Freddie Mercury: The Biography

by Laura Jackson

  Kensington, however, became Mercury’s stomping ground. Although it paled against the exoticism of Bombay’s bazaars, he thrived on the activity of the market. Comfortable, too, with his new circle of friends and infected by the end-of-sixties buzz, Mercury’s increasing flamboyance became an acceptably surreal part of everyday life. Mike Bersin remembers, ‘We were all very conscious that Freddie always thought of himself as being special. With hindsight, I recognise the determination to succeed that he had in spades. He demanded to be treated as a star long before he was a star. His talent was his ambition really, and people reacted to it in different ways, but it wasn’t an unpleasant thing.’

  Doubtless Mercury’s drive to succeed had received a boost, albeit at second-hand, as he watched the band he longed to be a part of preparing for the launch of their first single. Mercury Records released ‘Earth/Step on Me’ in August 1969, but the joy of rushing to the nearest record store to see it on display was denied them – it was released only in America. Weeks of anticipation turned sour, until their profound disappointment was diluted when Mercury invited the band back into the studio to record more tracks for an album.

  Tim Staffell recalls that ‘By now Brian and I had written a few songs and were looking forward to having the chance to record them properly. Our producer was Fritz Freyer and the tracks we cut for that album included “Polar Bear”, “Earth” and “Step on Me”, of course, as well as “Blag” and “April Lady”, on which Brian sang lead. But although we were happy with the results, Mercury wouldn’t release the album. It ended up surfacing years later in Japan.’

  Disappointment set in yet again, and weighing it all up, Freddie Mercury was clear that this kind of thing was not going to happen to him. He had been denied the chance to jazz up Smile, but he had gained a foothold with Ibex and was determined to make an impression. The band played gigs wherever Ken Testi could book them, mainly at venues in the north of England. They worked in particular around the Liverpool area, where he had a lot of useful contacts.

  Testi recalls, ‘Ibex had been into progressive rock, very much influenced by bands like Wishbone Ash, Free and Jethro Tull. Then Freddie arrived and brought something else entirely to it. It was dramatic, but it worked. He also brought an injection of culture. He was already fashionable. Not quite the peacock he later became; of course money was tight. But he had an eye to being well turned out. Ibex had been into jeans and trench coats, whereas Freddie was more your satin-and-fur man.’

  Mike Bersin agrees that ‘As a front man, there wasn’t a lot of difference then to when he became famous with Queen, except that later he wore louder clothes and had more space to strut around. But all the movements were there with Ibex, lots of poses, many of which I now recognise had been there right from the very start. I mean we were three guys from Widnes, all shoe-gazing bluesmen with minimal stage presence or movement and totally religious about our music. Then along came our new front man who was, to say the least, a culture shock. Freddie always worked extremely hard though, to instil in us a sense of being something to look at, as well as to listen to. And even in the cramped space available to pub bands he would strut up and down wielding the mike stand and pretending to play guitar.

  ‘Freddie always took stock of what was going on, but he never copied another performer. Freddie was always Freddie, very angular, very showbizzy about everything he did and entirely his own creation.

  ‘He was also continually concerned that he looked just right. He was never scruffy and yet to my knowledge he only had to his name one pair of boots, one T-shirt, one pair of trousers, one belt and one jacket. Still, he remained immaculate. As to the person inside? I would say non-stop in his life, both on and off stage, Freddie put on a performance.’

  When Ibex travelled north to play gigs, Smile would invariably join them for moral support, if they weren’t engaged at Imperial College. It wasn’t always easy to find a reliable mode of transport for both bands and their friends, and at times they risked their lives driving up and down the motorway in vehicles little better than deathtraps. But it was good fun – and good experience.

  Mercury’s most memorable gigs with Ibex were probably when they played at the Bolton Octagon Theatre in August 1969, followed by an appearance at an open-air festival the next day in the city’s Queen’s Park. ‘I brought along this guy I knew called Steve Lake,’ says Ken Testi, ‘who was seriously into photography, experimenting with light shows and liquid slides, which were very advanced for the time, and he took some great shots of Freddie in this amphitheatre in the park. The seating was like orange segments behind a pool, and there was one memorable shot of Freddie in full flight striding the stage totally à la Queen. It’s an image that’s stayed with me ever since.’

  The Bolton gigs proved to be a significant milestone in the development of the band’s image. Mike Bersin vividly recalls getting ready for the lunchtime gig. ‘We had decided to go to town dressing up. I wore a gold lamé cloak, which, when the time came, I felt a twit wearing – but Freddie stood out a mile. He’d been backcombing his long hair to make it stand out more, and before going on he’d been twitching at himself in the mirror for ages. I eventually yelled at him, “For God’s sake, stop messin’ with your hair, Freddie!” To which he retorted, “But I’m a star, dear boy!” There’s not a lot you can say to that.’

  According to Bersin, it was hard to tell if Mercury suffered any pre-performance nerves. ‘He would get more jokey than normal,’ he recalls, ‘which was maybe a form of psyching himself up, but the male society in bands then was definitely insult-based, and we’d all be slagging each other off. Freddie would take the piss out of people something rotten and, in turn, they took the piss out of him. He loved it.’

  It was around this time that Ibex decided they were tired of the exhausting motorway shuttle back and forth between London and Liverpool. Disappointingly it didn’t look like much was happening for them in the capital, even with the advent of their colourful new singer; so taking a vote, they agreed to stay for a while in Liverpool. Mercury didn’t like this arrangement, but his desire to remain in the group meant he had to go along with it. Based up north, he managed to maintain his links with Smile because they would often hitch-hike to Liverpool to see him play, staying with him overnight at his digs.

  His lodgings had been found through one of their friends, Geoff Higgins, whose mother was catering manageress at the Dovedale Towers Banqueting Halls, 60 Penny Lane. Higgins explains, ‘At this time “Tupp” Taylor was heavily into Jethro Tull and was dying to learn the flute so that he could incorporate it into the band’s repertoire, and he asked me if I could play bass for Ibex instead for a while, which I did.

  ‘Initially my mum had been shocked when I came home at the way I was dressed but nothing fazed her for long. She liked all my London friends, but she just adored Freddie, thought he talked ever so posh, and he was wonderfully courteous to her. Behind and slightly to the left of the main tower at Dovedale there was an enormous flat on two floors, which was where I was living, and when Freddie was looking for digs, he had to look no further.’

  Mercury may have missed Kensington and longed to return there, but he did enjoy Higgins’s company: ‘We all by now semi-suspected that Freddie’s sexuality was different from ours,’ Higgins recalls, ‘but then again at that time Liverpudlians classed all Londoners as fucking fruits anyway, so you couldn’t go by that. Freddie stayed with me at Penny Lane, but he never once came on to me.’ Geoff Higgins admits that this was a huge relief, considering his vivid memory of the time they had first met.

  ‘The first words I heard Freddie say,’ he explains, ‘was when Bersin had invited me some months before to kip on the chaise longue in his flat, when I was in London to do interviews for a few colleges I was hoping to get into.

  ‘I was fast asleep one day when in walked these two blokes. It’d been howling a gale and raining, and one of them dashed to the big mirror over the fireplace and squealed, “Oh, my God! Have I been out look
ing like this?” and I thought, well, I’m not going near that one, that’s for sure! It’s strange that we went on to become such good mates.’

  What surprised Higgins most was that for all Mercury’s posturing antics he was, in reality, a very sensitive bloke. ‘Fred was also a very good confidant,’ he reveals. ‘If I was feeling crap, he was good at noticing it – and drawing me out to talk about what was bothering me – and he’d always get me back on track. He was like that.

  ‘He was a couple of years older than me, which seemed to make all the difference, and it wasn’t only with me either. He’d be there if anybody in the gang needed an ear, and, let’s face it, at that age among blokes it’s not often that someone notices, let alone cares. But Fred did, and he was very good at helping. He was a terrific listener.’ As with much in Mercury’s personality, this side of him mostly remained hidden, swamped in public by the outlandish clowning that he was allowing himself more freedom to express.

  Mercury began to feel he had been in Ibex long enough to try to change something he considered important – the group’s name. Mike Bersin recalls the way he went about it: ‘He phoned me up one night saying that the others in the band weren’t happy with the name Ibex, and, if I didn’t object, the rest wanted it to be changed to Wreckage. I said that if that’s what everyone else wanted, then it was fine by me. Two days later we met up at rehearsal and discovered that all our equipment had already been stencilled with the new name. It transpired we all got the same call that night! Having said that,’ adds Mike, ‘Wreckage was a good choice. It probably said more to people. Not many knew what an Ibex was and cared even less, I guess. But Freddie knew if a name sounded right.’ What was interesting about Mercury’s manoeuvrings was that he managed to give the illusion of democracy while neatly getting his own way and not upsetting anyone in the process.

  While Smile frequently came to Liverpool to watch Ibex play – and to perform themselves, as Ken Testi would occasionally arrange gigs for them too – Mercury and the others returned equally often to London. Testi was frantically busy fixing up Wreckage with work, often at the last minute. ‘This whole period was pretty hectic,’ he recalls. ‘I didn’t know sometimes whether I was coming or going. Once we’d all been in London, and I’d hitched up to St Helen’s because I’d decided to go to college there. I’d literally just got in the door when Mike phoned to tell me that they’d had word that they were booked for the next day and asking if I could return to take them up in a van they’d borrowed. Nothing daunted, I grabbed a snack and started thumbing a lift back to London, arriving late that same day.

  ‘Early next morning I hoofed it round to Imperial College, picking up Freddie en route, who was supposed to help me load the gear. It was a science college and not particularly set up for music, but they had a small rehearsal facility on the third floor of an obscure tower with a spiral staircase, and the gear was stashed at the top. Well, while I humped down a big bass cabinet on my back and all the other heavy gear, a trip at a time, in total Freddie managed three journeys; one carrying the maracas, the second with a tambourine, and the third time he took down a music stand that we didn’t need. When I told him so, he replied with a gigantic sigh and a flick of his wrist, “Oh, could you possibly take it back up, then.” He was bloody useless, but never mind he was there in spirit.’

  All this effort was in aid of a gig at the Sink in Hardman Street, a basement club below the Rumbling Tum, which Geoff Higgins remembers well: ‘The Sink was so small and clammy, it made the Cavern look like the Empire State Building. It wasn’t licensed to sell alcohol, but they got around that by selling bottle tops at the door, which you then exchanged downstairs for ale. Anyway, that night Freddie was up to his usual tricks, cavorting about. We were always telling him, “For God’s sake, man, stand still! It’s really uncool to be poncing about the stage like that!” You just didn’t do that in Liverpool, and we were forever telling him that he was embarrassing us, but Fred didn’t take any notice. He was really into the look of things.’

  It was just as well that he was concentrating on their image because, according to Higgins, the sound was way off. ‘I taped that gig, and Wreckage were doing a Beatles number but giving it a mega over-the-top Wishbone Ash-type treatment, and Fred was lost. He was way off tune.’

  There was to be, however, something very significant about this gig. Says Higgins, ‘Smile had been playing the pre-dip ball at Liverpool Art College that same night, and afterwards they crashed in on our gig. No sooner had they arrived than they got up on stage with Wreckage, which meant that that gig, on 9 September 1969, was the first time that Freddie, Brian and Roger all played together on stage.’

  Because Ken Testi was so worn out with all the travelling, he doesn’t recall much about this gig, but he does remember the moment when Smile joined Wreckage: ‘Freddie was really in his element when he guested on a few of Smile’s numbers. He knew all their stuff by heart, you see.’ Watching Mercury on stage, Testi maintains that apart from the odd occasion when he sang off key – Freddie was already rapidly developing as a performer: ‘He had all the strong qualities that he would later bring to Queen; striding across in front of the band, using all those, now familiar, exaggerated gestures. He was bloody good.’

  For all that, though, Liverpool was not where Freddie Mercury saw himself getting his big break. Soon after the Sink gig, he headed back to London with Mike Bersin and went on to graduate from Ealing Art College with a diploma in graphic art and design. He also teamed up again with Roger Taylor in Kensington market. Brian May was by now in his second year as a postgraduate student and still pursuing a career in astrophysics, having joined, as part of his PhD, a research team studying zodiacal light. The work involved long stretches away, building an observatory in Tenerife. Left alone more often with Roger Taylor, Mercury’s relationship with the drummer developed into one of his strongest friendships.

  Mercury’s flat share with Mary Austin had ended while he was away in Liverpool, although she had often spent weekends with him in Merseyside. Once he was back in Kensington, they didn’t immediately start to live together again, and for a while Mercury was homeless, part of a shifting galaxy of friends with no fixed address. ‘At this time no one really knew where anyone was kipping,’ Ken Testi says. ‘I remember staying in one mate’s already overcrowded flat when there was a knock on the door early one morning, and there was Roger clutching a mattress, hoping to doss down.’

  There was nothing grand about any of their accommodation by late 1969. Most places they leased on a short-term basis, and in any case they usually fell behind with the rent and were evicted. Finally a few friends from Smile, Wreckage and other bands found a flat in Ferry Road, Barnes. This was only supposed to house three people, however, and, according to Mike Bersin, when the landlady came round for the rent, everyone else would hide in the bedroom until she’d gone.

  ‘The flat was ghastly,’ Mike Bersin recalls. ‘There were odd chairs and a red vinyl sofa, which had burst at the seams in places with ugly horsehair stuffing sprouting out. But we played Led Zeppelin’s first album all day, every day, on the old monogram record player, until the needle wore out. At that age, though, it was wonderful. Lager and lime was the big drink, and you went about without shoes on your feet, which in dog-shit covered pavements wasn’t the best of ideas, but there was just such an amazing buzz at the end of the sixties. It was post-pill and pre-AIDS, and promiscuity felt mandatory rather than optional. It was kind of romantic, too, jumping into a battered old van and travelling miles to play gigs practically for free.’

  Although fastidious by nature, Mercury wholeheartedly shared in the chaos of the Ferry Road flat. He thrived, too, on its atmosphere of camaraderie, and it was here that he seriously began to write songs, as well as rehearsing harmonies with May and Taylor. ‘Freddie loved talking music, would burn with enthusiasm when he was trying things out,’ Mike Bersin says. ‘He had endless patience, too, and would show you anything you needed to learn on piano. O
n that level you could get close to him, but probably only on that level.

  ‘Fred and I wrote a couple of songs together, which was quite an experience. If he thought there was a song in the offing in you, he drove you enthusiastically all the way until you got there.’ In tribute, after Mercury’s death, Roger Taylor spoke of how intensely he drove the others in Queen, forever determined to get the best out of them.

  ‘That determination to succeed was an irresistible force in Freddie from the start,’ maintains Mike Bersin. ‘And it was like a moving train. Once it pulls away, you can’t impede it by holding on to the door handle. You either jump on and go with it, or you step back and let go. And everyone around Freddie either went with it or they didn’t. People were forever calling out jokingly as soon as he arrived on the scene, “Ah, here comes Freddie, the star!” but it was all good-natured.’

  Of these crazy days, Tim Staffell recalls, ‘I never lived there but was always visiting as Pat McConnell and I were close-ish at the time. I smoked my first joint there and was absolutely transfixed by Freddie’s Frank Zappa album Only In It for the Money. The actress Sylvia Sims lived next door, I seem to recall.’

  Geoff Higgins occasionally stayed at Ferry Road, too. ‘There were at least three bedrooms,’ he says. ‘Freddie, Roger and another bloke shared the first one you came to on your right when you came in, and the two other bedrooms were at the end of a long corridor. People came out of them, but I never saw a soul go in! It was very strange. Then there was the breakfast room, where Freddie, Brian and Mike would write songs. “Son and Daughter” was definitely written there because they went over and over it one Sunday morning when I was recovering from a major hangover. They were driving me nuts trying to get it right.’