by Mark Blake
When Morgan stalled, Staffell flirted with the idea of a solo career, even going so far as to play a solo gig at the Marquee. By the late-seventies, Tim ducked out of music to pursue model-making as a career. As well as crafting numerous pieces for films and television commercials, Staffell’s most enduring creations are the models he made for the children’s TV show Thomas the Tank Engine. In 1992, he was back onstage with Roger Taylor and Brian May for a two-song Smile reunion at the Marquee; in 2003, he cut an independent solo album, Amigos, and is presently writing a science fiction novel.
For years Tim Staffell has graciously picked over his time in Smile for inquisitive journalists and TV documentary-makers, always insisting that he had not missed an opportunity by leaving the band. ‘I did not have it in me to do what Freddie did,’ he said. ‘I was never the showman or the writer that Freddie was. I have regretted not being a musician but not leaving Smile.’
At Tim Staffell’s house one evening in 1972, Morgan Fisher was introduced to one of his new lead singer’s friends. ‘Tim said, “Oh Morgan, this is the bloke who took over from me in Smile.” And this extraordinary, exotic Persian guy got up from the sofa, wearing clothes that looked as if they’d all been made out of a velvet cushion cover. He smiled very shyly, barely said a word and gave me this incredibly limp handshake.’ It was Freddie Bulsara.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Strange Vibrato
‘When I joined Queen I had sod all to do.’
Mike Grose, Queen bass guitarist
for three months
‘I thought they were going nowhere.’
Barry Mitchell, Queen bass guitarist
for six months
‘Can’t complain, nice house, great family and a fancy car … but it would have been nice.’
Doug Bogie, Queen bass guitarist
for two gigs
‘When I first joined Queen, the other three argued like mad and I just kept out of it.’
John Deacon, Queen bass guitarist
since February 1971
In 1970, Woodstock the movie opened in cinemas but not every budding rock musician was a fan. ‘When I saw that film it was a shock to realise how little I related to it,’ admitted Brian May. ‘Queen weren’t the sort of band that would get stoned, go on and shuffle around. In a way, we were a reaction against it,’ To some in their social circle, Bulsara, Brian May and Roger Taylor had always been an obvious combination of musicians. ‘I can remember walking down Ealing Broadway in 1968 with those three and thinking, ‘That’s it, that’s the band,”’ says Chris Smith.
Initially, though, Smile’s drummer and guitarist were wary of their new recruit. ‘I remember thinking, “Good on showmanship, but not sure about the singing,”’ admitted May. ‘Fred had a strange vibrato,’ chuckled Roger Taylor, ‘which some people found rather distressing.’ Just as it had been with Ibex and Wreckage, it was Fred’s persistence that ultimately won the day: ‘Freddie was there, saying, “I’ll sing and I’d do that,”’ said Brian, ‘and we gradually went … “OK.”’
Tim Staffell’s exit had also left Smile without a bass player. They recruited Roger Taylor’s friend Mike Grose, who had been the co-owner of PJ’s, the Truro music venue where Smile and The Reaction had been regulars. PJ’s was facing closure, but Grose was a bass guitarist with the added bonus of owning a Volkswagen van and a Marshall amp. Better still, Grose had played briefly as a guitarist in The Reaction and previously understudied for Tim Staffell at a Smile gig at PJ’s, after a row between the bassist and Roger Taylor.
Grose moved up to London and into a billet at Ferry Road. May hustled his Imperial College professors into signing the forms needed to let the band rehearse in one of the lecture theatres. Taylor had promised his mother that Smile would play a Red Cross fundraiser at Truro City Hall on 27 June. Neglecting to tell anyone that this was a very different ‘Smile’, May, Taylor, Bulsara and Grose managed to muddled their way through an uneven set in front of around 200 people in the 800-capacity hall, for which they were paid £50.
The origins of the Queen name, are, much like Freddie’s sawn-off mic stand, steeped in all kinds of myth and hearsay. ‘The name was mine,’ maintains John ‘Tupp’ Taylor. ‘I used to call Fred “the old queen” and I used to say to him that if he was ever in another band after Wreckage he should call it Queen, and he used to say, “Oh, do you think so?”’ However, Mike Grose remembers sitting in the garden at Ferry Road when Freddie first pitched the name. Ken Testi remembers being told of the new band’s name in a telephone call from Kensington Market. ‘It made perfect sense to hear that he was with Brian and Roger. It should have been that way all along. I told him it was great news, and then he told me the name: Queen. I said, “You’ll never get away with that, Fred.” But he was like, “No, it’s wonderful, dear, people will love it.”’
Other contenders for the group’s name included Build Your Own Boat, The Rich Kids and The Grand Dance (the last of these taken from C.S. Lewis’s science-fiction trilogy Out of the Silent Planet). But they were no competition. ‘The concept of Queen is to be regal and majestic,’ Freddie later told Melody Maker. ‘We want to be dandy. We want to shock and be outrageous.’
‘The name was Freddie’s idea,’ said Roger Taylor in 1974. ‘It was just a reflection of the social world we were in at the time, when he and I were working together on Kensington Market. In those days there was a pretty eccentric crowd there, and a lot of them were gay and a lot of them pretended to be, and it just seemed to fit in. I didn’t like the name originally and neither did Brian, but we got used to it. We thought that once we’d got established the music would then become the identity more than the name …’
Queen wouldn’t be the only name-change that spring. ‘Freddie had written this song called “My Fairy King”,’ said Brian May. ‘And there’s a line in it that says, “Oh Mother Mercury what have you done to me?” And it was after that that he said, “I am going to become Mercury as the mother in this song is my mother.” We were like, “Are you mad?”’
Though no official documentation has ever surfaced at the Deed Poll Office, from now on Fred Bulsara’s passport would read Frederick Mercury. The transformation from gauche immigrant schoolboy to extrovert butterfly was complete. ‘Changing his name was part of him assuming this different skin,’ said May. ‘The young Bulsara was still there but for the public he was going to be this god.’
Before long, though, Mike Grose had grown weary of the struggle. May, Taylor and Mercury had been students since the mid-sixties, and were used to living in diminished circumstances. The 22-year-old Grose liked earning a living and found what he called ‘the empty days’ at Ferry Road depressing: Freddie was an art student used to doing nothing; Brian and Roger still had months left to go on their courses. But Grose was used to working a day job and playing gigs in the evening. That summer, in the garden at Barnes, he had watched as his three bandmates teased out ideas for songs that would eventually find their way on to the first Queen album. Queen had written the whole of what would become their debut, and the song ‘Father To Son’ (from what became Queen II). Grose thought the band had potential but wasn’t prepared to wait. He quit after a few months, returned to Cornwall, played briefly in a group called No Joke with, bizarrely, Tim Staffell, before forming his own haulage company and dropping out of the music scene.
Mike Grose’s replacement would be found after a chance meeting in Cornwall. Barry Mitchell had grown up in Harrow, West London. By 1965, he was bass guitar in a soul covers band called Conviction, also featuring a young Alan Parsons on guitar. Parsons would go on to engineer Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and front his own ensemble, The Alan Parsons Project. Conviction changed their name to Earth in 1967, made one unreleased album and secured a residency at the Coffin Club on London’s Gerard Street.
By August 1970, Mitchell was considering giving up music altogether. His most recent group, Black (featuring a black South African Hendrix lookalike) had stalled, and he wa
s working a day job in Soper’s department store in Harrow. ‘I had a good friend called Roger Crossley who worked there with me,’ says Mitchell now. ‘The two of us used to hang out at the art college looking for pretty girls. Roger Crossley went to Cornwall in the summer and he met Roger Taylor. They got talking and Roger Taylor said he was looking for a bass player … So my mate gave me his phone number.’
Mitchell made the call, caught the tube to Kensington and auditioned for Queen at Imperial College. His first thought was how blessed the group were to have access to free rehearsal space and storage; the twin holy grails for any struggling band. ‘We had a couple of plays,’ remembers Barry. ‘We ran through some Hendrix and [Willie Dixon’s] “Do Me Right”, and that was it, I was in.’
Queen had a gig booked at Imperial in three weeks’ time, for an audience of invited friends. A few hours before showtime, the group convened in Brian’s bedsit. Here, Barry discovered that they were cooking homemade popcorn on the flat’s single gas ring, which they intended to serve with fruit juice as refreshments for their guests. ‘It was all quite sweet and innocent,’ he grins. ‘But, yes, you could say they weren’t rock ’n’ rollers.’
Queen’s set now included a smattering of old rock ’n’ roll tunes, Smile’s ‘Doing Alright’ and ‘Stone Cold Crazy’, a song Freddie had worked up in Wreckage and which Queen would make their own. Their wild cards were covers of Shirley Bassey’s ‘Big Spender’ and Cliff Richard and The Shadows’ ‘Please Don’t Tease’ (Mitchell: ‘I remember thinking, “What?”’). John Garnham, 1984’s ex-guitarist, saw the Imperial College show, and was struck by the originality of doing ‘this completely straight version of a Cliff Richard song right in the middle of the set’. Garnham was also struck by Freddie’s individual performance: ‘His voice wasn’t that dissimilar to Tim Staffell. But Tim was not a good frontman. He was always quite introverted and saying, “Oh, I didn’t do that. Shall I do this or shall I do that?” But Fred just took the bull by horns.’ That evening, John also remembers Queen road-testing a new song ‘Son and Daughter’. His verdict matched those of many who saw Queen at the time: ‘It was very Led Zeppelin.’
Also in the audience was John Anthony, now working as an A&R rep and in-house producer for Charisma Records. ‘Roger and I had kept in touch,’ he explains. ‘It was always Roger that used to call me.’ He knew lots of women: ‘One of them gave me crabs … even had them in my eyebrows. But Roger would always let me know what he was doing with Smile, and then one day I got the call saying they had found a new singer and was I interested.’
Anthony vaguely recalls having seen Freddie at Kensington Market before Queen. ‘He was very gushing and camp, but I didn’t think anything of it. Onstage, though, he filled the whole room. It was such a difference from Smile. They more or less had their sound together, but they had a dodgy bass player. He looked like he’d be better in a heavy metal band. I said to Roger afterwards, “Look, it’s not working visually, but you’re three-quarters of the way there.”’
In the meantime, Queen’s ‘heavy metal bass player’ was getting to know his new bandmates. ‘Brian was this fantastically nice guy and a unique guitar player,’ says Barry Mitchell. ‘Roger was a bit of a lad, and while his drumming was OK I thought it was a bit wishy-washy. Freddie was very sweet, but hard to get to know and incredibly self-conscious about his teeth.’ Mercury had played the Imperial College gig in a black, figure-hugging, one-piece outfit (designed by ex-roadie Pete Edmunds’s wife, Wendy). He called it his ‘Mercury suit’, as the ankles and wrists sported little wings. ‘I remember first seeing it and thinking, “Oh, you brave, brave boy,”’ recalled Roger Taylor.
Prior to the show Barry had also been taken aback to find the singer teasing his hair into place with heated tongs and sporting black vanish on the fingernails of one hand. ‘There was a difference right there,’ he admits. Mitchell’s look, such as it was, comprised jeans, T-shirts and a mop of long blonde hair. ‘There’s Freddie with his tongs and there’s me thinking, “Here’s my hair, right let’s go.”’
In rehearsals, too, Mitchell witnessed the band’s painstaking attention to detail and willingness to bicker over those details: ‘There were lots of disagreements. You could lose half an hour with them just arguing over four bars of music.’ A great leveller in such situations was John Harris. Harris had been introduced to May and Taylor by Pat McConnell the previous summer. Smile’s former driver/roadie Pete Edmunds was no longer with them, and Harris had stepped up as road manager, electronics wizard, sound engineer and ‘fifth member’. ‘He was a lovely guy who drove this long-wheeled transit van and really looked after us,’ says Mitchell. ‘He was always there in rehearsals and he was great at stepping in and saying, “Oh, for fuck’s sake! All this over four bars. Get it together!”’
If Mitchell had any misgivings, at least Queen were working. The Imperial College gig was followed by a show at an American private school in London’s Swiss Cottage, where Roger regaled Barry with stories of his romantic derring-do: ‘Roger was having a thing with a young lady living in student accommodation in Kensington, and apparently he’d scaled two or three balconies to get to her room.’
On 18 September 1970, Jimi Hendrix was found dead at his girlfriend’s room at the Samarkand Hotel in Notting Hill. Rehearsing at Imperial, barely a stone’s throw from the scene of his demise, Queen abandoned their own set and began jamming Hendrix’s ‘Foxy Lady’, ‘Voodoo Chile’, ‘Purple Haze’ and others. Chris Smith had seen a newspaper headline announcing Jimi’s demise while travelling on the tube to Imperial: ‘I was shell-shocked,’ he remembers. ‘And as I walked down the corridor to the lecture theatre, I could hear them playing “Stone Free”.’
Mercury and Taylor closed their market stall for a day in honour of Hendrix. Despite the noble gesture, they could hardly afford to lose the money. Fred’s illustrative work was strictly piecemeal. ‘He got an offer to illustrate a book about Second World War aircraft,’ remembers Richard Thompson. ‘So I lent him my collection of Air Pictorial magazines. I remember him doing some drawings, but I think he gave up on it, as it was too much like hard work.’ Furthermore, any cash Queen made barely covered their overheads. They needed proper day jobs.
Alan Mair was the proprietor of the clothes stall opposite Freddie and Roger’s at Kensington Market. ‘They were both lovely, but that stall of theirs never cut the mustard,’ he says now. ‘There was more and more competition on that aisle. You had the first denim jackets with white fur collars coming in, and people were making jackets out of chamois leather, but those two were just selling a few loonpants, nothing unusual.’
While Mercury and Taylor’s profits dwindled, Mair’s grew. He had begun making his own leather boots in a workshop and selling them at the market. Before long, he’d enlisted Freddie to help keep an eye on his stall. Lunchtime trips to the Greyhound pub on Kensington Square found the three striking up a rapport. While Mair knew that Freddie and Roger played in a band, they didn’t know that Mair had played bass guitar in a sixties Glaswegian combo called the Beatstalkers. ‘One night, at my flat, the Beatstalkers memorabilia came out, and I started getting invited to all the Queen gigs.’
The Beatstalkers had been managed by David Bowie’s mentor Ken Pitt, and covered a few early Bowie songs. When Bowie himself breezed into the market one day, he made straight for Alan’s stall. Mair offered Bowie a pair of boots on the house (‘“Space Oddity” had been a hit, but he said he had no money. Typical music biz! I said, “Look, have them for free”’). Freddie fitted Bowie for a pair of boots. It was probably the first time the two had met since Mercury helped build Bowie’s stage at the Ealing college gig: ‘So there was Freddie Mercury, a shop assistant, giving pop star David Bowie a pair of boots he couldn’t afford to buy.’
In October, Mair and ‘everyone else in the market’ descended on Kensington’s College of Estate Management for Queen’s weekend gig. ‘And it wasn’t very good,’ says Alan. ‘Freddie had this nervous energy that
would make him push his voice, and he sang sharp the whole set. He looked awkward onstage and wasn’t very rhythmic. It was the first time they had enthusiastically invited everyone down from the market, and on the Monday we were all saying, “Oh, it was OK.” And Freddie and Roger were like, “Is that all?”’ Mitchell, too, concedes that during his time in Queen, Mercury’s voice left something to be desired: ‘There wasn’t a lot of depth there.’
Gig bookings stopped when Brian, still studying for that PhD, took another trip to the observatory in Tenerife. On his return, Queen’s Liverpool connection picked up the slack. Ken Testi was still social secretary of his college in St Helens, and booking bands through his friend and fledgling promoter Paul Conroy (who would go on to become managing director of Virgin Records). Testi offered Queen two shows: a support slot at St Helens on 30 October and The Cavern the day after.
With a few hours to kill before The Cavern show, Queen trooped into a local cinema to watch a low-budget soft porn film. According to Barry Mitchell, the action and dialogue was so desperate, the group began laughing uncontrollably, ‘so they threw us out’. As The Beatles’ spiritual home, The Cavern still had a romantic cachet. ‘It was this basement with a low ceiling and sweat everywhere,’ says Mitchell, ‘but it was still an iconic place.’ Ken Testi thought differently: ‘The Cavern DJ Billy Butler wasn’t very welcoming to Queen. Having a band in seemed to be an interference to him playing his records. I hated The Cavern and still do.’
Between gigs, Queen stayed at the Testi family’s pub, the Market Hotel, in St Helens. ‘It is worth mentioning,’ says Ken, ‘that for a Northern lad to be able to introduce such idiosyncratically dressed friends from London to his mum and for them to be so well-mannered was fantastic.’ Ken’s sister, then aged four or five, still remembers sitting on Freddie Mercury’s lap and being taught to play noughts and crosses. At Queen’s next booking a fortnight later, at a teacher training college in Hertford, the group chanced their luck by requesting a bigger fee. The reason? They’d played The Cavern and were now more famous having been on the same stage as The Beatles. They were refused.
