Is This The Real Life? (13 page)

Brian May’s memory of the pre-Queen Fred as ‘very shy but cloaking himself in this persona’ is borne out on the Sink club tape. Fred’s between-song announcements are muted, hushed and achingly polite. Offstage, as well, for all his acid wit and lively banter, he could just as easily slip back into shyness, especially in the company of strangers. However, just weeks into his stint with Ibex, Fred was already plotting. The first casualty of his coup would be the band’s name. Fred wanted to re-title the group Wreckage, but had met with some initial resistance. ‘Then Freddie phoned me at home in Liverpool,’ says Mike Bersin, ‘and said he’d called everyone else in the band and they were happy to change the name to Wreckage. I said that if everyone else was OK, then so was I. I later found out that he’d called each of us and said exactly the same thing.’

His band members’ approval was just as well: before making the calls, Freddie had, apparently, already stencilled the new name onto Ibex’s gear. ‘Good marketing, very cute,’ says Ken Testi. ‘That was a guy with an agenda.’ On 12 October Freddie and Richard Thompson had gone to see Led Zeppelin at the Lyceum. ‘I think I’d read something with Jeff Beck where he said that a heavy band needed a heavy name. Like Led Zeppelin,’ says ‘Tupp’ Taylor. “Someone, it may even have been Beck, suggested the name Concrete Wellington as a joke. But that was the thinking behind Wreckage, it just sounded heavier.’

Going hand in hand with the change of moniker was some new material. ‘Vagabond Outcast’, a rather torpid heavy blues, was still in the set, but as Ken recalls, ‘Freddie and Mike had started writing songs. Fred realised Mike was someone he could work with.’ Existing Wreckage setlists confirm the original titles ‘Green’, ‘Cancer On My Mind’, ‘Without You, Lover’ (an early prototype of
the Queen song ‘Liar’), ‘Universal Theme’, ‘FEWA’ (which some believe stood for Feelings Ended Worn Away), ‘One More Train’ and ‘Blag-a-Blues’; most of which went unrecorded. Mike Bersin’s memory of specific songs is sketchy, but as he explains, ‘We came down from the North playing twelve-bar stuff, no key changes, and Freddie said, “No, no, no, you’ve got to use the black notes, and what we need now is a key change because it makes it more interesting.” We knew where music was, but Fred knew where it was going.’

Though Freddie had persuaded his bandmates to change their name, the geographical distance between the singer and the guitarist presented another hurdle. Previous accounts of Fred’s tenure in Ibex/Wreckage claim that at some point around October 1969, Freddie moved to Liverpool for a few weeks, staying at roadie Geoff Higgins’ family pub in Penny Lane. Ken Testi tactfully disputes this: ‘Freddie made brief visits to Liverpool, but somehow a stopover turned into summer in Liverpool. It didn’t happen.’

What is known for certain is that by the last week in October, Wreckage had lost drummer Mick ‘Miffer’ Smith and were limbering up for their debut gig at Ealing art college. The information was contained in a letter that Fred wrote to a friend, Celine Daley, one of the Maria Assumpta students. In it, Fred lambasts the drummer (‘Miffer’s not with us anymore ’cos the bastard just upped and left one morning saying he was going to be a milkman in Widnes’); reveals that he and ‘Miffer’ were about to start part-time jobs in Harrods; says that he paid Mike Bersin’s rail fare from Liverpool for rehearsals; that Smith’s replacement is ex-1984 drummer Richard Thompson (‘the practice was really great. Richard collapsed halfway through …’) and that ‘the Zeppelin II LP is a knockout’. As written, Mick ‘Miffer’ Smith did return to his old trade, after a stint as a construction worker on the M56 motorway. Richard Thompson was an obvious choice, because, as he points out now, ‘I already knew all the songs.’

Wreckage’s debut in what was known as the ‘Noisy Common Room’ at Ealing was not particularly auspicious. Mark Malden had now left the college, but his brother Aubrey was still running the student union and had booked Wreckage as a favour to Freddie. ‘They were crap,’ he says now. ‘I remember Freddie had bought a
white suit especially for the gig, but the only good bit was when he lay on his back on the stage, took the microphone off the stand and dangled it down his throat while wailing. This was all going on in the common room, and while some people were watching, others were sitting around chatting, reading newspapers, playing table football … I thought they were a bit of a joke.’

Wreckage would only play some ten gigs, at other venues including St Martin’s art school and Imperial College. Chris Smith saw them and was bemused: ‘Tim Staffell and I saw Wreckage in a pub, I think. Freddie was doing all the posing and the strutting, which I had never seen him do before. It was a shock, though, as it just didn’t work in a pub. But ten out of ten for bravery.’ Interviewed in 2004, Brian May tactfully recalled a similar sighting: ‘We went to see Fred sing with his own group. You could hardly keep up with him. He was being very ebullient and making a big noise, and we didn’t quite know what to make of it.’

In November, ‘Tupp’ Taylor’s sister arranged for Wreckage to play her school dance in Widnes. According to Queen mythology, it was the night Fred discovered his trademark. ‘Apparently that was the gig where the bottom of his mic stand fell off. A happy accident,’ says Ken Testi. Richard Thompson maintains that the base fell off and Fred simply continued without it. ‘Later, Queen came up to play St Helens Technical College, where I was social secretary,’ adds Testi. ‘I spotted the mic stand at soundcheck. I said, “Fred, this mic stand thing? Are you sure?” He said, “It’s my gimmick, dear. You must have a gimmick.” I said, “Fred, you’re sounding a bit like Jimmy Savile”. But he was like, “No, no, no”.’

For Wreckage, though, it was all over by Christmas. Two days after the girls’ school show, the group are believed to have played their final gig at Richmond Rugby Club. ‘The overwhelming reality is that the band wouldn’t have made it,’ explains Mike Bersin. ‘Freddie tried to keep it together, but I wasn’t that focused. However, that determination to succeed was an irresistible force in Freddie right from the start.’ Fred retreated to plan his next move while Bersin dropped out of music and continued with his prediploma course at art college in Liverpool. By now, the old network of Kensington flats and rented digs had found a new centre of
operations: 40 Ferry Road, Barnes.

‘Pat McConnell and another girl called Denise [Craddock] were the original ones in there,’ claims ‘Tupp’ Taylor. ‘Then I moved in, then there was Fred, Roger Taylor and another bloke who I think was studying to be a dentist. We had the whole bottom floor of the house.’

While Fred had made the move out of the parental home in Feltham, his new lodgings were a far cry from the Bulsaras’ suburban comfort zone (Freddie: ‘My parents were outraged when I told them what I was up to’). The house hadn’t been decorated in an age and still bore some of the gaudy stylistic traits of its previous occupants. Mike Bersin crashed there during the dying days of Wreckage, and recalls it now as ‘ghastly’. Richard Thompson maintains that ‘Ferry Road was a dump, but they all were. Typical student place.’ The communal living room is remembered for a red vinyl sofa, the seams on which had split leaving tufts of horsehair stuffing spilling out onto the cushions. The kitchen was largely a no-go zone, whose food contents rarely extended beyond tea and milk.

Any number of waifs or strays might emerge from the bedrooms on any given morning, but, adds Mike Bersin, ‘I still have no recall of where the bathroom was.’ ‘The old lady who owned the property lived upstairs,’ remembers Taylor, ‘and Sylvia Sims, the actress, lived next door. This old lady didn’t like Sylvia Sims. She’d always be talking about her as “that awful woman! Thespians … you know, not reliable people”. Meanwhile we were in this flat, playing music and making this terrible noise.’

In October 1969, before Wreckage’s Ealing college debut, Richard Thompson taped the group rehearsing late one night at Ferry Road: Bersin playing an unplugged electric guitar, Taylor on amplified bass, and Thompson pattering around on what he remembers as a ‘guitar case’. One of the songs played was the Bulsara/Bersin composition ‘Green’; the only surviving recording of Wreckage. ‘There is another song on the end of the tape,’ says Thompson. ‘And on the tape you can you hear their flatmate come in and complain about the noise as it’s one o’clock in the morning.’ What you can also hear on the Wreckage tape is Fred’s cultured tones, directing his bandmates (‘Listen … don’t forget … after
those two verses’).

While dope-smoking was widespread at Ferry Road, Fred was unusually abstemious. Instead, as was his wont, he’d be up bright and early, tiptoeing over his stoned flatmates, singing quietly to himself and strumming the chords to The Who’s ‘Pinball Wizard’ on his new guitar. ‘He was like a wandering minstrel,’ says Mike Bersin, ‘making a nuisance of himself.’

On one occasion, when two policemen called at the house after complaints about the noise, ‘Tupp’ Taylor, ‘playing the friendly Northerner’, sweet-talked them with a cup of tea and a piece of hash cake. ‘I used to buy dope on Carnaby Street,’ says Taylor. “I once showed Freddie an ounce of dope and he was astounded by the size of it. But if you asked him, he used to say, “Oh, I’ve been through
that
. I’ve done all that.”’

Ferry Road’s dope was sometimes purchased concealed in jasmine tea. It would then fall to one of the flat’s occupants to separate the leaves. On one occasion, the stash was dumped, unsorted, into the tea caddy and Fred made himself a cup, unaware of its exact contents. According to one eyewitness, Fred was found later, ‘freaking out’ to Frank Zappa’s
We’re Only in it for the Money
album, a parody of
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
with a trick segment featuring the sound of a stylus scraping across a run-out groove. This had sent Fred into a panic, as he believed he had scratched his new favourite record. ‘Freddie didn’t like dope,’ confirms Chris Smith. ‘Later on, though, he offered me speed. Freddie was like, “Have some of this Chris” … I’d tried it once, as it was good for playing a gig, but the comedown was terrible.’

The speed in question had been acquired in Kensington Market, the hippy emporium at which Freddie and Roger Taylor now had a stall of their own. As the year wore on, Freddie supplemented his meagre earnings with a stint at Harrods (as mentioned in his letter to Celine Daley) and occasional drawing jobs. ‘I came downstairs once and saw him drawing women’s underwear,’ says Mike Bersin. ‘He had taken a job designing fashion ads for newspapers.’ Later, Fred signed up as an illustrator with the Austin Knights design agency, and was commissioned to work on a children’s book that was never published.

The chic, three-storey indoor market on Kensington High Street was a hive of musicians, actors and artists, giving Fred and Roger a direct conduit to London’s ‘beautiful people’. Initially, the pair paid £10 a week (from Taylor’s grant money) for a stall, selling artwork from Fred’s college friends. ‘Then we sold Fred’s thesis, which was based on Hendrix,’ revealed Taylor. No trace has ever been found of the artwork but, according to Roger, ‘there were some beautiful things – he’d written the lyrics of “Third Stone from the Sun”… things like that are probably worth a lot of money now.’

For a couple of months Tim Staffell also took a stall on the market, selling artwork. But he loathed what he described as its ‘air of narcissistic coquettishness’. Realising that art didn’t pay, Freddie and Roger tried a different strategy. ‘We got into old Edwardian clothes,’ explained Taylor. ‘We’d get bags of silk scarves from dodgy dealers. We’d take them, iron them and flog them.’

‘It was bits of tat really,’ says Ken Testi. ‘Victoriana, fur jackets, the odd cricket blazer, some old lady’s coat sawn off and masquerading as a cape.’

Undeterred by the small scale of their operation, Fred told everyone that they were ‘gentlemen’s outfitters’ and seemed to approach the job with the same enthusiastic zeal as he did his music. ‘Fred would bring home these great bags of stuff,’ recalled Brian May. ‘Pull out some horrible strip of cloth and say, “Look at this beautiful garment! This is going to fetch a fortune!” And I’d say, “Fred, that is a piece of rag.”’

It was at the market that Adrian Morrish ran into his old friend from Isleworth Polytechnic. ‘I was on a shopping trip and suddenly heard that voice: “Adrian! Adrian!” He introduced me to Roger and I went to a party at his flat, got drunk, and that was the last time I saw Freddie. He said, “You must come and see my band”, and, of course, I didn’t. I was so convinced that he wasn’t going to make it any more than anyone else.’ It was also at Kensington Market that the possibly apocryphal story arose of Freddie, reluctant to use public transport, selling Roger’s own jacket on the stall to pay for a taxi. Asked about this by an
NME
journalist in 1977, Fred refused to confirm or deny it.

In his letter to Celine Daley, Fred wrote that ‘Roger and I go
poncing and ultra-blagging just about everywhere’, confirming how comfortable he was with the ‘narcissistic coquettishness’ that Tim Staffell found such a turn-off. Ex-Ealing student Tony Catignani vividly recalls he and Freddie being wolf-whistled at while promenading along Kensington High Street. Yet, in the same letter to Celine, Fred had also complained that ‘Miffer the sod has told everyone down here that I have turned into a fully-fledged queer!’ Mike Bersin suggests that while Fred ‘may not have been out of the closet he was certainly looking through the keyhole’. Yet, according to Bersin, during the singer’s time in Ibex and Wreckage, ‘he still gave every appearance of being heterosexual’.

‘Tupp’ Taylor maintains that ‘Fred had all these great girls who were his mates … and that was extremely handy for us … there was an art student called Caroline … two girls called Mary … and there was Josephine [Ranken, née Marston] from the art college, who was very over the top and looked like an artist even then.’ Josephine, remembered by another of their contemporaries ‘as a girl with an extraordinary bohemian sense of style’, was a platonic friend of Fred’s and later introduced him to a gay friend of hers. She recalled Fred being ‘obviously terribly interested in homosexuality; he was also afraid of it as well.’