by Mark Blake
For a couple of months Tim Staffell also took a stall on the market, selling artwork. But he loathed what he described as its ‘air of narcissistic coquettishness’. Realising that art didn’t pay, Freddie and Roger tried a different strategy. ‘We got into old Edwardian clothes,’ explained Taylor. ‘We’d get bags of silk scarves from dodgy dealers. We’d take them, iron them and flog them.’
‘It was bits of tat really,’ says Ken Testi. ‘Victoriana, fur jackets, the odd cricket blazer, some old lady’s coat sawn off and masquerading as a cape.’
Undeterred by the small scale of their operation, Fred told everyone that they were ‘gentlemen’s outfitters’ and seemed to approach the job with the same enthusiastic zeal as he did his music. ‘Fred would bring home these great bags of stuff,’ recalled Brian May. ‘Pull out some horrible strip of cloth and say, “Look at this beautiful garment! This is going to fetch a fortune!” And I’d say, “Fred, that is a piece of rag.”’
It was at the market that Adrian Morrish ran into his old friend from Isleworth Polytechnic. ‘I was on a shopping trip and suddenly heard that voice: “Adrian! Adrian!” He introduced me to Roger and I went to a party at his flat, got drunk, and that was the last time I saw Freddie. He said, “You must come and see my band”, and, of course, I didn’t. I was so convinced that he wasn’t going to make it any more than anyone else.’ It was also at Kensington Market that the possibly apocryphal story arose of Freddie, reluctant to use public transport, selling Roger’s own jacket on the stall to pay for a taxi. Asked about this by an NME journalist in 1977, Fred refused to confirm or deny it.
In his letter to Celine Daley, Fred wrote that ‘Roger and I go poncing and ultra-blagging just about everywhere’, confirming how comfortable he was with the ‘narcissistic coquettishness’ that Tim Staffell found such a turn-off. Ex-Ealing student Tony Catignani vividly recalls he and Freddie being wolf-whistled at while promenading along Kensington High Street. Yet, in the same letter to Celine, Fred had also complained that ‘Miffer the sod has told everyone down here that I have turned into a fully-fledged queer!’ Mike Bersin suggests that while Fred ‘may not have been out of the closet he was certainly looking through the keyhole’. Yet, according to Bersin, during the singer’s time in Ibex and Wreckage, ‘he still gave every appearance of being heterosexual’.
‘Tupp’ Taylor maintains that ‘Fred had all these great girls who were his mates … and that was extremely handy for us … there was an art student called Caroline … two girls called Mary … and there was Josephine [Ranken, née Marston] from the art college, who was very over the top and looked like an artist even then.’ Josephine, remembered by another of their contemporaries ‘as a girl with an extraordinary bohemian sense of style’, was a platonic friend of Fred’s and later introduced him to a gay friend of hers. She recalled Fred being ‘obviously terribly interested in homosexuality; he was also afraid of it as well.’
Yet both Paul Humberstone and Chris Smith remember the female student with whom Fred would go on to have a relationship. ‘She was this red-headed bombshell called Rosemary,’ laughs Humberstone. Interviewed in 1995, Josephine Ranken revealed that Fred and Rosemary’s relationship became physical, but ‘I heard they slept together just once, as his performance in bed was imperfect, shall we say.’ Nine years later, The Times newspaper ran an interview with Fred’s ex-amour, Rosemary Pearson, who had previously remained silent about the relationship.
Rosemary revealed that the two had met in 1967 on the same course at Ealing and struck up a friendship. ‘He’d sit next to me in the canteen and be terribly attentive and brotherly,’ she explained. The couple spent their time together ‘rushing off to exhibitions’, and going to gigs and parties. Two years later, they became lovers, back at Ferry Road. Rosemary’s connection with the art world had led her into a dinner-party clique based around a London doctor named Patrick Woodcock, whose patients, friends and confidants included the likes of David Hockney, Christopher Isherwood, Derek Jarman and John Gielgud. Fred had already begun wondering, she said, ‘what it would be like to sleep with a man’, and was keen to be introduced to Rosemary’s gay friends: ‘Freddie thought that if he didn’t meet them, he would never know whether he was gay.’ Ultimately, Rosemary ended the relationship at some point in 1970, claiming she knew, deep down, that Freddie was homosexual: ‘I think Freddie did love me, but for me it was too ambiguous, too androgynous. He liked to think of himself as two genders.’
Fred never made his dilemma public knowledge to anyone at Ferry Road. Or if he did, they’re not telling. Despite the jokes and ruthless teasing that went on, as one regular explains, ‘In hippy circles you didn’t question anyone’s sexual orientation. It was not done.’
Chris Chesney was a seventeen-year-old guitarist who became part of Fred’s circle in early 1970. When Wreckage disbanded, Fred had begun scouring the music press for a replacement band, and answered a ‘Vocalist Wanted’ ad in the back of Melody Maker placed by a band called Sour Milk Sea (named after a George Harrison song from The Beatles’ White Album sessions). The group, originally called Tomato City, had formed at St Edward’s public school in Oxford by Chesney (then known as Chris Dummett) and rhythm guitarist Jeremy ‘Rubber’ Gallop, whose businessman father bankrolled the venture. With drummer Boris Williams and bassist Paul Milne, the group had played a handful of shows at various arts labs and ‘happenings’; the sort of places where, explains Chesney, ‘people would take their clothes off and scream poetry’.
Williams left the band for India and the hippy trail in 1968 (though, many years later, he would reappear in The Cure), and his replacement was Rob Tyrell, an ex-Charterhouse public schoolboy who had previously backed future members of Genesis in a group called The Anon. By the summer of 1969, Sour Milk Sea had turned professional and opened for Deep Purple and Taste. Just like Ibex, they lacked a frontman. ‘We called ourselves a progressive blues band,’ says Chesney now. ‘At public school you listened to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, and Cream. Hendrix was beyond our capabilities. We wrote our own songs and I sang lead vocals, but I really wanted to concentrate on playing guitar.’
Their ‘Vocalist Wanted’ ad yielded results. Auditions took place at a youth club in a church in Dorking, and Chesney recalls that as well as the usual no-hopers, a couple of promising vocalists turned up, including folk singer Bridget St John. Still, there could be only one man for the job. Fred arrived in grand style, having cajoled Smile roadie John Harris into driving him to the audition. (As Ken Testi explains, ‘I once asked Freddie why he never learned to drive. He said, “My dear, I don’t need to drive, I’ll always be driven.”’) Once he’d disembarked from the van, Fred strode purposefully into the youth club, Harris a few steps behind, carrying his master’s microphone in a wooden box.
‘When he fired up with us, it was so obvious that he was fantastic,’ laughs Chesney. ‘He had the long dark hair and was dripping in velvet and he was very bold.’ Immediately, Fred reprised the moves he’d first used with Ibex. ‘He came up to me straight away and there was this physical interaction, jabbing the mic stand at me while I played a solo. He didn’t quite have the voice then, as I don’t think he’d done that many gigs, but he sang falsetto, which was unusual, and I liked that.’
Chris is unsure of the precise dates but, with Freddie in tow, Sour Milk Sea played The Temple in London’s Lower Wardour Street. ‘I also think we opened for Black Sabbath and played the Red Lion on the Fulham Road,’ he adds. A planned gig on Smile’s home turf, PJ’s in Truro on 18 April, was cancelled, with Smile taking Sour Milk Sea’s place. Remarkably, the band’s debut gig with Freddie, at Highfield Parish Hall in Headington, Oxford, in March 1970, was accompanied by an interview in the Oxford Mail. The gig was on behalf of the homeless charity Shelter, and as the son of All Saints philosophy don Michael Dummett, Sour Milk Sea’s teenage guitarist had a certain pedigree. Remarkably, the Mail reporter allowed the band ‘their say’ at the end of the article
. ‘Their say’ was to print the lyrics verbatim to one of Fred’s songs, ‘Lover’, opening with the wonderfully nonsensical line, ‘You never had it so good / the yoghurt pushers are here …’ The accompanying photographs showed Chris Chesney as a baby in his pram and, posing with Sour Milk Sea, ‘new vocalist Freddie Bulsara’ gazing confidently into the camera lens.
‘We never knew his name until later,’ reveals Chesney. ‘When our manager took the call for the audition, he asked him his name and he said, “Fred Bull.” He stopped himself from saying Bulsara. It was not an issue for us, but he was always watching himself. Freddie never talked about his childhood and we didn’t even know he came from Zanzibar.’
Six years older than Chris Chesney, Freddie soon began introducing his ideas to the guitarist. ‘We were doing our own songs, which appealed to him, but straight away he was like, “I’m tossing out your lyrics and writing my own.” I didn’t care. I was seventeen and I welcomed the education.’ Under Freddie’s aegis, Sour Milk Sea changed. Paul Milne’s then-girlfriend, the future novelist Judy Astley was struck by the transformation: ‘I saw a rehearsal in the wilds of Surrey, and one of the gigs, and it was immediately clear that Chris and Freddie were a terrific stage act. Freddie seemed to free up Chris to be more flamboyant than before.’
Judy found Fred to be ‘polite, sweet, charming and funny, but reluctant to give a lot away about himself’. In contrast, Paul Milne was Sour Milk Sea’s ‘pouty bassist’. ‘Paul was a terrifically cool dresser,’ elaborates Judy, ‘buying lots of velvet from Granny Takes a Trip and shirts from Deborah and Clare. He was very fond of Chris and, I think, miffed that Chris and Fred got on so well.’
Freddie hustled the group to play songs from his Wreckage days, and rock ’n’ roll covers such as ‘Lucille’ and ‘Jailhouse Rock’. As Chris explains: ‘He had this showbiz angle which was rare at the time.’ With Chesney, he began writing songs with wild chord changes (‘his chords broke all the rules’). Onstage, though, for all the phallic mic-stand twirling and camp horseplay, Fred’s humour was much in evidence: ‘He loved to wind up the audience. So he’d do this thing at the end of a song where he’d go, “Wank you … wank you very much”, and you could see people in the audience going, “Did he say thank you or wank you?”’
Offstage, though, Fred’s shameless vanity went down less well with some. Interviewed in 1996, Jeremy ‘Rubber’ Gallop recounted an incident where Freddie studied himself in a mirror for some time before announcing, ‘I look good today, don’t you think, Rubber?’ ‘I was only eighteen at the time and didn’t think it was very funny,’ he said. ‘So I thought, “Fuck off!”’
In a matter of weeks, though, minor grievances turned into a major rift, with Fred and Chris on one side; ‘Rubber’ and Paul Milne on the other. To compound the tension, Chesney had accepted Fred’s offer to move into 40 Ferry Road. ‘I was from a very conventional middle-class background in Oxford, and all these guys from West London were more glamorous and interesting,’ recalls Chris. ‘So the others, still stuck in Leatherhead, thought that me and Fred were cooking up something in Barnes. There was an awful lot of jealousy.’
At Ferry Road, Chris and Fred ‘bonded quickly’. Musically, the guitarist was intrigued by his singer’s catholic tastes. At Ferry Road, the record player spun Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland (‘that was at the heart of everything’), The Beatles’ White Album, The Move’s Cherry Blossom Clinic, Zappa, The Who, Rod Stewart … ‘Fred was hugely into Led Zeppelin, but he was very quick to spot pop music,’ says Chesney. ‘The Jackson 5 single “Want You Back” had come out, and Fred was very into that. I also remember him telling me that David Bowie was the perfect pop star, and at the time he’d only had a hit with “Space Oddity”. He was very prescient.’
The pair’s relationship was never sexual (‘I wouldn’t be embarrassed if it was, but it wasn’t’), but as Fred’s protégé, Chesney was happy to experience all that was on offer. At Ferry Road, he dropped LSD, marvelled at the Smile groupies drifting through the place, took care not to risk his health by venturing too far into the kitchen (‘you might make a cup of coffee, no more’), and practised his guitar in jamming sessions with Brian May (‘we’d lock ourselves in a room with a couple of AC30s’).
It seems probable, too, that Chesney saw Fred with Rosemary Pearson: ‘He had a girlfriend, not Mary Austin [Fred’s soon-to-become serious partner]. They used to disappear into his room together. No one ever suggested to me he was gay.’ Fred’s regular announcements that he was ‘off to see my bender friends’ always drew some hearty ribbing from Smile’s drummer, however: ‘Roger loved to take the piss, but Brian was far too polite for that.’ Meanwhile, according to Chesney, neither May nor Taylor were considering Fred as a possible lead singer in Smile: ‘I had the impression they thought he was a bit of a joke. That he was trying too hard.’
Among the rest of Sour Milk Sea, the tension continued to grow. Fred’s song ‘Lover’ was a particular bone of contention, as Gallop and Milne considered it too twee and commercial. Fred’s musical influence was regarded as pernicious, teasing the group away from an authentic, underground sound. Paul Milne was a massive fan of Free, and, as Gallop explained: ‘We were supposed to be a heavy duty blues band but Freddie was coming up with these huge harmonies.’
‘Paul definitely thought Freddie was an influence in the wrong direction,’ confirms Judy Astley. ‘He thought he was a hired vocalist and shouldn’t be influential in decision-making.’ Having ploughed hundreds of pounds of his father’s money into the group, ‘Rubber’ had further reason to feel resentful. Interviewed in 1995, Gallop (who died in 2006) was painfully candid: ‘I liked Freddie a great deal. The thing was, I’d put my life into the group … I was in tears over it … Chris was an amazing lead guitarist, and I thought my chances of making it were a lot slimmer without having him around.’
Tempers frayed, punches were thrown, and though Fred tried to play the diplomat, by the spring of 1970, Sour Milk Sea was over. ‘Rubber took all the equipment back,’ admits Chesney. ‘I had a beautiful SG Standard and a nice Marshall. All gone. Later, one day I went down to Leatherhead, shinned up a drainpipe, through the bathroom window and nicked the guitar. How I thought I could get away with it! Sure enough, before long there was a knock on the door in Barnes, and two heavies were outside.’
Fred’s erstwhile band members began to go their separate ways. Gallop and Rob Tyrell went off to form another group; Paul Milne took up a place at East Anglia University, and Chris Chesney scavenged as many shifts as he could at Huntley & Palmers biscuit factory in Reading to help him buy a new instrument. Chris, Freddie and John ‘Tupp’ Taylor considered forming a group of their own, but without money or, in Chesney’s case, a guitar, it seemed pointless. Instead Taylor found a job as road manager for the band Patto, going on to form his own management company, looking after the likes of the late Jim Capaldi, Dennis Locorriere and Joe Brown. ‘After those days, I never saw Freddie again,’ he says. ‘And he still had a suitcase of my clothes … which my sister always reminds me of, as she owned the suitcase.’
Freddie was, once again, ‘a singer without a band’, yet the group he’d always wanted to join were now falling apart. In the two years since Smile opened for Yes and Pink Floyd, their progress had been achingly slow. Smile remained a perennial support band; a name in small print in Melody Maker listings, but rarely the main event. Two weeks before Christmas 1969, they opened at London’s Marquee for Kippington Lodge, a band featuring Nick Lowe, a songwriter who at the time had been trailing around the same circuit with similarly diminishing returns. Despite promises from Mercury Records that the gig would boost Smile’s profile, it led to nothing.
Brian May was again juggling science and music. In February 1970, as Fred was prancing his way into Sour Milk Sea, May was studying in Tenerife. As part of his ongoing thesis, Brian had joined Imperial College’s Professors Jim Ring, Ken Reay and others at their observatory close to Mount Teide, the island’s dormant volc
ano. In Santa Cruz, Brian bought a tiny Spanish guitar. ‘I used to play it up the mountain where we were observing. I think Ken thought it was quite funny. He had a sly little smile on his face that said, “Obviously you’ll never get anywhere …”’
Returning to Britain with an enviable suntan, Brian found Tim Staffell waiting to tell him the bad news: he was quitting Smile. ‘The longer it went on, the more success eluded us and the more insecure I felt,’ Staffell admitted. Yet Smile’s lack of progress was only part of the problem. Just as it had been for Chris Smith, the music was also an issue. Staffell had been introduced to US soul and R&B and was now far less inspired by Smile’s terribly English hard rock. ‘We used to do a version of “If I Were a Carpenter”, a bit like Vanilla Fudge, and it didn’t swing,’ Staffell protested. Equally, with the pompom-wielding Freddie Bulsara hovering in the wings, Tim could see the future: ‘Smile wanted to go this theatrical way, and I could see I was not going into that. My idea of a musician is heads down, long hair, staring at the floor.’ While the two would remain on good terms, Brian May said Smile’s bass player ‘had a strange driving force which was always driving him away from us.’
Surprisingly, Tim Staffell’s next musical venture would be light years away from soul or R&B, fronting ex-Bee Gees drummer Colin Peterson’s new group Humpty Bong. They enjoyed a minor hit single, ‘Don’t You Be Too Long’, in August 1970, and even an appearance on Top of the Pops, but split without playing a single gig. A year later, after spending a few months playing in the US, Staffell returned to England, and a new gig as lead singer in the cosmically inclined progressive rock band Morgan, featuring ex-Love Affair keyboard-player Morgan Fisher. Morgan recorded the old Smile song, ‘Earth’, for their 1972 debut album, Nova Solis.
