at the time,’ remembered Brian May. ‘They were rebels who weren’t interested in the academic side. And they were very influential to me. I felt very jealous of all those people that were doing it at school, being in semi-professional groups, because all the pressure on me was to keep on with the studies. My parents thought you should stay at home and do your homework … and then go out when you were about twenty years old. I was a bit sheltered really.’
The Others gave the impression of being anything but sheltered. A surviving promotional photograph shows five youths with Brian Jones-style fringes and skinny ties, displaying the same surly demeanour visible on the cover of the first Rolling Stones LP. ‘Oh Yeah!’ was cocky English pop; a schoolboy Yardbirds, with lots of wailing harmonica and faux menace. While The Others would never crack the charts (re-emerging briefly as The Sands three years later), their tougher sound was the antithesis of 1984.
While The Others seemed to have cornered some of the ‘raw sex and anger’ that May so admired in The Yardbirds, Brian himself was still the shrinking violet. ‘He was never an extrovert onstage,’ says Garnham. ‘Brian was a super-brain, a goody two-shoes at school. But he was still a quiet person when he was in the early groups. It always struck me as peculiar that once Queen got going, he was rushing to the front of the stage doing the Pete Townshend windmilling arm and being The Great Rock Guitarist. I used to think, “This is not the same person.” I think Brian’s outward character changed when he was in Queen, but his inward character stayed the same.’
‘Brian was always serious-minded,’ agrees Dave Dilloway. ‘He was never the life and soul. In 1984, Tim and Richard were the loosest characters and the biggest personalities. John was just in it for fun, and I was the bass player …’ He laughs. ‘And we don’t have personalities.’
As Hampton’s other musos passed their exams and headed off to universities, others stepped in to take their place. ‘People started slotting into other groups just to keep things going,’ explains Garnham, whose pre-1984 sparring partner Pete ‘Wooly’ Hammerton would later find himself in The Others. In the meantime, Hammerton and Brian May circled each other on the local youth-cub scene; two hotshot guitarists eager to outplay each other. ‘I wouldn’t like to say who was better but both were well above average skills and speed,’ says Dave Dilloway.
‘There was a competition to see who could play new stuff quickest,’ said Brian. ‘So when the new records came out we would all feverishly study them at home.’ A Swedish instrumental group The Spotnicks offered the ultimate challenge with their 1963 cover of the bluegrass standard ‘Orange Blossom Special’ and another, later, single, ‘Happy Hendrick’s Polka’. ‘We really killed ourselves, trying to play it. We’d make our fingers bleed.’ Only later did they discover that The Spotnicks sped up their tapes in the studio.
This revolving-door policy would find Brian occasionally guesting with The Others, and brought May and Hammerton together for a one-off gig at Shepperton Rowing Club in 1965. ‘Wooly’ handled lead vocals and guitar, with Brian switching to bass and Richard Thompson playing drums. Among The Beatles and Martha and The Vandellas covers and The Others’ ‘I’m Taking Her Home’, the trio tried their hand at a game version of The Who’s ‘My Generation’; a song that, among others by The Yardbirds, would signal a shift in direction for 1984 over the next twelve months.
But in autumn 1965, it was time for 1984, and its star pupil, to move on. Brian May left Hampton Grammar with ten O-levels and four A-levels, in Physics, Applied Mathematics, Pure Mathematics and Additional Mathematics. As being a full-time guitarist was not yet an option, May set his sights set on astrophysics, and was accepted for a three-year degree course in Physics and Infra-Red Astronomy at London’s Imperial College of Science and Technology. Richard had already been working for some time, but John took a job at the BBC, Dave headed off to study electronics at Southampton University, and Tim enrolled on a graphics course at Ealing Technical College and School of Art.
Before Imperial College, though, Brian paid for a new amp by taking a summer-holiday job at the Guided Weapons Research Centre in Feltham. It was a position more suited to his scientific bent than his previous holiday jobs: making windscreen wipers and doling out the wages at a fire extinguisher factory.
For 1984, there began a period of, in Dave Dilloway’s words, ‘rehearsing by letter’. Still, they managed to play most other weekends around the West London suburbs, plugging in at Putney’s Thames Rowing Club, Twickenham’s All Saints Church Hall, Feltham R&B Club … A gig at Southall’s White Hart tavern gave them their first taste of boozy violence, when a fracas broke out in the audience and the police were called; another found them playing behind a barely-clothed female dancer with a snake. Later, they’d break up their three-hour sets by cracking jokes and fooling around onstage with plastic bricks and shaving foam; anything to stand out from the other teenage bands playing the same songs on the same circuit.
The Yardbirds’ ‘Heart Full of Soul’ and ‘I Wish You Would’ had now crept into the set, while Brian’s lightning-fingered rendition of ‘Happy Hendrick’s Polka’ gave the audience something to gawp at when they weren’t dancing. ‘Thousands of people must have seen Brian May playing these small clubs,’ reflects Dave Dilloway, ‘and not had the slightest idea that he was later in Queen.’
Throughout the year, though, it was still a juggling act to rehearse, play live and find time to study. Dave, John and Brian’s parents accepted their sons’ musical hobby, but Tim’s were less impressed by what they called ‘that band nonsense’. At the end of 1965, after a year, Dave Dilloway quit Southampton University and opted for an HND electronics course at Twickenham College of Technology. Being back in West London sped up the process of getting to and from gigs.
May’s college connections also brought 1984 bookings at Imperial, including one at a fancy dress party in the spring of 1966. The following year found them playing marathon sets in an upstairs room at Imperial, keeping the students dancing, while, as Dave Dilloway explains, ‘the main band played the
main hall downstairs’. Dashing between the two rooms during the interval, they found a way to sneak into the main hall without paying, to catch snippets of their rivals’ sets.
During their final years at school, the band members had been regulars at Eel Pie and Richmond’s Station Hotel, watching The Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, The Tridents and The Yardbirds. ‘I saw The Yardbirds at the Marquee, soon after Jeff Beck joined,’ recalled May. ‘Eric Clapton came on and jammed at the end. I’ll never forget it.’ Clapton’s next band, Cream, would make an even greater impression. The trio made their live debut in the summer of 1966, unveiling their first album, Fresh Cream, in December. Like The Jimi Hendrix Experience, with whom they seemed locked in a dead-heat musical race, Cream’s freewheeling sound and virtuosity spun the blues off into myriad directions. Between them, Clapton and Hendrix opened up May’s eyes to a world of musical possibilities.
Not long after Brian saw Hendrix blow The Who offstage at the Saville Theatre, Dave Dilloway witnessed Jimi up close on 1984’s home turf: Hounslow’s Ricky Tick Club. ‘A club smaller than the local village hall,’ says Dave. ‘The PA was a pair of four-by-twelves and a Marshall stack. Incredible.’ Before long, Clapton and Hendrix’s influence would be felt in 1984, with the latter’s ‘Stone Free’ stripped into the set. ‘Brian’s influences changed dramatically from The Beatles to Hendrix and Cream,’ remembers John Garnham. ‘But I still had this thing in 1984 that we should do songs that people could dance to, which wasn’t true of, say [Cream’s] “Sunshine of Your Love”. I played that crash-bang-wallop Chuck Berry style. I couldn’t play the fancy Eric Clapton stuff, but Brian could.’ As we had a guitarist who could play Clapton and Hendrix, that’s what we did,’ adds Dave Dilloway. ‘We muddled along, gradually moving with the music of the time.’
A February 1967 article in the local newspaper, the Middlesex Chronicle, found Tim Staffell in an effusive mood, proclaiming that ‘psychedelic music is here to stay’. In keeping with the psychedelic era, electronics whizz Dilloway was now experimenting with a primitive light show, inspired by the up-and-coming Pink Floyd. But 1984’s student grants would hardly run to the oil slides and projectors Floyd were using. ‘Our lighting rig was very basic. We had the ideas and the technological know-how, but we didn’t have the money,’ laughs Dave. ‘We couldn’t afford bigger bulbs! We used to get paid peanuts but everything we earned we ploughed back into the band. All the time Brian was with us, we didn’t even have a PA: just two AC30 amps.’
If, as they freely admitted, 1984 was ‘always small-time’, during Brian May’s final months in the band, they were lurching closer still to their musical idols. Dave Dilloway’s course at Twickenham had introduced him to trainee technicians at Thames Television’s studios in Teddington. The studio had invested in new equipment and needed a group to test it. Dilloway offered 1984. On 31 March, the group spent a day playing musical guinea pigs (minus the MU rates the studio would have had to pay a professional band) and recording a handful of songs, including Cream’s ‘NSU’, Sam and Dave’s ‘Hold On I’m Coming’, Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’, and Eddie Floyd’s ‘Knock On Wood’. Heard now, it’s May’s guitar playing and Staffell’s voice, loose and soulful like a wannabe Steve Winwood, that most impress. Tellingly, Staffell sounds more at ease on the soul numbers than he does on ‘Purple Haze’, which, naturally, gives May the chance to cut loose.
The differing tastes of 1984’s singer and its lead guitarist would become a sticking point later on, but in 1967, Tim and Brian were sufficiently in tune to start writing songs. Also recorded that day were two versions of a May/Staffell composition titled ‘Step On Me’. ‘I didn’t know then that Brian wanted to explore songwriting or that he even had ideas,’ admits Dave Dilloway. ‘I don’t think the rest of us had those aspirations. “Step On Me” was our one original number in all the time 1984 played live.’ With its dainty melody and subdued guitar solo, its overriding feature is the exquisite harmonies; like an early test drive for the sound May would explore fully with Queen.
Just weeks later, Brian was back in the studio, helping out his old Hampton Grammar schoolmate Bill Richards. Two years earlier Richards had put together a band called The Left-Handed Marriage and in January 1967 issued a privately pressed album. Two months later, Richards signed to EMI’s music publishing wing, Ardmore and Beechwood, as a songwriter. Richards wanted May to help beef up the group’s sound. May joined the group at a recording studio in Twickenham, playing on four songs for a planned EP. The EP was never released, but Ardmore and Beechwood stumped up for another more prestigious recording session two months later. This time, Dave Dilloway joined May, deputising for The Left-Handed Marriage’s absent bass player. ‘We got taken down to Abbey Road to do it,’ says Dave. ‘This was at the height of The Beatles’ era, so it was tremendously exciting.’
Bill later recalled that an A&R man present at the session was unimpressed by Brian’s playing. But, undeterred, a third session with May took place at London’s Regent Sound, in July. With singer Henry Hill’s enunciated vocals, The Left-Handed Marriage merged elements of The Kinks, while his co-singer Jenny Hill brought a folkier slant to the music. In the end, Bill’s career as a songwriter never took off. But in 1993, the final Regent Sound sessions were included on a Left-Handed Marriage album called Crazy Chain, giving Queen fans the chance to hear their guitar hero in his youth; the Red Special splashing colour on a set of whimsical mid-sixties pop songs, miles away from the pomp of Queen.
In between the recording sessions, May also came within touching distance of his idol. On 13 May, 1984 were booked on the same bill at Imperial College as The Jimi Hendrix Experience, the day after the band released its debut album, Are You Experienced? ‘Brimi’ was in his element. But there would be no communication between the two; only Jimi’s question to Tim Staffell as he loped down the corridor from the dressing room: ‘Which way’s the stage, man?’ Also in Hendrix’s entourage that night was Brian Jones, soon to be expelled from The Rolling Stones for too much drinking and drugging. Dave Dilloway glimpsed the ghost-like Jones tagging along behind Hendrix on the walk to the stage looking sicker than anyone he had ever seen before. Jones would be dead in less than two months.
A September 1967 booking for 1984 at the London School of Medicine would be the catalyst for another date with Jimi, after talent spotters took a shine to the band. ‘To this day I have no idea who they were,’ laughs Dilloway, ‘but there were these three guys who fancied breaking into the music business and were looking for a band to manage. We were doubled up on the bill with another group at the London School of Medicine. I think they came to see this band, and decided to go with us instead.’
John Garnham and Richard Thompson are similarly baffled as to the identities of these ‘couple of characters’. Nevertheless, their new patrons watched the band rehearse and told them they needed to sharpen up their image. Early photos of 1984 found most of the group sporting the skinny-trousered, Chelsea-booted mod look of the day, with Tim Staffell and John Garnham taking turns to wear a pork-pie hat. Curiously, it’s Brian May that looks the most ill at ease; very much the suburban schoolboy, clutching his guitar like a comfort blanket and wearing a cardigan. As Tim ruefully explained, ‘I never perceived Brian as having the dangerous image which was necessary at the time.’
But the band was tentatively embracing fashion. Staffell would later claim to hate the flowery-shirted ‘Summer of Love’ look, but he, like the others, moved with the times. On 9 September, after a boutique shopping trip, the group showed up for a battle-of-the-bands competition at Croydon’s Top Rank Club looking very much the pop stars in waiting, even Brian.
The contest had been sponsored by Scotch tape, and the proviso for entering was that groups had to submit songs recorded on a reel of Scotch. 1984 submitted two tracks: The Everly Brothers’ ‘Crying in the Rain’ and Marvin Gaye’s ‘Ain’t That Peculiar?’ On the night, they played two sets (the first as backing group to an unknown singer named Lisa Perez) and
won the contest hands down. ‘It was a joke, though,’ laughs Dave. ‘Nothing ever came of it.’
Instead the winners were gifted with a reel of Scotch tape and an LP for each band member, deteriorating in quality from Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence (blagged by Tim Staffell) to an album by Irish bandleader Tommy Makem, for which Dave Dilloway drew the shortest straw. ‘That’s all we got,’ says John Garnham. ‘These crappy LPs.’
Still, the winning band were photographed that night, preserving an image of 1984 that year. Twenty-year-old Brian May had a regulation Beatle hairdo and Hendrix-style military jacket. Much to his chagrin now, Tim Staffell was wearing a shirt with pink polkadots.
A similar so-called competition found the band piling into the back of Richard Thompson’s works van and trekking over to East London’s Forest Gate to play to one of their biggest audiences yet at the Upper Cut Club. ‘It was a club run by Billy Walker the boxer,’ remembers Thompson. ‘The Who had opened the club, and I don’t know if there even was a competition. I think it was just an excuse to get people over there. We played to a couple of thousand people that night.’
The aspiring managers disappeared as quickly as they arrived. Still, their hustling skills were enough to secure the group a slot at the ‘Christmas on Earth Continued’ extravaganza. Held on 22 December at the chasm-like Kensington Olympia, ‘Christmas on Earth Continued’ was an all-night musical love-in starring fifteen acts, which included Pink Floyd, The Who (who never showed), The Move, Soft Machine and headliner Jimi Hendrix.
Before the gig, the band’s benefactors sent them out to buy some new outfits. ‘My memory is that Tim and Richard went to Carnaby Street and bought us stuff to wear,’ recalls John Garnham. ‘I was presented with this black shirt with a silver front.’ Though Tim Staffell recalled: ‘Our manager bought us velvet guardsman jackets and put us in make-up. We looked terrible.’ Newly groomed, the band drove to the Olympia, parked their cars in a side street and started unloading their gear.
