Freddie Mercury: The Biography

by Laura Jackson

  The date was set for 18 September, which worked out well with Queen’s arrangements to play two gigs earlier in the month. The first show took place during the annual Edinburgh Festival at the Playhouse Theatre, when they were supported by Supercharge. And the second was in Wales, at Cardiff Castle. Billed QUEEN AT THE CASTLE, the outdoor gig came at the end of the worst drought in Britain for years. Rivers and reservoirs had dried up, and in some places the street standpipes were back in operation.

  But, as the 12,000-plus crowd assembled that night, the rains started, pouring down as support acts Frankie Miller’s Full House, Manfred Mann’s Earthband and Andy Fairweather Low played their sets. By the time Queen appeared, the ground was a bog, and the crowd were soaking wet.

  The compère in Cardiff had been Radio One presenter Bob Harris, who was on duty again eight days later at Hyde Park, when more than ten times the Cardiff crowd converged on the area. Capital Radio was covering the event live, with commentary from Kenny Everett and Nicky Horne. This night, too, was the first time Freddie Mercury met sixties’ pop star Dave Clark, who would become one of his closest friends.

  Besides his professional association with Queen, Harris had developed a close friendship with the band and already held them in high regard: ‘They were very bright, and their overview was always keen,’ says Harris. ‘They were never an exploitative band either.’ Referring to another stylish group at the time, he recalls, ‘I remember being in a production meeting with the members of this group, and it was, “What do the punters want?” said in a very dismissive and blasé way. Queen were never guilty of that, and, in fact, genuinely cared very much for their fans.’

  The support acts at Hyde Park included Steve Hillage, Supercharge and Kiki Dee. Having lately enjoyed a number one hit with Elton John with ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’, Dee had hoped to persuade John to appear with her. But, in the end, she settled for dueting with a cardboard cut-out of the star instead.

  ‘Queen came on just as it was getting dark,’ recalls Bob Harris. ‘People had been amassing since midday, and, by mid-afternoon, when you stood on the stage, you could see the crowd literally stretching to the horizon line. The mass of humanity was an incredible sight.’

  Greeting this mass of humanity with the words ‘Welcome to our picnic by the Serpentine’, Mercury, in a black leotard scooped to the navel and with ballet pumps on his feet, launched into a high-energy rendition of ‘Keep Yourself Alive’.

  ‘It was a brilliant event,’ says Harris, ‘and Queen were very special that day.’

  The roar for an encore was deafening, making Mercury desperate to return on stage, as much for himself as for his fans. At Queen concerts, he often taunted an audience with the battle cry, ‘This is what you want? This is what you’re gonna get!’ Only that day the police saw to it that no one was getting anything more. Prior to the event they had laid down a strict set of dos and don’ts, and as the schedule had already overrun by thirty minutes they threatened Mercury with instant arrest if he dared place a foot back on the stage. To prove their point, they pulled the plug on the power supply, momentarily plunging the park into pitch darkness.

  Sir Richard Branson recalls, ‘It was a vitally important gig for Queen – and a turning point in their career.’ The band put this to best use in the weeks ahead, while working on their new album. A Day at the Races was released during the second week in December, when, despite music-press criticism that it lacked inspiration, it was a resounding success for them.

  Almost exactly a month earlier, Mercury’s love song ‘Somebody to Love’ had been chosen as Queen’s next single. Kenny Everett once more bombarded his Capital Radio listeners with the number, to the extent that it topped the station’s own chart, Hitline. When it was officially released on 12 November, however, it stopped just short of giving Mercury the satisfaction of a second national number one.

  By now, in a deeply personal way, physical and emotional fulfilment was a serious issue for Mercury. He had battled with himself for a long time, but by the end of 1976, he felt he had to sacrifice his relationship with Mary Austin for stronger desires. That Mercury deeply loved Austin has never been disputed. That he felt compelled to redefine their life together did not mean he was less devoted to her, nor, time would prove, she to him. His decision led to an unusual coexistence. While Mercury pursued the gay life he craved, Mary Austin went on to make other relationships, from which she had children. She was pregnant with her second child when Mercury died. But she remained involved with him throughout his life. And Mercury’s abiding love for the woman he had met when he was unknown and penniless always overshadowed his closest relationships with male lovers.

  The break with Austin was a huge relief to Mercury, and 1977 began a period of promiscuity that lasted for at least five years. He boasted that his enormous sex drive led him to bed hundreds; not an unusual claim in rock, though the bragging usually refers to female groupies. After an evening’s partying on the gay scene, Mercury would select whoever took his fancy. He wanted sex with no strings and would leave for home around dawn with his conquest in tow. It appears that he wasn’t fussy, and for someone whose artistic sensibilities were becoming increasingly refined, he could go extremely downmarket. This period also saw a marked increase in Mercury’s use of cocaine.

  His diet of sex and drugs was indulged by Queen’s hectic life on the road, especially during the two- or three-month US/Canadian tours. The most extensive of these was due to begin on 13 January, and Queen arrived in Milwaukee to find the country experiencing the lowest temperatures of the century. Joining them on the bill was Thin Lizzy, fronted by Phil Lynott and featuring lead guitarist Scott Gorham. The raucous rock band, which derived its name from Tin Lizzy, a comic-strip robot, had recently notched up two top ten UK hits. Their manager Chris O’Donnell remembers getting this support slot:

  ‘Thin Lizzy had been due to tour America on their own, when Brian Robertson got involved in a fight at the Speakeasy Club. Some guy had tried to smash a bottle over Frankie Miller’s head, and Brian put his arm up to stop the bottle, which shattered and badly cut his hand. The injury was so nasty that he couldn’t play the guitar. I went straight to America to see if I could find a way of keeping Lizzy’s new album alive, and when I was there I got a phone call, out of the blue, from Queen’s US agent then, Howard Rose. Rose told me that Queen were big fans of Thin Lizzy and wondered if they would like to support them on their States tour.’

  Returning to Britain and substituting guitarist Gary Moore for the injured Robertson, O’Donnell set about negotiating terms on the band’s behalf. ‘I was a young manager then in partnership with Chris Morrison, and basically we couldn’t believe our luck,’ he admits. ‘I heard myself saying we can’t do this, or yes, we will do that, but at first it was very strange.’ Controlling his delight, however, O’Donnell was less impressed in other ways.

  ‘I’d gone to the Reid offices to discuss the tour,’ he recalls, ‘and at that time “Somebody To Love” had entered the charts, and Queen were hoping to do Top of the Pops. But the thing is, it had been at number two, and news had just come through that it’d quickly dropped back to five. Well, there was a girl there screaming down the phone to someone at the BBC that they just had to get on the show. The whole premise of TOTP was that it only featured bands whose records were rising up the charts, but this girl’s whole attitude spelt out, “But we’re Queen! We’re apart from all that.”’

  Independent-minded himself, O’Donnell says that Thin Lizzy, unusually, did not pay to support Queen. It was a personal thing: ‘I just don’t agree with the practice. In the business it’s called tour support money, and basically a band sells the slot to help defray the cost of sound and lights, with the payback for the support band supposedly being the exposure which could lead to them being big. I’m very sceptical about that so, no, Lizzy didn’t pay to support Queen.’

  According to O’Donnell, Queen’s first couple of US dates were little more than warm-up gigs, and
the tour only started properly once Thin Lizzy joined them. The trip was a revelation for him: ‘There were definitely times when Thin Lizzy played Queen off the stage. I felt that, good as they were, Queen were now so stylised that the slightest thing going wrong threw the whole perfect balance right off. Whereas Lizzy were so hungry and raw that by contrast they had this unpredictable energy on stage, and it showed. Having said that, they were a great package.’

  For someone who had started out in awe of Queen, reality proved disillusioning, especially with regard to Mercury’s personality and behaviour: ‘To me Queen were one of the greatest rock bands ever but not all America is New York and Los Angeles – you play an awful lot of gigs in between. We turned up at one airport and headed as usual for the cars which had been laid on to pick us up. Midwest towns would have a 20,000 capacity sports stadium, but beyond that the facilities were not great.

  ‘This particular day we arrived and found that three shiny black saloon cars had been hired for us from the local funeral parlour; they were the best cars they had. Well, Freddie threw a major wobbly and went into a huge sulk because there was no limousine and flatly refused to get into the car. Now, I know for a fact that he had been told, well in advance, that in these places there would be no point expecting any stretch limos and yet he still had to make a big noisy issue about it.’

  Unwittingly reinforcing Pete Brown’s theory about the cause of some of Mercury’s prima donna antics, O’Donnell adds, ‘Of course, this kind of carry-on manifested itself in tantrums when they really stemmed from other, deeper problems.’

  But that petulant display wasn’t an isolated incident. O’Donnell generally found Mercury a difficult person. ‘He was in a spiral of the lifestyle he led, as happens in many cases,’ he explains, ‘and it just isn’t a real situation. He gathered this great court around himself. Pete Brown was on that trip, as were his personal assistants Paul Prenter and Joe Fanelli, but there were several others. He had an American hairdresser, for example, who accompanied him everywhere, a personal masseur and a dresser, and it was all, “Freddie darling, this” and “Certainly, Freddie darling, that.” On stage he was the consummate professional and very driven by fame, but he had to live the whole thing off stage, too, and, of course, in one way he ended up paying the price.’

  ‘In his Kensington market days he had been an entirely different person. Now he’d lost that. It’s easily done. In management you become fully aware that it’s a period of escalation – that’s what you work towards in the first place. But it becomes very hard to control, and it’s like holding the reins of a runaway horse – eventually you’re scared to let go, and you wonder where it’s taking you.’

  Quite early on in the tour, one particular incident left its mark on O’Donnell. Having completed two Canadian dates, Queen returned to America for a gig at the Stadium in Chicago, when he recalls, ‘The weather was atrocious – snow, ice and horrendously bitter – and the equipment trucks had been delayed travelling down from Montreal because of the conditions. Well, at the theatre the kids were queuing round the block, huddling and blowing on their hands to keep warm, and the promoter was pleading with Freddie to be allowed to open the doors and let them in.

  ‘Queen were very late anyway, and he eventually told Freddie that many of the fans were actually turning blue outside. His only response was, “Darling, we haven’t had a sound check yet. We can’t possibly let them hear Queen until then.” And what’s more, I watched him deliberately set about delaying the whole process, just to make his point.’

  Disgusted by this behaviour, O’Donnell continues: ‘Freddie very much had a vision of where they were going, where he himself was going. He was totally professional in terms of how he was going to get it, too. And you can’t take away from the fact that he wrote all those songs. During the tour, I’d stand in the wings and be amazed at Queen’s performance and, particularly, Freddie’s. As a showman, there was no one to touch him. He was brilliant, and I’d been such a fan of his songwriting. But, oh, close up, he irked me a lot. It was such a disappointment.’

  That all four band members had different natures was, O’Donnell believes, the catalyst that made them a great band. ‘But it was not at all relaxing to be around Freddie,’ he goes on, ‘for the simple reason that everything had to be about him and his performance. In fact, at times signs of jealousy crept in because of it, when, afterwards, they would sit around and dissect a show.’

  After-gig dinners were also something of a performance: ‘I’d never seen tour catering like it,’ recalls O’Donnell. ‘Not for Queen the obligatory backstage grub. They went for the four-course gourmet routine, complete with candelabra. What started to happen, though, was that Brian and Roger, who were the real rockers of the band, would slip away with Phil and Scott to hang out at some club in town, leaving Freddie and John behind. Then John gradually started leaving, too, and Freddie would go off to prowl the gay clubs, but even then I felt there was no room for spontaneity, everything always seemed rigidly planned.’

  As the tour progressed, aspects of Mercury’s grandiose behaviour, so alien to O’Donnell, began to rub off on Phil Lynott. Other Thin Lizzy members, and some of their road crew, couldn’t help but notice that the Dublin-born singer was hugely impressed by the way Mercury never carried his own luggage on arrival at an airport. Instead he would sweep ahead regally to the car, leaving his ‘bag man’ to do the labouring. How, once at the hotel, he would inspect the quality of accommodation on offer before agreeing to stay. Influenced, too, by Jimi Hendrix and decidedly flash himself, Phil Lynott clearly had an affinity with Mercury. He soon began to get difficult, complaining that his room wasn’t big enough or the hotel not grand enough.

  Lead guitarist Scott Gorham has own recollections of the tour. Born in Santa Monica, with his laid-back Californian outlook, he remembers Mercury with affection: ‘Yeah, well, Fred was a real different kinda guy for me. Thin Lizzy were 100 per cent a politically incorrect band, and, I mean, all down the road, y’know? For a start, we were all completely homophobic, and, like, we didn’t know how to treat this Freddie Mercury, until we met him and discovered that he was a lovely guy. He wasn’t at all how we’d imagined, especially with our readymade prejudices. But, you know, Fred had a strong personality, strong enough to win just about anybody over, and that’s what he did with Thin Lizzy.’

  Touching on the homophobia, Chris O’Donnell says that ‘Despite having a name like Queen and their front man being the way Freddie was, it was very much a boys’ band. The gay element on stage just wasn’t there now. They played hard rock, and Freddie never came away with any of those familiar effeminate gestures. Off stage was another matter, and, I suppose, it was one of the hardest aspects for Freddie to be living one lifestyle on stage, which was so much at odds with his private life.’

  The two worlds, however, were not always so distinct, something for which Scott Gorham can vouch. ‘Hell, no!’ he declares. ‘We played one gig at the massive Winterland in Frisco, which is a city kinda known as having a big gay community. We were first up, and, OK, so I’m blastin’ away and rushing about the left-hand side of the stage, thinking I’ll go and mess with the audience on the right. The spotlight all the time is chasin’ me, and I get over there and look up, and there’s like five hundred of the gayest guys I’ve ever seen, man! They were wearing sequinned hot pants, satin jumpsuits, huge floppy hats with waving ostrich feathers, and they’re jumpin’ off their seats chuckin’ feather boas in the air. As soon as I arrived at their side, they all started lunging at me shoutin’, “Yeah! Shake it, boy!” Geez, man! I’m thinkin’, Whoa there, buddy. I’m not real ready for that kinda contact! And I’m already makin’ a bee-line to the farthest left I can find!

  ‘And that followed the tour around. But the funny thing is, the more you meet these people, the less weird they seem, and you accept that they’ve just got a few flamboyancies that you’ve to get used to. Most of them are real nice. I realised then that you’ve gotta open up your
head about life.

  ‘But if you could’ve seen Fred on that tour! He was just kickin’, man. When Queen weren’t going down particularly well, he worked his ass off to ensure they still ended up with two or three encores.’

  During an arduous gig, in the midst of an equally strenuous tour, Mercury would gain the stimulus to keep going from sources other than his own adrenaline. It wasn’t uncommon during a guitar solo for him to go backstage for a snort of cocaine. Of this tour, Gorham says, ‘I never actually saw him doing drugs that trip. He wasn’t throwing it about and making it a problem. He was very discreet.’

  But it had been a different story before the tour began. Gorham recalls: ‘I was recording at Olympic Studios at the same time as Queen, and I met Freddie in the lobby, and he had had a few hits. He said, “Hey, Scott, can you do me a favour?” I replied, “Well, yeah.” Freddie asked, “Can you come up and check out what we’re doing upstairs. I really want you to listen to Brian’s guitar sound. I think it’s great, but he doesn’t like it. Come on up and give us your opinion.” By this time I’m saying, “Well, I’d rather not. I mean the world’s full of critics – who needs another?” But Freddie just had that persuasive thing, so I went, and it sounded great.

  ‘Anyway, by this time Fred had had a few more snorts and was really goin’ at it. In fact that was the first time I saw him take coke. I guess that’s what was making him buzz the way he was, cos he started saying to Brian about me, “Hey, isn’t this a handsome guy? Couldn’t he have a great career on his own without playin’ the guitar – just on his looks alone? Hey, Brian, don’t ya think?!” And he kept on and on, and I’m winking at Brian, taking it all as a joke. But Fred was real loose and pestering Brian bad now, so to please him, he finally agreed.

  ‘Happy, Freddie swung on me and starts telling me how he had been his school’s ping-pong champion. I’d played it my whole life, and Fred, buzzin’ worse, was goin’ at me to take him on. Eventually I said, “All right, pal. Let’s go,” and Fred shoots off to the table downstairs. By the time I joined him he was deadly serious. I mean, this guy wants to win bad, and all these rules come flyin’ out – how many games we’re to play, the scoring, the lot. After too much of this I shout, “Hey cut it, man, get on with it.”