Freddie Mercury: The Biography (7 page)

‘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.

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.

Mercury wasn’t too hopeful. He had witnessed Smile’s excitement at Lou Reizner’s earlier interest, but remembered all too
well how that had worked out. With Queen, Mercury was looking for something more substantial than the hint of a promise. It
was a wise attitude to take because there was no immediate phone call from John Anthony. Instead, what preoccupied everyone
was simply how to survive.

Roger Taylor registered for a biology degree course, for which he would be eligible for a grant. In July 1971 he enrolled
at the North London Polytechnic to study plant and animal biology. Brian May had been giving tutorials at Imperial for a small
fee, and Freddie Mercury, in an attempt to shore up the
often non-existent takings at the market stall, continued to seek commissions with commercial art agencies but hardly anyone
responded to his efforts.

In these early days, bookings were as essential for the money as for the work experience and exposure. Their four-month rehearsal
period, to integrate John Deacon into the band, meant that although the year was half over, they had only played a total of
six gigs. But Roger Taylor’s Cornish connections came to the rescue again when he managed to arrange a West Country tour,
this time involving almost as many gigs as they had played during the whole of 1970.

Kicking off on 17 July at the Garden in Penzance, the tour could hardly be classed as uneventful. Gigging through Wadebridge,
Hayle and St Agnes, nightly rows with pub landlords over the volume at which they insisted on playing became a standard occurrence.
The band had learnt to make sure they were paid before a gig, for fear of being deprived of their fee at the end of the evening.
Their unconventional stage image – in particular Mercury’s penchant for ambiguously sidling up to May as he played on guitar
– combined with their long hair provoked heated reactions from some locals, including servicemen from nearby RAF Culdrose.
On occasions they had to make a swift getaway.

Being pursued by a car full of drunks psyched up for a fight was a hair-raising experience, while the buzz of outwitting them
on the road could also provide an amusing anecdote later. None of this squared with Mercury’s vision for the future. That
still lay in trying to persuade the music moguls that Queen was worth signing. When the tour ended with a gig at the Carnon
Downs Festival, Truro, in late August, Mercury couldn’t wait to get back to London. There, May’s IC contacts remained good,
and there were plans for another private show, in early October, this time to an invited audience from a selection of London
booking agencies. So far, their gigs had been mostly in town
halls, colleges and pubs, even young farmers’ clubs. Their goal was a foothold in the major venues, and that meant wooing
the right people.

Mercury’s return to London brought a welcome change in his personal life. He and Mary Austin had been sharing a poky flat
together again, close to Kensington market, but they had had plans to move on for some time. Tired of the nomadic existence
of the past few years, living in varying degrees of discomfort, Mercury had decided to move upmarket, as much as he could
afford. He still wished to stay in Kensington and had found somewhere he liked, as Ken Testi recalls.

‘Freddie went on to own some fabulous homes, but the first place he really coveted was a ground-floor flat at 100 Holland
Park Road. It was more spacious than he’d known to date, but what he thought was bloody marvellous was the ritzy sound of
the address. He loved that. It was very important to him, and he also recognised the benefits of having a good address.

‘There was a substantial front room, which thrilled him because it was the first place any of them had had where you could
fit all the members of the band sitting down at the same time. As a result, a lot of discussion as to their musical future
took place there.’ According to Testi, the new apartment also featured in small ways then in Mercury’s songwriting: ‘The opening
lyric in “Killer Queen”, which speaks of a woman keeping Moet & Chandon in a pretty cabinet, referred to a beautiful cabinet
Freddie was particularly proud of at that time,’ he claims.