Читать книгу Somebody to Love - Matt Richards - Страница 12

Back in Zanzibar and living with his parents, Freddie enrolled at school in Stone Town in an attempt to finish off his education while constantly trying to gather anything connected with pop culture that might somehow find its way onto the island. The Western world, with its music and fashion, was a constant attraction to the teenage Freddie Bulsara, a fact his mother, Jer, was all too aware of: ‘He really wanted to come to England. Being a teenager he was aware of these things in Western countries and it attracted him.’¹ Living at home and still in full-time education in the early 1960s, there seemed little prospect of him following his dreams and travelling to England. But significant events were about to cause a massive upheaval in Zanzibar and would ultimately lead to the entire Bulsara family, with their very lives in peril, upping sticks and fleeing to the UK.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Zanzibar had a tremendously varied cultural heritage based upon the extensive ethnic diversity of its population. Over the centuries, trade from Africa, Asia and the Middle East had converged upon Zanzibar, bringing a multitude of influences. Now, in the early part of the decade, tension between ethnic groups was beginning to rise as a result of the Arab population, despite being less than 20 per cent of Zanzibar’s population, being dominant both economically and politically. In 1963, when Britain granted Zanzibar independence an election followed which pitted the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) against Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah’s Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP). The ZNP were victorious in the election with 54 per cent of the vote, but this only increased feelings of resentment within the black population and a coup led by self-appointed Field Marshal John Okello soon followed. Okello believed he was divinely chosen by God to remove Arabs from power and, on 12th January 1964, with popular support from Zanzibar’s oppressed African majority, the revolutionaries fought their way towards Stone Town.

The Bulsaras were still living in their apartment in Stone Town at the time and were all too aware of Okello and his revolutionaries murdering and plundering their way across Zanzibar. It appeared no Arab or Asian was safe. Jer Bulsara remembers this period: ‘It was really frightening. And everybody was rushing around and didn’t know what to do exactly. And because we had young children, we had to decide too, we had to leave the country.’²

Fitting whatever possessions they could carry in two suitcases, the family fled Zanzibar. They could have travelled to India but, owing to the fact that Freddie’s father, Bomi Bulsara, had a British passport and that he had worked for the British government in Zanzibar, they chose to fly to England. In May 1964, Bomi, Jer, Freddie and his younger sister Kashmira arrived at Heathrow Airport.

They settled into a four-bedroom house at 22 Gladstone Avenue, Feltham – a suburban town in the west London Borough of Hounslow, directly beneath the Heathrow flight path. Freddie was extremely excited to have finally made it to London, but for his parents, life was tough. They were used to a privileged life in Zanzibar with domestic servants, not to mention the tropical weather. Now they existed under the drab grey London skies with the incessant din of aircraft flying overhead. And Britain itself was not the most welcoming of places towards immigrants in the early 1960s.

Since the late 1940s onwards, the Black and Asian population in Britain had increased through migration from the Caribbean as well as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A tide of resentment was beginning to grow and race and immigration had become major domestic political issues. In the summer of 1958 there had been a vicious outbreak of antiblack rioting in London’s Notting Hill during which a young black man, 32-year-old Kelso Cochrane, was murdered, and in 1964, the year of the Bulsaras’ arrival in the UK, that year’s General Election featured the notorious Smethwick by-election in which race became a divisive issue, so much so that a British branch of the Ku Klux Klan was formed later in the year. Against such a tense background, Bomi and Jer Bulsara opted to keep their heads down and simply provide for their family as best they could while they created new lives for themselves in the UK. Finding the cost of living much higher than they had been used to, both parents had to take a job. Bomi found employment as an accountant for a local catering company, while Jer went to work in the local Marks & Spencer store.

For Freddie Bulsara, approaching his 18th birthday, the excitement of finally being in England was tempered by the fact that his life was at something of a crossroads. His education in India and Zanzibar had been a failure but he was keen to revive his studies in London at a local art school. But it wasn’t what his parents wanted for him – they were keen he should follow a more established and watertight career. ‘He knew we wanted him to be a lawyer or an accountant or something like that, because most of his cousins were,’ Jer Bulsara explains. ‘But he’d say, “I’m not that clever, Mum. I’m not that clever.” ’³ To be seen to be doing something, Freddie would fill out job application forms, but deep inside he hoped they would be unsuccessful.

His desire to go to art school wasn’t so much a passion to study painting, sculpture or textiles but a determination to follow a path that many English pop stars had previously trod. While in Zanzibar he had read in the few Western magazines to reach the island that it was almost de rigueur for wannabe pop stars to attend art school first, and he had his heart set on Ealing Technical College & School of Art, as its famous alumni included Ronnie Wood, Roger Ruskin Spear and Pete Townshend. ‘He used to talk about that,’ his mother, Jer, remembers, ‘that so many people from art college had done music, pop music, and I didn’t take much notice of that at that time thinking, well, it’s one of those things, let us see.’⁴

But Freddie’s lack of educational success in India and Zanzibar meant he didn’t have the required qualifications to be accepted at Ealing. The only option available to him was to attend a foundation course at another educational establishment. Thirty-five minutes away by bus from Freddie’s Feltham home was Isleworth Polytechnic, where in September 1964, he began an arts foundation course. Here, he hoped to get the A-levels he needed to get into Ealing.

Although he was not yet where he wanted to be, Freddie Bulsara had arrived in London. And at just the right time. It was the era of The Beatles, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones, of Mods and Rockers clashing at seaside resorts, of Radio Caroline broadcasting from UK territorial waters, and Top of the Pops had just begun on BBC TV. For the first time, Freddie felt he belonged, and he was determined to make the most of the opportunity fate had dealt him.

Little did he know that also living in Feltham, just a few streets away from the Bulsara family, was a 17-year-old physics student. This teenager was a keen guitarist but unable to afford the much-coveted Fender Stratocaster that he so desired. The only solution was to build one himself. So, over the next 18 months with the help of his father, he built an electric guitar to precise specifications.

A few years later, Freddie would be introduced to this teenage guitar wizard during a random meeting in London. It would prove a pivotal moment in music. The life of Freddie Bulsara and the course of pop history would never be the same again, as the foundations of Queen were laid during that very first encounter.