HOW REGAL IT SOUNDS

The plan had always been for Ibex to spend just the summer of 1969 in London, so, once the money and enthusiasm had run out, they returned to Liverpool. Mike Smith was the first to head north. He was a few years older than the others and was offered a job as part of a construction team building the M56 which passed through Cheshire from Manchester to Liverpool. He needed the regular money so he reluctantly told the group he was leaving. He was replaced by Richard Thompson who had already learned most of the songs through attending their shows. Richard and Freddie had become fairly close friends, thev lived near to one another and had similar tastes in music. One of their regular haunts was The Marquee, and Richard often drove there with Freddie singing along loudly to the radio.

Mike Bersin, always the most pragmatic member of Ibex, took up a place at art college in Liverpool, as he had promised his parents he would do if the group hadn’t landed a record deal by the end of the summer. John Taylor was the only one to remain in London: he had settled into his new life and was being asked to play with other bands that congregated at the record shop.

Like many groups, Ibex’s demise came about in stuttered fashion. On their return to Liverpool they were able to make contact with allies old and new through Mike Bersin’s college course. They were offered gigs and Ken Testi had the onerous task of welding together a band whose members lived nearly 200 miles apart. He was keen, unusually so, and on one occasion hitched to London and back to collect Freddie. The singer responded to this determination and spent a few weeks living in Liverpool, giving it one last shot. «It was really weird seeing him around Liverpool.» said Geoff Higgins. «He dressed like an alien compared to everyone else. He was always in his velvet trousers and three-quarters length coat. He had this habit of hiding his buck teeth with his top lip, pulling the lip down over his teeth somehow.».

By this point Freddie had instigated a new name for the group. He had never been enamoured of Ibex, so he rang each of them, telling each one the others were in favour of a change and suggested Wreckage as an alternative. «He rang me and said the other two were up for it, so 1 might as well be too,» said Mike Bersin. «It was sojike Freddie to do that sort of thing. He was very direct and usually got his own way. We didn’t really care all that much what we were called, so it didn’t make much difference. I turned up for the next rehearsal and everything had Wreckage sprayed on it.».

Freddie moved in with Geoff Higgins’ family in the pub they were running. Dovedale Towers, in Penny Lane. He had to spend most nights on the floor in Geoff’s bedroom and his tolerance of such primitive living was a testimony to his conviction to succeed. He was a good house guest and Geoff’s mother, Ruth Higgins, was fond of him. «My mother liked him because he spoke properly, because he was from the South,» he said. «She was glad I’d started to meet people ivho could speak properly. Freddie was very, very kind to her.» At such close quarters, Geoff saw no evidence of any homosexual leanings from Freddie, and &ays he ‘didn’t have the slightest inkling’ that he might be gay and often saw him in the company of girls. John Taylor christened Freddie ‘the old queen’, but he too did not consider him to be gay.

Wreckage, to Freddie, clearly had qualities which most others missed; even Mike Bersin considered themselves ‘small beer’ on the Liverpool scene, while Richard Thompson said they were ‘rough around the edges’. They continued playing a series of poorly attended shows in the Liverpool area, appearing at clubs like The Sink, a dingy venue beneath the Rumbling Turn club in Hardman Street. The fees were low, usually about £25, of which up to £15 would be needed to cover the cost of the lights. Like many bands, their light show was at least as important as the music, and they used hot oil to create kaleidoscopic images while they played. The other members of Wreckage would have been happy to scale down the lights to leave themselves more money for beer, but Freddie was adamant that the show look professional. Freddie himself made no compromise to the size or state of the venues, or the number of people in attendance. «He gave the same kind of performances he did at the peak of his career.» said Ken Testi «He was a star before he was a star, if you know what I mean. He’d strut around the stage like a proud peacock.».

Freddie did not eschew the mundane duties of life in a group. He was willing to load the van, albeit at a slower pace than the rest, and despite his manliest difference in demeanour from the others, he was not regarded particularly as an outsider. They enjoyed his enthusiasm and he was one of only a few people who ever really cared. Sometimes fellow hipsters from London would arrive to see Freddie, including Roger Taylor and Brian May, and they made an arresting sight as they cruised the streets in their velvet and satin. Glam rock, as it became tagged, had already evolved organically from hippy chic in London, but it was still filtering through to the provinces. It was during one of their trips to Liverpool when Brian, Roger and Freddie first appeared on stage together. At a show at The Sink, Freddie invited them on to the stage to jam with Wreckage and they duly obliged.

There is some confusion as to whether Freddie Mercury began writing songs in earnest during this period. Mike Bersin, who would have been, hib most likely collaborator, remembers only a handful of completed songs. Among scraps of ideas they worked on, he feels these may later have evolved into fully fledged Queen songs like ‘Liar’, ‘Seven Seas Of Rhye’, ‘Jesus’ and ‘Stone Cold Crazy’. Richard Thompson, who took on the role of band archivist for Wreckage, believes it was a much more fertile period. He recalls Freddie and Mike writing between ten and twenty songs, and that most of them found their way into the band’s set. «They were very melodic,» he said. «Freddie had written them on the piano, I suppose it was classical piano in style. It was dead original, definitely going towards what Queen became. Freddie had so many influences, both in art and music,».

Wreckage, as befits their name, soon began to fall apart for a final time. Their farewell to a music business which hadn’t really noticed their existence was at Wade Deacon Grammar School for Girls in Widnes. The concert was a debacle as they struggled against a poor sound with equipment breaking down all around them, but by accident Freddie stumbled upon something which later became a Queen trademark. He was attempting to hoist a microphone stand above his head when it broke away from its base. Without its heavy ‘anchor’ Freddie was free to use the stand like a cane and he swirled it around, dropping it to his midriff when he wanted to mime a guitar solo. In front of a few dozen girls in Widnes it seemed a rather witless, meaningless act. but. mainly through Live Aid. it later became an indelible rock’n’roll image, like Paul McCartney’s violin bass or Mick {agger’s elastic lips.

«It wasn’t all that sad that we split up, we hadn’t done that much together.» said Richard Thompson. «I still saw Freddie around as a friend. It was obvious at this point that Freddie was keen to make it because he was more or less running the band at the end.» The drummer moved to the United States and on his return joined the fledging punk band, X-Ray Spex. After co-writing much of the material for their debut album he was sacked from the group for refusing to cut his hair. He later recorded with Essential Logic who were signed to Rough Trade, before returning to Heathrow Airport to work as an export clerk, Wreckage’s bassist. John Taylor, became the concert sound engineer with Patto, a band fronted by Mike Patto who released albums firstly with Vertigo and later Island. After Patto folded in the mid-Seventies John drifted into band management and his current clients include the founding member of Traffic, Jim Capaldi, along with Joe and Sam Brown, of the famous Brown musical family which until her premature death also included the singer, Vicky. Mike Bersin worked his way through various jobs in local radio before becoming a director at the Metro Radio Group in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Mike Smith, meanwhile, was last heard of living in New York in a trailer; he had gone to the United States after marrying an American girl he met in England.

In the autumn of 1969 Freddie moved back to London, disappointed but not disillusioned, now fixated about becoming a pop star. Ibex and Wreckage, in truth, had been average rock groups, content to plagiarise in the main, and only Freddie’s input had given them any real panache. It would be easy to consign Freddie’s commitment to Ibex/Wreckage as a dalliance, albeit an enthusiastic one. Ken Testi would concur: «I think Ibex filled a gap for Freddie. He wanted to be singing in a band and Ibex benefited enormously from having him. It was a marriage of convenience for all parties. We were all very nai’ve and there would have been some naivete in Freddie at that time To Freddie it was like his first second hand car. the sort of thing you buy when you can just scrape a bit of money together. Eventually you want a better one.».

Freddie had cared enormously about Ibex: enough, in fact, to change their name, image, and set (which he was dotng towards the end) and temporarily to leave his cherished London. During this period Freddie crackled with ambition and eagerness. His zeal had a profound effect on his newly acquired friends from Liverpool, and for many of them it helped put their own lives, their ambitions and dreams, into perspective, «it was an education knowing Freddie,» said Ken. «He was very committed about everything. He had a certain tenacity, a single minded ness, a desire for excellence.».

Back in London, Freddie put the word around that he was available for freelance graphic design work, but this was never more than an aside in his mind. Austin Knight’s agency in Chancery Lane gave his portfolio tacit approval and promised him some design work, including the drawings for a children’s science fiction story. He was also asked to sketch fashion items for a local paper; Mike Bersin remembers looking over his shoulder one day to find him painstakingly drawing a woman wearing a corset! Richard Thompson lent him some aircraft magazines after Freddie was commissioned to illustrate a book about World War I.

He was really set upon stardom at all cost. Making a living from art entailed application beyond his scope, whereas training for the pop business was unspecific. It could be made up as he went along. He was no longer reticent about his desires; he told anyone within earshot that he was going to be a legend, dear boy. He refused to take buses or travel on the tube. He was unknown and almost destitute. but would rather spend money on a taxi fare than a meal. His behaviour seemed a tinge pathetic, deluded even, to some of his friends, and they mused on how Freddie would survive if he did not find his niche. Freddie, the bluster already consummate, would have none of it and for someone who had not written more than the bones of a few songs, his audacity was remarkable.

Around people he already knew. Freddie was very much at ease and often held court with them. Even if he were not talking about anything of real importance, his profuse mannerisms and ardour would make him the pivotal point in a group. He did not have the same air of confidence with strangers; it was often said throughout Queen’s career that he was inordinately happy and voluble at his own parties, but quite often a wallflower at those thrown by others.

During the winter of 1969 and spring of 1970 he began to respond to adverts for singers which were placed m the music press. His audition with the group Sour Milk Sea summed up his personality. He was really extremely nervous of the situation, but conspired to make it appear as if he was self assurance incarnate. He needed moral support and asked Roger Taylor and Smile’s roadie, John Harris, to accompany him to their youth club rehearsal room in Dorking. The band had never seen such ostentation. Roger held open the van door for Freddie who stepped out regally, wearing a fur coat, designer trousers and high boots. John Harris followed them into the building, solicitously carrying Freddie’s Schure microphone in a wooden box. It was all ridiculously pompous and after such a grand entrance the band were virtually intimidated into giving Freddie the job.

Sour Milk Sea had been formed by Chris Durnmett, whose father was a philosophy don at All Souls College, Oxford, and whose mother was a local councillor. The group first came together while its members were pupils at St Edward’s School, a minor public school in Oxford. Originally known as Tomato City (which was also the title of one of their songs), the line-up was Chris Durnmett on guitar and vocals, Jeremy ‘Rubber1 Gallop on rhythm guitar, Paul Milne on bass, and Boris Williams on drums. They were each five or six years younger than Freddie and sported the same long hairstyles with brutal centre partings. They had been in existence for nearly a year when Freddie joined and they were keen, rehearsing up to six times each week under their new band name borrowed from the title of a Jackie Lomax song.

Chris Durnmett already had a musical history of sorts; he had met Eric Clapton as a teenager, and was eager to sample as much of the scene as possible. He dropped his first acid tab at sixteen and wore his hair long through his later school years. The group had a cosmopolitan attitude to the use of drugs and often rehearsed while stoned or high. They were moulded from a riotous strand of eccentric middle England Bohemia. They once drove from Jeremy Gallop’s home town of Leatherhead in Surrey to their rehearsal base in Dorking while on speed and crashed the van into a wall before completing the four-mile journey.

Boris Williams had left the group before Freddie joined. He went in search of the exotic and jumped aboard one of the numerous camper vans voyaging from west London to India. He was to return some years later and join one of new wave’s most successful groups. The Cure His place behind the drum kit in Sour Milk Sea was taken by Rob Tyrell.

Sour Milk Se,. with Chris Dummett taking on vocals by ‘default’, were heavily influenced by the British blues boom of the Sixties, revering artists like John Mavall, Chicken Shack and the early incarnations of Fleetwood Mac, featuring guitarist Peter Green. They were a band with considerable intent - before most of them had reached seventeen they had supported Deep Purple and P.P. Arnold at venues like the Civic Hall in Guildford. Their experimental bent gave (hem an edge many others missed. Chris Dummett was happy for his solos to bleed over the music and groups like The Pretty Things, with the inspired live meandering of Twink. had given them a fairly left-field perspective.

They were each interested in developing as virtuoso performers and decided that a singer would free them to indulge themselves as artists. Their equipment was the best available because Jeremy Gallop, whose late father, Clive Gallop, was a wealthy businessman, bought it on their behalf. Jeremy’s mother was a cousin of Walter Bentley. one of the famous pioneering ‘Bentley Boys’. Their practice room was well stocked with powerful amplifiers and Gibson and Fender guitars.

The response to their advert for a singer in Melody Maker was excellent and the applicants were of an unusually high standard. Jeremy Gallop remembers auditioning a black singer with a ‘voice senf from God’ and Bridget St John, who had recorded an album for John Peel’s Dandelion label just a year earlier. She later went on to work with John Martyn and Mike Oldfield among others, but her style hardly fitted with Sour Milk Sea.

Once Freddie walked through the door the decision was a formality. «He was dripping in velvet.» said Chris Dummett. «He really turned it on at that first rehearsal. We asked him if he wanted the lyrics to our songs and he said. ‘No thanks I’ve got my own.’ He came up to me during one of the guitar solos and was really giving it all the physical gestures. He was a riot of colour, full of confidence, nothing like what we could have ever expected. Afterwards, the band just sat around with this smirk of agreement. We weren’t remotely interested in anvone else, he had such enormous charisma.».

Freddie told Chris he was a close friend of the members of Smile and Chris gave a knowing snigger. A few months earlier both Sour Milk Sea and Smile had been booked to play at All Saints Hall in Notting Hill Gate, a venue of some magnitude on the hippie/progressive rock scene of the time. Hawkwind. for example, were signed to a record deal on the strength of a ten-minute Jam at the hall. A squabble had broken out between Sour Milk Sea and Smile as to who would headline. Chris left his band’s manager, Nic Twilley, to resolve the matter while he went to the bar. On his return he learned that Smile would be the main attraction for the night and Nic told him it seemed to matter a great deal to them. «[ don’t know why it should have particularly.» he said. «It was one of those two men and a dog in the audience type of gig.».

Sour Milk Sea found bookings easy to come by in Oxford, as it was Chris Dummett’s home town. Freddie made his debut with them on Friday, March 20. 1970. The band had previously appeared at the city’s Randolph Hotel but Freddie’s first show was a benefit for Shelter at Highfield Parish Hall. Headington. Also on the bill were The Harlow Go-Gos from nearby Old Marston Secondary School. Bette Jones, the secretary of Shelter’s Oxford branch, promised the young punters that the catering would be appropriate - lots of milk and yogurt.

In an unusually contemporary move, the Oxford Mail invited Sour Milk Sea to ‘have their say’ in print as a preview to their appearance. Much of the band’s article was drawn from lyrics written by Freddie to a song called ‘Lover* which later evolved into ‘Liar’, a track on Queen’s debut album. It was a fascinating example of the heartfelt, elegiac, but ultimately vacuous prose which most British bands, famous or not. were dispensing at the time: «You never had it so good. The yoghurt pushers are here. There’s a place 1 have been and a face I have seen today. I have said all my prayers, never answered, never cared at all. But there’s a sudden change in me. I’m another person inside of me. Tomorrow I am going to see the last of the blue skies above me, Lover calling, I hear your voice, solar systems that surround you all your life, they remind me that you’re really from another source of light. Lover, take me to your leader. I give you body and soul. Come to understand. I grow my lile in the palm of your hand.».

It was apparent Immediately that Freddie and Chris Dummett had a rapport. They both possessed a deep love of music and realised they needed a musical axis in order to focus their songs. «Freddie had a much greater pop sensibility than’most people around at that time,» said Chris. «We were very blues based while he was into the Move, The Hollies, Steve Winwood, people like that. His was a much broader base of appreciation. I really wanted to learn from him and he was willing to take me under his wing.».

The pair formed an extremely close friendship and within weeks Chris had moved in to the house in Ferry Road so they could write songs together. Freddie took it upon himself to inculcate Chris, who was nearly six years younger, with a certain decorum. They shared clothes, listened to records together (especially Hendnx’s ‘Electric Ladyland’ album), and began visiting restaurants. Freddie, eager to embrace the new, patronised a restaurant in Gloucester Terrace, near Paddington station, which specialised in macrobiotic food. «We got on fabulously,» said Chris. «He tried to make me aware of my appearance. He was charming and sweet and would share any food he had in the house. He was a very generous and warm person.».

Their relationship was platonic, but Chris quickly surmised that Freddie’s sexuality was equivocal: “He had someone who he called his girlfriend [this would not appear to have been Mary Austin] but she only came to the house a couple of times. There was no evidence of him ever dipping his wick. He would refer sometimes to his ‘bender friends’, quite laughingly. He was always very camp and fey, he’d really taken on board all that androgyny package. There was something weird about this ‘girlfriend’ situation but at seventeen I wasn’t equipped to analyse it. He was very proud of having a girlfriend but he wouldn’t let you get close to her. He had an attitude that defied you to go further on the subject. It was a case of not showing your lack of social poise by asking further; it would have blown your cool by showing how much you cared, In those days there was an absolute paranoia about staying coot.».

Jeremy Gallop was similarly baffled by Freddie’s sexuality: «It crossed my mind that he might be queer. He never made eyes at the girls, though he didn’t show any signs of being homosexual. I was quite a pretty boy myself in those days but he never came on to me or anything. The rest of us were sniffing out the women but we thought Freddie was cool. We used to think he was so cool he’d get the best looking chicks without even trying.».

Chris Dummett fell easily into the erratic lifestyle of 40 Ferry Road and found Freddie an amiable companion. Some nights Freddie would take nut hts portfolio of drawings; Chris remembers that they each seemed to feature jimi Hendrix in some wav. On some. Jimi was an eighteenth-century dandy, complete with cane, while on others his face was in vivid close-up. While he was living at the house he noticed Roger Taylor had grown a beard. «He did it to slop people .saung. ‘Can 1 help,you madam?’ ,» said Chrts. «He looked like a fucking girl! Groupies were in and out of the house at all times but no one would Tuck them. They were dogs really, put in the spare room. They were desperate girls who nobody fancied. Maybe Tupp Taylor shagged a few of them, he looked like the type who might.».

In the household it was generally accepted that Roger, feminine looks or not, was the most successful with girls. On a whim, his friend from Cornwall, Peter Bawden, suggested they should drive out to the Ideal Home Exhibition in Birmingham. «I learned that day that Roger had real magnetism,» he said. «It was an education. So many girls were making plays for him it was unbelievable. We’d gone there just for a lark but all eyes were watching this good looking blond guy. He didn’t even have to chat them up, his strike-rate was unbelievable.».

The addition of Freddie to Sour Milk Sea brought almost a complete transition Lo their music and shifted the balance of control. Freddie insisted on singing his own words to songs they had already written, and while Chris Dummett admired this fresh, single-minded approach, the others, especially Paul Milne, largely saw it as usurpation. The new songs drafted in by Freddie and Chris were ‘architectural in concept’ - they carried unexpected changes of tempo and unusual stage dynamics. At their handful of concerts, however, the band were unanimous about Freddie’s ability «He just seemed to turn on a light,» said Chris Dummett. «He used to plan things beforehand and had this great patter with the audience. He was cynical but witty with it. At the end of a song he sometimes said ery quickly into the microphone. ‘Wank you,’ and you could see the audience thinking. «Did he say ‘Thank you’, or ‘Wank You’ just then?».

Relations in Sour Milk Sea were strained when it became obvious that Freddie, with Chris Dummett’s support, was out to change their sound. «Quite early on he started to change it.» said Jeremy Gallop. «It was awkward at the time and caused a few rifts. The thing I remember most about Freddie was that he was a wonderful arbitrator. I was pretty fiery but he was a very good calming influence. He was a good speaker and had this gentle way with him.» There was a disagreement about introducing Freddie’s sony ‘Lover’ into their set. «I just didn’t like it. and Chris did,» says Gallop «It was dynamic pop and a little bit twee. He was trying to bring a commercial edge to the band and we saw ourselves as an underground band, quite cerebral I suppose. When you’re a kid, and we all were at the time, all this sort of thing matters a great deal. Freddie was really the wrong choice for Sour Milk Sea but I felt he was manipulating Chris. Chris was head over heels in love with Freddie so to speak. We were supposed to be a heavy duty blues band but Freddie was coming up with these huge harmonies even then. His ideas seemed really difficult to do and I thought we were going to end up sounding like The Dolly Sisters if we started singing all those harmonies. Eventually we started thinking, ‘Fuck Fred, we’ll do it our way’.».

A rift developed thereafter between Chris Dummett and Freddie and the other members of Sour Milk Sea and by the spring of 1970 the band was set to disintegrate. It was inevitable that Jeremy Gallop would feel most upset because he and Chris Dummett had originally formed the group and Jeremy was about to lose his much-valued musical partner. As well as time and effort, Jeremy had invested a great deal of money in the band. At the age of nineteen he spent £8,000 of inheritance money on a motorcycle and equipment for the band. He had bought the best Ampeg amplifiers imported from the United States, a new transit van, and kitted everyone out with the best available instruments. The money aside, Sour Milk Sea was. as is often the case with teenage dreams, ‘his world’.

Jeremy Gallop was angered more by Chris Dummett than Freddie. He recognised that Freddie was. to a degree, orchestrating the split, tempting Chris away lor his own designs. Yet he saw Chris’s ready compliance as nothing short of betrayal. The pair, although close friends even now. always had a tempestuous rapport. On one occasion Jeremy had thrown a cup of hot coffee over Chris during a band argument and fled to the toilets, locking himself in before Chris could gainretribution. «There were a few nasty moments when all this was going down.» saidJeremy, «Freddie didn’t care that he was splitting up the group. You have got to beruthless to get anywhere. Everyone is selfish to a point when you’re trying to makeit. There was tension for a while but I never had any argument with Freddie, in factI liked him a great deal. The thing was I’d put my life into the group and it washideous that it should end, I was in tears over it, it was like the end of the world. I was sad about losing Chris, I wasn’t bothered about losing Freddie at all. Freddie was obviously a pop singer and I wasn’t into that at all, but Chris was anamazing lead guitarist, a real hot shot, and I thought my chances of making it were a lot slimmer without having him around.» «.

Quite rightly, Jeremy Gallop felt that once Sour Milk Sea had split Chris Dummett should return the Gibson SG guitar and Marshall stack he had bought for him. He considered it an implicit agreement that the equipment was provided on condition it was used in Sour Milk Sea. «It was very unpleasant getting the stuff back from Chris,» Gallop recalls. «I was nervous about driving round to Ferry Road to pick it up, I was scared of getting my head kicked in. I knew if Freddie was in there would be no trouble because he was so diplomatic. Luckily he was, and I got it back, though it was made obvious to me that Chris was really pissed off.».

The retrieval of the equipment scuppered the short-term plans of Chris and Freddie. «I was planning to form another band with Freddie but not having a guitar and not having much money put a kibosh on the idea.» said Chris.

Chris Dummett was given an early insight into the relationship between Freddie and his future musical collaborators, Brian May and Roger Taylor. He could sense a bizarre ‘courtship’ between them which would remain unconsummated for some time yet. «Brian May was light years ahead of me but he did not have any Tire in his bollocks.» Dummett claims. «Freddie thought Brian was suburban and droopy. I think. For their part, the Smile people thought of Freddie as a little bit of a joke. They used to send him up, take the piss a bit, in an affectionate way I suppose.».

He detected that Freddie was aspiring to replace Tim Staffell and was quite focused on doing so, though he doubts whether he would have engineered anything particularly devious. «Freddie had to eliminate Tim because he had such a strong voice,» Dummett points out, «Freddie could be very strong-willed, single-minded. Tim did not have the pizazz like Freddie. Tim, at the time, was much more rounded in terms of musicianship but Freddie was the definite extrovert.» Tim Staffell did not suspect Freddie of any covert chicanery. He was, in fact, pleased to leave Smile and move in a new musical direction and was quite apathetic about who took over his position in Smile, or any group formed from their ashes.

For a number of years Freddie Mercury. Brian May and Roger Taylor had formed a close social grouping. They had lived, worked and played together. It had not been a dry, cordial arrangement: there had been rows and fights, pettiness and gravity, and it was perhaps too obvious, too mawkish even, that this family of three should form itself into a pop group. Once Tim Staffell had moved on and Sour Milk Sea had floundered, however, it was impossible for them to avoid the inevitable and when Brian May returned from Tenenfe in April 1970. he, Roger and Freddie finally decided to form their first group together. They planned it in meticulous detail; they had all been part of strong, but ultimately unfulfilled groups in the recent past and were now resolute about the success of any new venture together.

They discussed several potential band names. An early favourite was The Grand Dance, drawn from C.S. Lewis’ books. Out Of The Silent Planet, a trilogy both Brian and Roger had read. The Rich Kids (later adopted by Glen Matlock’s post-Pistols outfit) was another candidate, but Freddie, with his usual imperiousness, had settled defiantly on Queen. ‘‘It’s ever so regal.» he claimed to anyone in earshot, Roger Taylor’s mother. Win Hitchens remembers Freddie’s spirited explanation in the kitchen of her Truro home: «He just kept saying how regal it sounded,» she said.

Like everyone else, Win Hitchens also recognised its flagrant nod to homosexuality, most pointedly the greasepaint, theatrical strand to which Freddie aspired. In the early Seventies the word ‘gay’ was rarely used to describe homosexuality. ‘Queen’, though now largely archaic, was a more usual colloquialism. Several of Freddie’s friends called him affectionately ‘the old queen’ and this reversal of gender terminology was often used in an ironic way. Elton John, who became a close friend and confidante, invariably said ‘she’ or ‘her’ when talking of Freddie. ‘Queen’, however, was not merely a nickname of Freddie’s: in appearance at least it could equally have applied to both Roger and Brian. At thts time Brian was wearing flared jeans with tiny bells sewn around the botLom of each leg. His hair was past his shoulders and necklaces dangled loosely around a. his neck- Roger and Brian were unconvinced of its qualities as a band name.i/t bul Freddie was persuasive and by the end of April 1970 they were Queen.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 805