by Mark Blake
The Octagon Theatre gig was a Saturday lunchtime affair and part of the venue’s regular ‘Bluesology sessions’. At lunchtime, Ibex played their debut gig with the future Freddie Mercury. ‘Tupp’ Taylor thinks they opened their set with, at Freddie’s suggestion, a cover of ‘Jailhouse Rock’. If so, then it came with a difference. ‘Pat McConnell reminded me recently that Freddie had his back to the audience for half of the first number,’ recalls Ken Testi. ‘It was only thinking back that we realised this was his first time onstage with a band. He’d done bits at school, but nothing since.’ Fred’s opening gambit to Ibex had been: ‘I’m a singer but I haven’t got a band.’ ‘Looking back, it was a brilliant strategy,’ Testi says. ‘It was a great stroke. By the end of the first number, the shyness had gone and he was performing well.’
Brian May had been unable to make the Friday night trip to Bolton, but wanted to catch the Sunday show. The band and entourage were planning to spend Saturday night twenty-five miles away in Ibex’s native Liverpool. Ken Testi had arranged to collect May from Lime Street station, and decided to park the van on a ramp leading up to the station platform. ‘I figured we’d be good for ten minutes or so, but then this very senior policeman hoved into view and walked up to the driver’s window. It was then I realised we were in what you might call a borrowed van and that I could be hung, drawn and quartered for having a load of people in the back.’
Having seen the agents’ address on the side of the vehicle, the officer presumed that Testi was on company business, and asked if he was waiting for the train from London. ‘I said we were, so this policeman said, “Righto, well, you shouldn’t really park here. I’ll open the gates for you so you can back it up on to the platform.”’ Without further ado, a group of station porters arrived and opened the gates, while Ken reversed the van onto the platform. ‘When Brian got off the train he could not believe his eyes. To his credit, he realised what was going on straight away.’ With the guitarist safely stashed, Testi made a swift getaway.
The evening ended with most of the group billeted at the McConnell sisters’ family home in St Helens. It was at the McConnells that Brian dozed off in an armchair close to a gas fire. ‘Despite his height, Brian was wearing platforms,’ smiles Ken Testi. At some point in the evening, the family could smell burning rubber. ‘Poor Brian was unaware of the heat until one of his soles dropped off. He was limping around with half a shoe for the rest of the weekend.’
Fred’s second gig with Ibex was due to take place the following afternoon at Queen’s Park. The ‘Bluesology Pop-In’ was an open-air event. That day, the bill also showcased such forgotten local acts as Gum Boot Smith and acid-folk band Spyrogyra. The stage was set up on the bandstand in the middle of the park, and was three times as big as the stage at the Octagon. ‘When Fred stepped on that stage, he was all action,’ confirms ‘Tupp’ Taylor. ‘I thought, “Fuck, yes! This is what we want.”’ Mike Bersin adds, ‘I was used to playing guitar solos with my eyes shut, and now there’s a guy on his knees in front holding the mic up to me. Many of the moves Fred later did in Queen, he first did with us.’
While Freddie’s Bolton debut was considered a resounding success, Ibex’s days in London were numbered. ‘Just a few weeks later, all the promise of the summer started to fall apart,’ says Ken Testi. The first to go was Mike Bersin, who enrolled at art college in Liverpool (‘I’d promised my parents I’d do this after the summer’). While ‘Tupp’ Taylor elected to remain in London, ‘Miffer’ Smith seemed poised to do what he’d been threatening all summer. As Chris Smith says, ‘Whenever things were going badly, “Miffer” always used to say, in this real Ringo voice, “I just want to go home and be a milkman.”’
Testi was also considering a place at college in St Helens. On 8 September, he hitchhiked back to Liverpool. No sooner had he arrived then he took a phone call from Mike Bersin. ‘Ibex had been offered a gig, Mike had called the others and they’d arranged to borrow a van, and could I go back to London and pick them up and all the gear?’ says Testi.
Undaunted, he scrounged a lift back to the M6 where he stuck out his thumb, finally making it back to London at 11 p.m. The following morning, Smile’s roadie Pete Edmunds dropped off the Transit, which Ken loaded up with Ibex’s gear, most of which was stashed at Imperial College in a room at the top of a spiral staircase. As Ken manhandled the amps down the narrow stairwell, ‘Freddie managed a pair of maracas and a tambourine’. With the van loaded, Testi climbed behind the wheel to make the 176-mile drive back to Liverpool. Squeezed in the seats, between Fred, ‘Tupp’ Taylor, ‘Miffer’ Smith, Pat McConnell, guitar cases, amps and a drum kit were Brian May and Roger Taylor.
Ibex’s gig that night was at the Sink on Hardman Street, a dank basement club in which The Rolling Stones were said to have played their debut Liverpool gig. As Ken recalls, ‘Roger, Brian and Fred were wearing what passed for fashionable in Kensington – lots of velvet and fur. That was something unknown in Liverpool. Outside the club Roger informed us that he’d been accosted by some local youths who rather took exception to the way he was dressed.’ Taylor later claimed that he flashed his student library card, pretending it was a membership card to a martial arts club. ‘He said, “Look! I have to show you this before I kill you … I’m a black belt third dan … in … origami,”’ chuckles Ken. ‘Supposedly the youths backed off.’
Testi’s schoolfriend and Ibex roadie Geoff Higgins had often taped the band’s gigs and rehearsals. His one surviving tape, recorded on a Grundig TK14 reel-to-reel, is Ibex’s performance at the Sink. Standing stage right, Geoff draped the Grundig’s crystal microphone over a rusty nail and hoped for the best. The recording has Ibex clattering through Cream’s ‘We’re Going Wrong’, The Beatles’ ‘Rain’, Elvis’s ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and Led Zeppelin’s ‘Communication Breakdown’; making up in raw enthusiasm what they lack in expertise. According to Higgins, the Sink stage was so small that Fred had to stand in front of it, not that this inhibited his moves. Listening now, Mike Bersin’s crowning moment is the Hendrix/Jeff Beck blues staple ‘Rock Me Baby’; ‘Miffer’ Smith shines at holding the beat while others are losing their way, while Fred’s Robert Plant-like squeal on ‘Communication Breakdown’ is testament to hours spent practising and terrorising the neighbours, at home. ‘Freddie had a real thing about Robert Plant and that first Zeppelin album,’ says Bersin. ‘He was forever wandering around the flat singing snatches of it, especially the “never never never never gonna leave you babe” bit from “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”.’
‘Tupp’ Taylor is less impressed: ‘When I listen to that bootleg, I think, “God, we were awful.” We couldn’t hear ourselves properly. Freddie was no Winwood, Marriott or Cocker, he didn’t have that kind of soul, and at the beginning, his pitching was awful, but what he was fantastic at from the start was the show.’ Sadly, what the Sink recording doesn’t include is the encore. Geoff Higgins claimed the tape ran out just before Roger Taylor and Brian May joined Ibex for renditions of what Geoff recalls as a couple of Smile songs. ‘So we had three-quarters of Queen in the place,’ reflects Testi, ‘although none of us knew that at the time.’
Brian May’s memory of the pre-Queen Fred as ‘very shy but cloaking himself in this persona’ is borne out on the Sink club tape. Fred’s between-song announcements are muted, hushed and achingly polite. Offstage, as well, for all his acid wit and lively banter, he could just as easily slip back into shyness, especially in the company of strangers. However, just weeks into his stint with Ibex, Fred was already plotting. The first casualty of his coup would be the band’s name. Fred wanted to re-title the group Wreckage, but had met with some initial resistance. ‘Then Freddie phoned me at home in Liverpool,’ says Mike Bersin, ‘and said he’d called everyone else in the band and they were happy to change the name to Wreckage. I said that if everyone else was OK, then so was I. I later found out that he’d called each of us and said exactly the same thing.’
His band members’ approval was just
as well: before making the calls, Freddie had, apparently, already stencilled the new name onto Ibex’s gear. ‘Good marketing, very cute,’ says Ken Testi. ‘That was a guy with an agenda.’ On 12 October Freddie and Richard Thompson had gone to see Led Zeppelin at the Lyceum. ‘I think I’d read something with Jeff Beck where he said that a heavy band needed a heavy name. Like Led Zeppelin,’ says ‘Tupp’ Taylor. “Someone, it may even have been Beck, suggested the name Concrete Wellington as a joke. But that was the thinking behind Wreckage, it just sounded heavier.’
Going hand in hand with the change of moniker was some new material. ‘Vagabond Outcast’, a rather torpid heavy blues, was still in the set, but as Ken recalls, ‘Freddie and Mike had started writing songs. Fred realised Mike was someone he could work with.’ Existing Wreckage setlists confirm the original titles ‘Green’, ‘Cancer On My Mind’, ‘Without You, Lover’ (an early prototype of the Queen song ‘Liar’), ‘Universal Theme’, ‘FEWA’ (which some believe stood for Feelings Ended Worn Away), ‘One More Train’ and ‘Blag-a-Blues’; most of which went unrecorded. Mike Bersin’s memory of specific songs is sketchy, but as he explains, ‘We came down from the North playing twelve-bar stuff, no key changes, and Freddie said, “No, no, no, you’ve got to use the black notes, and what we need now is a key change because it makes it more interesting.” We knew where music was, but Fred knew where it was going.’
Though Freddie had persuaded his bandmates to change their name, the geographical distance between the singer and the guitarist presented another hurdle. Previous accounts of Fred’s tenure in Ibex/Wreckage claim that at some point around October 1969, Freddie moved to Liverpool for a few weeks, staying at roadie Geoff Higgins’ family pub in Penny Lane. Ken Testi tactfully disputes this: ‘Freddie made brief visits to Liverpool, but somehow a stopover turned into summer in Liverpool. It didn’t happen.’
What is known for certain is that by the last week in October, Wreckage had lost drummer Mick ‘Miffer’ Smith and were limbering up for their debut gig at Ealing art college. The information was contained in a letter that Fred wrote to a friend, Celine Daley, one of the Maria Assumpta students. In it, Fred lambasts the drummer (‘Miffer’s not with us anymore ’cos the bastard just upped and left one morning saying he was going to be a milkman in Widnes’); reveals that he and ‘Miffer’ were about to start part-time jobs in Harrods; says that he paid Mike Bersin’s rail fare from Liverpool for rehearsals; that Smith’s replacement is ex-1984 drummer Richard Thompson (‘the practice was really great. Richard collapsed halfway through …’) and that ‘the Zeppelin II LP is a knockout’. As written, Mick ‘Miffer’ Smith did return to his old trade, after a stint as a construction worker on the M56 motorway. Richard Thompson was an obvious choice, because, as he points out now, ‘I already knew all the songs.’
Wreckage’s debut in what was known as the ‘Noisy Common Room’ at Ealing was not particularly auspicious. Mark Malden had now left the college, but his brother Aubrey was still running the student union and had booked Wreckage as a favour to Freddie. ‘They were crap,’ he says now. ‘I remember Freddie had bought a white suit especially for the gig, but the only good bit was when he lay on his back on the stage, took the microphone off the stand and dangled it down his throat while wailing. This was all going on in the common room, and while some people were watching, others were sitting around chatting, reading newspapers, playing table football … I thought they were a bit of a joke.’
Wreckage would only play some ten gigs, at other venues including St Martin’s art school and Imperial College. Chris Smith saw them and was bemused: ‘Tim Staffell and I saw Wreckage in a pub, I think. Freddie was doing all the posing and the strutting, which I had never seen him do before. It was a shock, though, as it just didn’t work in a pub. But ten out of ten for bravery.’ Interviewed in 2004, Brian May tactfully recalled a similar sighting: ‘We went to see Fred sing with his own group. You could hardly keep up with him. He was being very ebullient and making a big noise, and we didn’t quite know what to make of it.’
In November, ‘Tupp’ Taylor’s sister arranged for Wreckage to play her school dance in Widnes. According to Queen mythology, it was the night Fred discovered his trademark. ‘Apparently that was the gig where the bottom of his mic stand fell off. A happy accident,’ says Ken Testi. Richard Thompson maintains that the base fell off and Fred simply continued without it. ‘Later, Queen came up to play St Helens Technical College, where I was social secretary,’ adds Testi. ‘I spotted the mic stand at soundcheck. I said, “Fred, this mic stand thing? Are you sure?” He said, “It’s my gimmick, dear. You must have a gimmick.” I said, “Fred, you’re sounding a bit like Jimmy Savile”. But he was like, “No, no, no”.’
For Wreckage, though, it was all over by Christmas. Two days after the girls’ school show, the group are believed to have played their final gig at Richmond Rugby Club. ‘The overwhelming reality is that the band wouldn’t have made it,’ explains Mike Bersin. ‘Freddie tried to keep it together, but I wasn’t that focused. However, that determination to succeed was an irresistible force in Freddie right from the start.’ Fred retreated to plan his next move while Bersin dropped out of music and continued with his prediploma course at art college in Liverpool. By now, the old network of Kensington flats and rented digs had found a new centre of operations: 40 Ferry Road, Barnes.
‘Pat McConnell and another girl called Denise [Craddock] were the original ones in there,’ claims ‘Tupp’ Taylor. ‘Then I moved in, then there was Fred, Roger Taylor and another bloke who I think was studying to be a dentist. We had the whole bottom floor of the house.’
While Fred had made the move out of the parental home in Feltham, his new lodgings were a far cry from the Bulsaras’ suburban comfort zone (Freddie: ‘My parents were outraged when I told them what I was up to’). The house hadn’t been decorated in an age and still bore some of the gaudy stylistic traits of its previous occupants. Mike Bersin crashed there during the dying days of Wreckage, and recalls it now as ‘ghastly’. Richard Thompson maintains that ‘Ferry Road was a dump, but they all were. Typical student place.’ The communal living room is remembered for a red vinyl sofa, the seams on which had split leaving tufts of horsehair stuffing spilling out onto the cushions. The kitchen was largely a no-go zone, whose food contents rarely extended beyond tea and milk.
Any number of waifs or strays might emerge from the bedrooms on any given morning, but, adds Mike Bersin, ‘I still have no recall of where the bathroom was.’ ‘The old lady who owned the property lived upstairs,’ remembers Taylor, ‘and Sylvia Sims, the actress, lived next door. This old lady didn’t like Sylvia Sims. She’d always be talking about her as “that awful woman! Thespians … you know, not reliable people”. Meanwhile we were in this flat, playing music and making this terrible noise.’
In October 1969, before Wreckage’s Ealing college debut, Richard Thompson taped the group rehearsing late one night at Ferry Road: Bersin playing an unplugged electric guitar, Taylor on amplified bass, and Thompson pattering around on what he remembers as a ‘guitar case’. One of the songs played was the Bulsara/Bersin composition ‘Green’; the only surviving recording of Wreckage. ‘There is another song on the end of the tape,’ says Thompson. ‘And on the tape you can you hear their flatmate come in and complain about the noise as it’s one o’clock in the morning.’ What you can also hear on the Wreckage tape is Fred’s cultured tones, directing his bandmates (‘Listen … don’t forget … after those two verses’).
While dope-smoking was widespread at Ferry Road, Fred was unusually abstemious. Instead, as was his wont, he’d be up bright and early, tiptoeing over his stoned flatmates, singing quietly to himself and strumming the chords to The Who’s ‘Pinball Wizard’ on his new guitar. ‘He was like a wandering minstrel,’ says Mike Bersin, ‘making a nuisance of himself.’
On one occasion, when two policemen called at the house after complaints about the noise, ‘Tupp’ Taylor, ‘playing the friendl
y Northerner’, sweet-talked them with a cup of tea and a piece of hash cake. ‘I used to buy dope on Carnaby Street,’ says Taylor. “I once showed Freddie an ounce of dope and he was astounded by the size of it. But if you asked him, he used to say, “Oh, I’ve been through that. I’ve done all that.”’
Ferry Road’s dope was sometimes purchased concealed in jasmine tea. It would then fall to one of the flat’s occupants to separate the leaves. On one occasion, the stash was dumped, unsorted, into the tea caddy and Fred made himself a cup, unaware of its exact contents. According to one eyewitness, Fred was found later, ‘freaking out’ to Frank Zappa’s We’re Only in it for the Money album, a parody of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with a trick segment featuring the sound of a stylus scraping across a run-out groove. This had sent Fred into a panic, as he believed he had scratched his new favourite record. ‘Freddie didn’t like dope,’ confirms Chris Smith. ‘Later on, though, he offered me speed. Freddie was like, “Have some of this Chris” … I’d tried it once, as it was good for playing a gig, but the comedown was terrible.’
The speed in question had been acquired in Kensington Market, the hippy emporium at which Freddie and Roger Taylor now had a stall of their own. As the year wore on, Freddie supplemented his meagre earnings with a stint at Harrods (as mentioned in his letter to Celine Daley) and occasional drawing jobs. ‘I came downstairs once and saw him drawing women’s underwear,’ says Mike Bersin. ‘He had taken a job designing fashion ads for newspapers.’ Later, Fred signed up as an illustrator with the Austin Knights design agency, and was commissioned to work on a children’s book that was never published.
The chic, three-storey indoor market on Kensington High Street was a hive of musicians, actors and artists, giving Fred and Roger a direct conduit to London’s ‘beautiful people’. Initially, the pair paid £10 a week (from Taylor’s grant money) for a stall, selling artwork from Fred’s college friends. ‘Then we sold Fred’s thesis, which was based on Hendrix,’ revealed Taylor. No trace has ever been found of the artwork but, according to Roger, ‘there were some beautiful things – he’d written the lyrics of “Third Stone from the Sun”… things like that are probably worth a lot of money now.’
