Freddie Mercury: The Biography

by Laura Jackson

  Having to content himself with the knowledge that at least their performance was improving, Mercury shelved his disappointment and concentrated instead on a gig just over a week away, on 25 July, at PJ’s in Truro. They would be publicly billed here as Queen for the first time, but this gig turned out to be the last for Mike Grose. ‘Basically, I’d had enough of never earning decent money and of living in squalor,’ reveals Grose. ‘I thought, to hell with it. There wasn’t any animosity, and in fact Roger rang me up a fortnight later to ask me back, but I didn’t want to.’

  When Mike Grose left that August, he had an uneasy feeling that he was walking away from something special. But, at twenty-three, having played already for six years, he was ready to quit. By contrast, Mercury, at much the same age, was driven all the more to succeed. Time was not running out for the band, but by their mid-twenties most rock stars were established. Queen remained in its infancy, and was now short of a bass player.

  There was some urgency to fill the vacancy left by Mike Grose, for in less than three weeks’ time they had a booking at Imperial College. For a second time Roger Taylor’s West Country connections proved useful, when Barry Mitchell heard in Cornwall that a London band were in desperate need of a bass player. ‘I was given a number to ring,’ says Mitchell, ‘and Roger invited me to meet them. I went to the flat they were sharing around the corner from Imperial College, and from there we walked to a lecture theatre for my audition. We did a couple of bluesy numbers then returned to the flat for a chat, when it was kind of generally agreed that I’d passed and was in.’

  Fresh-faced with long blond hair, Barry Mitchell looked the part as well as being good on bass. But he never felt that he quite fitted in. May later called Queen an ‘efficient little machine’, clearly resistant to outsiders, and Mercury, May and Taylor were established as something of a clique. Nevertheless, Mitchell looked forward to the new challenge. His first impressions of Mercury were clear: ‘Outside band business Freddie was very deep, and you never knew quite what to make of him. But professionally it was obvious right from the start that he was the driving force in the band. His ideas to be flamboyant, to wear women’s clothes on stage and so on were, without doubt, all very much part of his plan to grab as much attention as possible. It’s the same as him naming the group Queen. He knew exactly what he was doing.’

  Mitchell’s debut with Queen took place on 23 August. Performing again in front of an invited audience, it was hoped this show would be their springboard to fame. By now Mercury’s anticipation had reached fever pitch, and he’d asked a dressmaker friend to make him a couple of special stage outfits, based upon his own rough sketches. He saw himself in a slinky black one-piece of sensuous material, so figure-hugging that it left little to the imagination. Slashed dramatically to the waist to expose his hairy chest, with a quilted wing effect at the wrists and ankles, he called it his ‘Mercury suit’ and commissioned a replica in white. Getting ready for that gig, Freddie Mercury was to take their new bass player by surprise in other ways, too.

  ‘I walked into the flat and stopped dead at the sight of Freddie not only in this outfit, but with great big curlers in his hair,’ says Mitchell. ‘I thought, Wait a minute! What’s this? I came from long-haired, greasy blues bands, and I wasn’t getting into any of this lark.’ Unperturbed by Mitchell’s dismay, Mercury continued meticulously painting his fingernails black and making the finishing touches to his hair with a set of heated curling tongs that he wielded like a pro.

  But it wasn’t only Mercury’s stage clothes that were different. There was also the extraordinary trouble the band was prepared to take to please their audience. Mitchell recalls that ‘Earlier that same day, I’d been round at the flat to help them get things ready. We were making our own popcorn and orange juice, which was being laid on free of charge. It sounds corny nowadays, but it was a heck of a lot more than other bands did.’ There was no return on their hospitality, however, and they reverted to scraping together as many gigs as possible. Mitchell admits, ‘Queen were busier than any band I’d been used to. We played another gig at a private school in London not long after that night, but it was the Liverpool scene that was special then, and it was clear they [Queen] had good local connections.’

  Those Merseyside connections continued to be made through Ken Testi. By now social secretary at St Helen’s College of Technology, part of his job involved booking bands for college dances, and as such, he was invaluable to Queen. Even so, at the beginning of September, bookings dried up when May’s academic studies required another trip to Tenerife, leaving Mercury, Taylor and Barry Mitchell to content themselves with rehearsals. One practice session, in particular, remains vivid in Mitchell’s memory.

  ‘It was on 18 September,’ he says. ‘I arrived at the flat to meet the others and had just walked in when Freddie, very pale-faced, asked, “Have you heard? Jimi Hendrix is dead.” God, the stunned feeling was immense. He’d been our idol, and we were all absolutely shattered. Freddie and Roger closed their stall that day as a mark of respect, but by night we were still in a state of shock, so at rehearsal, as our own tribute, we played nothing but Hendrix songs the whole session.’

  Hendrix’s death had genuinely shaken Mercury. The American guitarist, singer and songwriter was one of a handful of artistes whose influence played a tangible role in shaping his own musical taste, which as Ken Testi reveals, was difficult to define: ‘Freddie’s album collection in those days struggled to get into double figures, and those he did have he kept flat in a drawer. He had Liza Minnelli’s Cabaret, The Beatles (White Album) and Sgt. Pepper, Led Zeppelin’s first album, because he loved all the power chords, the Who’s Tommy and one by the Pretty Things called SF Sorrow, which Freddie considered to be the first rock opera.’

  Mercury himself cited his two major influences as Minnelli and Hendrix, an odd cocktail which perhaps helps to explain the showbiz flair that formed such an integral part of his own performing style. It is often said that you can tell a lot about a person from their record collection, but this ragbag selection of Mercury’s was only confusing. He was right, however, about SF Sorrow – it was the first rock opera.

  The Pretty Things had deserted their early R&B roots and were involved in London’s psychedelic underground scene. When SF Sorrow was released back in December 1968, it was critically acclaimed several weeks before the appearance of the Who’s now much-vaunted Tommy. The band’s lead guitarist, Dick Taylor, formerly an original member of the Rolling Stones, confirms, ‘We recorded our album before Tommy, and in fact, there’s a track on it which sounds extremely like “Pinball Wizard”. Phil [May] had concocted a story, and we all wrote songs around that. It was kind of surreal and poetic and quite complex, about someone’s life and death. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I’ve ever really understood it myself, but the thing is, it was certainly pre-Tommy. But the Who got their album out in the States first, and that was all it took for SF Sorrow to get sidelined, and Tommy hailed as the first rock opera.’

  Dick Taylor and his then wife, Melissa, were friends with Mercury and Mary Austin. ‘Melissa worked at Biba, when Mary worked at reception, and it was through their friendship that I got to know Freddie,’ says Dick Taylor. ‘We met up often, and I never knew he felt that way about our album, but it doesn’t surprise me. He really was very quiet in private. He didn’t say much at all to many people, at any time. He invited us to some of their gigs when he was newly starting out, and I was very impressed with how hard he was working at it. When I saw him with Queen later on the telly I thought, Blimey, that’s a bit over the top.’

  Mary Austin’s increasing significance in Mercury’s life continued to deflect any doubts about his sexuality. ‘Although ours was very much a business arrangement,’ says Barry Mitchell, ‘I’d often head off to the market to see Freddie and Roger, just to knock about. Freddie was always full of wild gestures, hands flying around, and would be very demonstrative when he greeted you. Don’t get me wrong, he was great fun,
and we all got used to him, but all this limp wrist stuff – I was sure it was all part of the act. I already knew what he was up to with the band’s image, and I assumed this caper was just an extension of that. I never wondered seriously about him being gay, because there was no sign of anything other than a heterosexual relationship with Mary.

  ‘As a couple, what came across most was that they were very good friends. There was a solidity there, even then. Freddie trusted Mary ever so much. She was someone he could confide in.’

  For Ken Testi, now effectively Queen’s manager, Mary Austin was something of an enigma: ‘She was good-looking, quiet, caring and ever so sweet but difficult to really get to know. I think later on, when stardom came along, that Freddie developed in similar vein. And the thing is people who do get close to a star tend to protect their own closeness by excluding others from getting to the star, and as such it creates a huge, impenetrable cladding around that person, which becomes highly exclusive to outside influences. By the time this happened with Freddie he might very well have wanted it that way, but personally I’m not so sure.’

  The rarefied exclusivity to which Ken Testi refers was years away then, and in 1970 Mercury was only too glad of Testi’s help in securing bookings for Queen, which still tended to focus to a large extent on the Liverpool area. ‘Every time I booked them for a gig up north I tried to make it worth their while by booking another one for the next night,’ Testi explains. In those days Testi’s mother ran the Market Hotel in St Helens, which was where Queen stayed on these weekend trips.

  ‘There were only ten letting rooms,’ he goes on, ‘but whenever the band came up my mum would give them beds if she had any to spare. If not, they’d sleep on my bedroom floor. But she always made sure they all got a cooked breakfast in the morning. Freddie, without fail, made sure they gave her a big box of chocolates for her trouble.’

  One weekend at the end of October 1970 still stands out as memorable for Geoff Higgins and Barry Mitchell. As usual, St Helen’s Tech featured on the first night, and Higgins was there. He remembers Mercury being more obsessed than usual with his looks that night and recalls, ‘Queen were using the college kitchen as a dressing room, and Freddie had poured himself into the tightest velvet trousers I’d seen. There was a seam up the back of each leg, like in ladies’ nylons, and he was going berserk trying to get them to lie straight. Eventually he asked Ken to get him a big mirror, so he nipped off to the fashion department and returned with a full-length one. Well, Fred started writhing and twisting furiously, struggling to straighten these seams, and he flatly refused to go on stage until he got them right, no matter if it made the band very late.’

  When they did finally prise Mercury away from the cheval-glass to perform, it had all been hardly worth it: ‘London progressive rock, which is what they were playing, was just a no-no in Liverpool, and they were flogging a dead horse trying to serve up that music that night,’ Higgins reveals.

  They were to perform the same set the following evening, but the excitement of the venue overrode any doubts left over from the night before. ‘Freddie was a huge Beatles fan, and so when I fixed up this Halloween gig at the Cavern he was thrilled,’ recalls Ken Testi. But the omens were not good. Mitchell’s amp chose that night to die, and when he plugged in his guitar to another band’s equipment, it promptly exploded.

  ‘The Cavern itself, though, was quite an amazing place,’ maintains Mitchell. ‘For all its reputation, it was nothing but a dingy basement, with so many people squeezed inside it that it became a cauldron, with their sweat making condensation run down the brick walls. Yet undeniably it had something.’

  What the night didn’t have was a front man singing in tune. Just as Higgins revealed that Mercury often sang off-key when fronting Wreckage, so Mitchell confirms continuing problems with the fledgling Queen: ‘And it wasn’t just the Cavern night either. I didn’t rate Freddie’s voice at all in those days. He didn’t always hold the note very well. There wasn’t a lot of depth to his voice, which was, to be blunt, pretty thin.

  ‘Years later he was absolutely amazing and could hit and hold practically any note in creation. I’ve often wondered, in fact, if he took voice training on the quiet, although that’s always been hotly denied.’

  With Mercury’s intermittently unreliable singing voice, Queen played a shaky handful of bookings in the next couple of months, only to end the year on a sour note. ‘We had a New Year’s Eve gig in one of the Imperial College refectories,’ recalls Barry Mitchell, ‘but we got stopped after only half an hour. They asked us to pack up, so that they could put on the disco. They said we were too loud and gave this and that excuse, but it was obvious they just didn’t like us. Freddie was completely disgusted. He argued with the bloke, saying, “You’ve got live music here, man! And you want to put on records?!” He was thoroughly cheesed off about it.’

  Following that gig, Barry Mitchell decided to leave Queen: ‘I didn’t feel that they were going anywhere,’ he explains, ‘and not just because Freddie was often flat. Plus I didn’t like where they were headed musically. Freddie, in particular, although he liked rock ’n’ roll, was into the sort of music I wasn’t used to. He forever wanted to make it more intricate and much more melodic. The band was playing hard-rock stuff, but Freddie’s influences were definitely very tuneful.

  ‘They were getting heavily into performing all their own compositions, too, which I personally didn’t like. Queen’s first two albums contained what I felt was a lot of pretentious stuff, although they found their hard-rock base eventually.’

  Mitchell honoured the immediate two dates of 1971, the first of which, on 8 January, marked Queen’s debut at the Marquee. His final gig with the band came the next night, at Ewell Technical College, Surrey, when, with Genesis, they played support to Kevin Ayres and the Whole World Band. What Barry Mitchell remembers best about that night is Peter Gabriel’s persistent attempts to talk Roger Taylor into joining Genesis. But unlike Mitchell, Taylor elected to stay with Queen.

  Mitchell had lasted longer than Grose, yet still Queen had got through two bass players in ten months. They had six weeks before their next gig, and surveying the available musicians, they called on the services of someone else on the session circuit temporarily to fill the gap. Within the space of two gigs, this was a decision they came to regret. The excitable bassist cavorted about the stage like a lunatic; with Mercury’s increasingly bold stage act, there was room for only one flamboyant focus. The musician was not invited back after a gig at Kingston Polytechnic on 20 February.

  That last gig was in support of Yes and Wishbone Ash. Wishbone’s lead guitarist, Andy Powell, confirms that Queen’s music was still based in progressive rock: ‘What they were playing then was similar to us, although having said that you could certainly detect an edge to them that was a bit more mainstream, and it wasn’t long after that that they became a glam band.’

  A former Kingston Polytechnic student, Tony Blackman, recalls that night, too: ‘Two things have stuck in my memory. The first is that although Queen, whom nobody really knew at this time, were supporting Yes and Wishbone, they amazingly didn’t come over in any way as second rate. And also their image stood out. Dressed completely in black, their clothes were skintight, and there was no doubt about the fact that they were going out of their way, particularly the singer, to project an effeminate image. That kind of thing just wasn’t done in those days, but he was flaunting it.’

  Queen’s on-stage confidence was undermined by their frustration at the lack of a bass player. They made a huge effort to see other bands, in the hope of finding the right person to replace Barry Mitchell. This paid off when May and Taylor attended a dance held at the Maria Assumpta Teacher Training College, Kensington, where Brian May’s by then steady girlfriend, Christine Mullen, was studying. Here, they were to meet John Richard Deacon, a student too, and one who played bass guitar.

  Since childhood, John Deacon had played guitar and, gripped by Beatlemania, had formed his
first band by 1966. Leaving school three years later, he had enrolled at Chelsea College in London to study electronics. He retained his love of music and attended various shows, including an earlier Queen gig. He had been less than impressed at the time. Four months later it was a different story when he heard that Queen was looking for a bass player. His flatmate Peter Stoddart knew May and Taylor, and it was through Stoddart that he met them that night, with the express purpose of offering them his services.

  Neither Taylor nor May could believe their luck, and they invited Deacon to audition for Queen at Imperial College a few days later. Two things impressed them about him, apart from his obvious musical skill: his knowledge of electronics, which with experience of faulty equipment in the past was no small consideration, and his placid manner. Similar in temperament to Brian May, and opposite to the vibrancy of Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor, he seemed to promise to balance the band. John Deacon joined Queen in late February 1971. He was to be the final piece in their line-up.

  Months of intensive rehearsal followed, so that by the summer they were able to accept bookings. For much of this time Brian May was absent, once again committed to his PhD studies in the Canaries. But the band was thriving, and confident that they were finally on the right track. Mercury threw himself enthusiastically into their practice sessions. He was determined to learn from past mistakes – and doubtless to work on his voice. He couldn’t wait to get started with what, at last, felt instinctively like the complete Queen.

  FOUR

  Blind Faith

  John Deacon played his first gig with Queen at a Surrey college on 2 July 1971, followed just over a week later by his initial appearance at Imperial College. In the late sixties, Smile had been known as ‘the Imperial College band’; Brian May himself was an IC student, and Freddie Mercury for a long time had been part of that crowd. Deacon felt an outsider, and he wasn’t sure what reaction he’d get. It turned out to be potentially a special night when record producer John Anthony, with whom Smile had worked two years before, was spotted in the audience. As he left, he gave the band encouragement and said casually that he would be in touch.