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On 24th May 2006 at Bonhams auction house in London, a three-minute reel of Super-8mm film came up for auction that attracted a considerable amount of global interest. Lot 474 dated from around 1965 and was significant as it featured rare and unpublished film footage of Freddie Bulsara at Isleworth Polytechnic.

The silent film, shot by one of Freddie’s friends, Brian Fanning, shows a group of six young men walking towards or away from the camera, standing in staged positions, and sitting on a park bench smoking or gesticulating towards the sky with their arms. Being silent adds to the eeriness. Dressed in a wine red blazer and white shirt with blue trousers, Freddie is conspicuous by his obvious shyness. Not once does he smile, leading one to speculate his protruding teeth are making him incredibly self-conscious. There is no sign of the showman he is set to become in later life although already his movements and gestures indicate a whimsical nature and an element of camp, particularly when he buries his chin in his shoulder with an embarrassed grin after unravelling his hands theatrically skywards.

Freddie attended the Polytechnic from 1964 to 1966 and in terms of getting him into Ealing School of Art it certainly served its purpose. He had already gained three O-levels in art, history and English and now had the crucial A-level in Art & Fashion. But it offered him more than just that: it gave him a greater exposure to fashion, to films, to the English pop culture of the time and, of course, to music.

The mid-1960s was a turning point for popular culture in the UK. At this time Britain’s baby boomers were coming of age and pop culture, art and politics came together to seismically change British society from the bottom up. For the first time, creativity looked to the masses rather than to the higher echelons for validation. The Beatles were showing how pop could be both art and extraordinarily popular at the same time, as well as introducing regional accents to the masses. Films such as Darling, The Knack . . . and How to Get It, and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion starring Catherine Deneuve were redefining British cinema while documentaries like The War Game literally blew audiences away with its depiction of the horrors of a nuclear attack. In the world of theatre Frank Marcus’ The Killing of Sister George opened in London, one of the first British mainstream plays with lesbian characters, and Dirk Bogarde’s film Victim – notable in film history for being the first English language film to use the word ‘homosexual’ – also played.

Victim became a highly sociologically significant film as it played an influential role in liberalising attitudes (as well as the laws in Britain). Four years later, Lord Arran proposed the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts, which ultimately led, in 1965, to MP Leo Abse introducing the Sexual Offences Bill. When passed two years later as the Sexual Offences Act, homosexual acts between two men over the age of 21 in private in England and Wales were finally decriminalised. And, if that wasn’t enough, 1965 also saw theatre critic Kenneth Tynan spark outrage by uttering the word ‘fuck’ on BBC1 TV.

Studying at Isleworth Polytechnic and living in London during the Swinging Sixties proved vital to the transition of Freddie Bulsara into Freddie Mercury. He had arrived at just the right time. Bulsara observed and absorbed what was going on around him and, like a magpie, stole that which shone from music, film, dance and fashion. Storing these elements up for future use, he would adapt them into his own music, style and look in the decades that followed. Of course he wasn’t the only one doing so, but he was unique in that while others were stealing or borrowing from the blues or skiffle or rock’n’roll, Freddie was stealing from Puccini, Porter and Presley. It was this culturally cluttered mix that would combine in his compositions to create something extraordinary.

But that was all in the future. For now, in 1965, it was taking a while for him to adapt and find his feet. One of his closest friends at Isleworth Polytechnic, Adrian Morrish, recalls how Freddie stood out from early on: ‘He dressed weirdly in drainpipe trousers that weren’t quite long enough and middle-aged jackets that were slightly too small. I suppose he’d brought those clothes with him from Zanzibar or India. He seemed very gauche, but he desperately wanted to fit in.’¹ His sister, Kashmira, also remembers Freddie’s early – and distinct – lack of style: ‘Freddie stood out against other boys of his age because at that time the fashion for hairstyles was [the] long and shaggy look, but when we arrived Freddie had that very old-fashioned Cliff Richard look, very shiny, the hair going backwards, standing up, that kind of look, so wherever we would go out together, or come home from a bus stop or something, I’d like to walk behind him because I didn’t want people to think I was with him.’²

Freddie’s determination to ‘fit in’ led him to join the Polytechnic’s youth choir and theatre group and he appeared in a couple of productions, The Kitchen and Spectrum. But music was still his main passion and he grew restless trying to find an outlet for his musical creativity.

During evenings and weekends he would sometimes join his friends at local pubs, where they’d watch bands and singers such as Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry and occasionally go on to parties afterwards, although Freddie drank little and frequently left early. There appeared little sign of the man who, decades later, would host some of the most outrageous parties in the history of rock’n’roll and though none of his Polytechnic friends recall Freddie having girlfriends during his time at Isleworth, neither do they remember any explicit indication of him being gay. He simply attended his classes, fooled around a little with his friends, earned a bit of extra cash in menial jobs such as washing pots at Heathrow Airport or stacking crates on a nearby industrial estate, and was even paid £5 per session as a nude life model.

By the time he left Isleworth Polytechnic in 1966 Freddie had grown in confidence and he felt more at home in England. Furthermore, his dress sense had improved considerably and he had swapped the outdated clothes he had brought with him from Zanzibar and begun dressing in the more bohemian look of 1960s London. Finally, Freddie Bulsara was beginning to fit in.

In September 1966, enrolling at Ealing School of Art to study a course in fashion design was everything Freddie had dreamed about: the chance to study art and to follow in the footsteps of rock musicians and pop stars who had done the same thing. What’s more, he was in London at the height of its cultural power and relevance. What more could he want?

After a while the daily commute from Feltham to Ealing proved to be a drag to Freddie, so he started crashing on the floor of Chris Smith’s flat, a college friend who rented a property at 42b Addison Gardens, Kensington. Despite following his dream, it wasn’t long before he became disenchanted with the course at Ealing, where he spent his time studying fabric printing and textile design, and he was already looking at alternatives. But, most of all, Freddie was desperate to follow his musical ambitions. This only intensified on 16th December 1966 when the BBC TV show, Ready Steady Go! transmitted the first British television performance by American guitarist Jimi Hendrix. Performing ‘Hey Joe’, Hendrix announced himself spectacularly with his virtuoso playing style and energetic and wild stage persona. Freddie found himself captivated by everything about Hendrix’s performance: the music, the fashion, the hair, and, above all, his command of the stage as an artist.

So captivated was he by Hendrix that Freddie went to see him perform 14 times, including nine nights in a row at pubs all around London. ‘I would scour the country to see him whenever he played because he really had everything any rock’n’roll star should have: all the style and the presence,’ Freddie would later say. ‘He didn’t have to force anything. He’d just make an entrance and the whole place would be on fire. He was living out everything I wanted to be.’³

Hendrix was less than four years older than Freddie and provided him with the spark to follow his dream. Determined to be a star, Freddie had already started writing songs at home as his mother, Jer, recalls: ‘He would write songs from an early age. I kept on saying, as all mothers do, carry on with your studies and clean up your bedroom. Once when I went into his bedroom at our home in Feltham. I told him I was going to clear up all the rubbish including the papers under his pillow. But he said “Don’t you dare.” He was writing little songs and lyrics then and putting them under his pillow before he slept. It was more music than studying and my husband said he didn’t understand what this boy was going to do.’⁴

Freddie knew exactly what he wanted to do, but he needed like-minded musicians around him and, unable to find anyone who shared his passion, ambition and raw talent, he consoled himself by using his time in class to draw images of his idol that he would plaster over his bedroom walls. ‘He was a great artist, you know, line drawing, pencil. He had this whole catalogue of stuff. Hendrix, he did a lot of pictures of Hendrix that were brilliant,’ remembers one of his college friends at the time, John Taylor.⁵

Sometime between 1967 and 1968, Freddie was asked to leave the fashion design course at Ealing by its principal, James Drew, owing primarily to the fact that he was spending too much time away from college (in part watching Jimi Hendrix) rather than undertaking his studies. Incredibly, he managed to persuade the principal to let him switch courses rather than kick him out and consequently Freddie found himself on the graphics course. It was on this course that he encountered three students who shared his interest in music; as well as Chris Smith – who Freddie already knew – there was Nigel Foster and, perhaps most importantly, Tim Staffell.

Staffell was a more than able musician. He had taken up the harmonica in the early 1960s before moving on to the guitar and then finally settling on the bass guitar as his instrument of choice. One evening in 1964, he was playing harmonica in the wings for a band called Chris & The Whirlwinds at Murray Park in Whitton. In the audience that night was young bass player and a young guitarist who also happened to attend Hampton Grammar School and who had just formed their own band called 1984. The bass player was Dave Dilloway; the young guitarist was the boy from Feltham who had built his own guitar with the help of his father in a workshop. His name was Brian May.

Following the concert, Dilloway and May tracked down Staffell and persuaded him to join their new band as singer and harmonica player and, on 28th October 1964, with Tim Staffell now in the band, 1984 played their first ever gig at St Mary’s Church Hall in Twickenham. By 1967, when Freddie Bulsara became friends with Staffell, 1984 had been gigging consistently around London and had even recorded a number of songs at Thames Television Studios. The band also supported Jimi Hendrix on 13th May 1967 when he played at Imperial College London, a concert that, conceivably, Freddie himself attended as an audience member.

Once he had switched courses at Ealing, Freddie quickly fell in with Staffell and the other musically inspired students. ‘My first impressions of Freddie were that he was quite straight culturally. That’s to say, conservative – I didn’t even think about his sexuality. You wouldn’t have described him as being at all “in your face”. He had a fair degree of humility. Freddie didn’t particularly shine. Having said that, though, he was intuitively a performer and his persona was, even then, rapidly developing. As far as being a star was concerned, I personally think he was already in the ascendant. People responded to him,’ Staffell remembers.⁶

During the winter of 1967, Staffell’s friends were introduced to the band he was fronting, 1984, and Freddie and Chris Smith became regulars in the audience whenever and wherever they played across London. According to Smith, it was fairly obvious that Staffell and May were clearly head and shoulders above the rest of the band in terms of talent. It was to be a prophetic observation as, early in 1968, Brian May abruptly left the band because he wanted to be in a group that performed their own material rather than cover versions and also because he had to devote more time to his studies – he had enrolled at Imperial College in 1965 to study physics and infra-red astronomy, having left Hampton Grammar School with ten O-levels and four A-levels. However, May kept in touch with Staffell after 1984 had split and a few months later they were to join forces again.

In the meantime, when he wasn’t living like a gypsy on the floor of Chris Smith’s Kensington flat, Freddie continued to compose basic songs or lyrics in the bedroom of his parents’ home in Feltham, study at Ealing, and follow Jimi Hendrix around feverishly whenever he could. ‘I think Hendrix represented something to him, a goal that he could achieve himself,’ suggests Tim Staffell.⁷

But, in 1968, despite the influence of Hendrix, there was still little sign of the flamboyant character Freddie Bulsara would one day become, as classmate John Hibbert remembers: ‘With hindsight, looking back you’d think he must have stood out, he must have been the leader of the gang, and he wasn’t really, because his nature was actually very kind and gentle and actually relatively quiet.’⁸

Still desperate to get into music somehow, Freddie, for the time being, could only hang onto his friends’ coat-tails, so he was fortunate that one of his closest friends at the time, Tim Staffell, was about to form another band.

Staffell and Brian May remained keen to pursue their own musical ambitions after the demise of their previous group, 1984, and, in the autumn term of 1968, May met up with Staffell, who was still at Ealing School of Art, and they decided to form another band. Staffell would provide vocals and play bass while May would play guitar. They needed a drummer to form the musical trio of bass, guitar and drums that was totally in vogue mid-1968, thanks to the popularity of The Jimi Hendrix Experience. So, with that in mind, they posted an advert on the noticeboard at Imperial College, where May was studying, requesting applications for a ‘Mitch Mitchell/Ginger Baker type drummer’ to join a new band.

The advert was spotted by a number of drummers who all applied; however, none of them were up to the required standard. But fate was to intervene. Passing the noticeboard one day was Imperial College student Les Brown. ‘As I remember, the first day back at Imperial College I went to the Student Union Bar, saw the “Drummer Wanted” ad written in hand by Brian, and brought it straight back to the flat,’ he recalls.⁹

He wasn’t a drummer himself. But his flatmate, Roger Taylor, was.