Читать книгу Somebody to Love - Matt Richards - Страница 17

In May 1970, Freddie Bulsara assumed his position as the lead singer of Smile, and his transformation began. It was the role he had been desperately wanting and waiting for, and he was supplanting the man, Tim Staffell, who had introduced him to the group in the first place. Although Freddie’s ambition was insatiable, this was no coup d’état – Staffell had left of his own accord.

With their new singer, Smile began rehearsing earnestly in London. ‘We played together for the first time in a lecture theatre at Imperial College, and Roger brought along an old friend of his, who played bass,’ remembers Brian May. ‘Freddie came armed with a few ideas for songs, and we had a couple of ideas, so we were immediately doing our own material and pretty much nothing else, with the exception of “Jailhouse Rock” and “Hey Big Spender”, which were there to have fun with.’¹

The band also had a new bass player, Mike Grose. ‘I met them at West Cromwell Road,’ he remembers. ‘There was Roger and Brian, and Freddie Mercury, who was still Freddie Bulsara at the time, and we all shook hands and that was it. And I presumed we were still called Smile at the time, though nobody ever discussed it. They explained to me that Freddie was in the band – that they’d known him for ages, and in fact that he’d wanted to be in the band for ages. I liked Tim’s voice more than Freddie’s. Tim was good, bloody good. Freddie used to sing flat. When he got to high notes he would pull the microphone away from his mouth so you wouldn’t quite hear him. But Brian used to talk to me about Freddie, and I think it was Brian who really believed in him at that stage.’²

Grose moved into Ferry Road in Barnes and when Smile weren’t rehearsing at Imperial College, the four band members would all convene at the shared house to work on original compositions to extend their live repertoire. ‘Obviously the dominant writers were Freddie and Brian,’ recalls Grose. ‘Freddie would just come along and sit in the garden and he would tell you what he wanted, and would, say, sing a tune, or he’d have the lyrics, and we used to piece it together. Simple as that. He might have come with chords or an arrangement on the odd occasion.’³

Although officially one of the newer members of Smile, even though he had been on the periphery of the group for a couple of years, Freddie was keen from the start to impose his vision on the band. ‘His personality was so strong,’ says Brian May. ‘We didn’t see a great singer or musician first of all: he was very wild and unsophisticated. We just saw someone who had incredible belief and charisma, and we liked him.’⁴

As rehearsals at Imperial College and informal songwriting sessions in the garden at Barnes continued, the very basic elements of what was to become the Queen repertoire in later years started to emerge. ‘What would turn out to be their first single, “Keep Yourself Alive” and also “Seven Seas of Rhye”, came out of sessions like that,’ suggests Mike Grose. ‘Even ones like “Killer Queen”, which came a good bit later, were rumbling around in those days.’⁵

As well as having a major hand in the composition of original material, Freddie also used the weeks in the run-up to Smile’s next concert in Truro to scoure the London fashion scene to create a ‘look’ for the band. He was still running his stall at Kensington Market with Roger, who was having a hiatus in his dental studies, and felt that it was his duty to fashion the band, as Mike Grose remembers: ‘Freddie and I went shopping for stage gear – I think on the King’s Road – and he got me into those black velvet trousers that were so tight I could hardly walk!’⁶

With rehearsals complete, and some semblance of stage attire assembled by Freddie, the four of them, together with roadies John Harris and Pete Edmunds, crammed their gear into Mike’s Volkswagon van and headed down to Cornwall for their first ever gig as the new Smile line-up. This concert was held in Truro’s City Hall, which could accommodate an audience of up to 800 people. However, barely 200 turned up on 27th June 1970 to listen to Smile play its first gig with new bassist Mike Grose and singer Freddie Bulsara.

Clad in their newly acquired attire of striking black silk stage costumes consisting of black crushed velvet trousers, black T-shirts and stack-heeled boots and adorned with silver rings, bangles and neck chains, Smile opened the concert with ‘Stone Cold Crazy’, a song that Freddie had already played with one of his previous bands, Wreckage. In a 1977 interview he recalls both the song and their stage attire: ‘In the early days we just wore black on-stage. Very bold, my dear. Then we introduced white, for variety, and it simply grew and grew. “Stone Cold Crazy” was the first song Queen ever performed on-stage.’⁷

Although they had rehearsed, the gig was anything but polished as Mike Grose recalls: ‘We were a bit rough at the edges that night. We had practised, but playing live is different to rehearsing in a college classroom. We also got a bit lost with one of us remembering a different arrangement on a song to the rest. We did our best to hide the gaffes but, let’s put it this way, we didn’t expect to be asked back.’⁸

It was a view shared by the one review of the concert printed in a local newspaper: ‘Four very peculiar-looking young gentlemen clad in silk and too many jewels, making enough row to wake half the dead in Cornwall.’⁹

Roger Taylor, whose mother had organised the concert, remembers that it was for charity but that Smile still got paid for their efforts: ‘We got fifty quid between us, which seemed huge. We thought we were rich! It was Freddie’s first actual proper performance with us. My mother was quite shocked. And he didn’t really have the technique that he developed later on. He sounded like a very powerful sheep!’¹⁰

Regardless of the reaction to Smile’s first concert with the new line-up, Freddie was full of adrenaline travelling home to London and didn’t shut up for the whole journey back. ‘Freddie put a lot into that first concert,’ recalls Mike Grose. ‘I remember he jumped about all over the place, prancing about, a bit like Mick Jagger – but Freddie-style.’¹¹

Smile’s next gig was to be held at Imperial College in London. But before then two radical changes would take place. The first was a change in the band’s name. Mike Grose remembers a discussion that took place in the garden of Ferry Road in Barnes. ‘We were in the garden just learning a number and they came up with the name of Queen – which of course was Freddie’s idea. They said to me, “What do you think?” I know it seems ridiculous today – but forty years ago if you called yourself Queen it was a bit risky really. I said, “Well, if we didn’t get arrested or anything at least people will remember us!” ’¹²

Freddie had been working on the name for a while and had mentioned it in passing to Sue and Pat Johnstone, two sisters from Cornwall, who had been visiting Ferry Road in 1970. ‘We would hitch a lift back to Cornwall from the start of the M4, and on one of these occasions Freddie walked us to the bus stop and said, “What do you think of the name Queen?” ’ Sue recalls. ‘We thought it was hilarious because he was always so camp. And we just laughed and thought of the gay connotation immediately, but he tried to make it more acceptable by persuading us that it was “regal”. At that point he’d already started working on the crest and the logo. He’d thought about the whole concept from the start. He had a great marketing mind, and that’s probably what swayed the others. And he usually got his way.’¹³

‘It was Freddie’s idea,’ remembers Roger Taylor. ‘I didn’t like the name originally and neither did Brian, but we got used to it. We thought that once we’d got established the music would then become the identity more than the name.’¹⁴

‘It’s just a name, but it’s very regal obviously, and it sounds splendid,’ Freddie would say. ‘It’s a strong name, very universal and immediate. It had a lot of visual potential and was open to all sorts of interpretations. I was certainly aware of the gay connotations, but that was just one facet of it.’¹⁵

Smile was no more. From now on the band would be known as Queen.

The second change that took place before the band’s next concert was that Freddie Bulsara would change his name, too. In the summer of 1970, Freddie Bulsara, the shy boy from Zanzibar, became Freddie Mercury, the flamboyant singer with Queen.

‘He wrote a song for the first album called “My Fairy King” and in it there’s a line that goes: “O Mother Mercury, what have you done to me?” ’ Brian May remembers. ‘And it was after that that he said to me, “Well, I’m going to become Mercury because the mother in this song is my mercury and so I’m going to become Mercury.” And we all went, is he mad, you know, but again he was serious and he changed his name to Freddie Mercury. I think changing his name was part of him assuming this different skin. I think it helped him be this person that he wanted to be, and the Bulsara person was still there, but for the public he was going to be this different character.’¹⁶

So how far removed was this new character from the teenager who had fled with his family from Zanzibar and landed at Heathrow in 1964? Six years had passed and Freddie had been exposed to a whole new lifestyle at the very pinnacle of a cultural revolution. He had followed his dreams of attending art school before breaking into music, thereby creating his own path rather than following the safer route his parents desired for him in accountancy or law. And the very confusion over his sexuality was at odds with his parents’ Zoroastrian faith. By changing his name, was Freddie (in part) discarding his past, his Parsee roots, his colonial upbringing? His close friend, David Evans, has his own theory for the name change: ‘Farrokh Bulsara was a name he had buried. He never wanted to talk about any period in his life before he became Freddie Mercury.’¹⁷

With new names assumed, Freddie Mercury and Queen set about their quest for musical domination with a small gig for close friends at Imperial College London on 18th July 1970. It was the very first time the four of them had taken the stage as Queen. ‘I don’t really remember a proper gig there. There might have been twenty or thirty of Brian’s mates there, but that’s all,’¹⁸ recalls Mike Grose.

It would be a week later, on 25th July, that the band would make their full public debut as Queen, and it would be back on Roger Taylor’s old stamping ground in Cornwall. Advertised as ‘Queen (formerly Smile)’ in local papers, the gig at PJ’s in Truro might have been the first public show for Queen but it was the final one for Mike Grose, who left the band shortly afterwards to return to a day job in Cornwall.

With another concert booked for 23rd August, Queen urgently needed to find a bass player to replace Mike. A chance meeting in Cornwall led to Barry Mitchell becoming their new bass guitarist and he was welcomed into the band: ‘They were great guys, really great guys,’ Barry recalls. ‘Brian, a particularly nice man. He’s a wonderful, warm caring person. Freddie was a bit of a puzzle, he wasn’t as flamboyant then as he became, he wasn’t as confident as he became either, quite the opposite, he was pretty shy, I think, to my mind. Yes, they were good guys.’¹⁹

But at their first gig, at Imperial College on 23rd August, Mitchell discovered his role extended to more than simply playing the bass: ‘It was a strange affair because we laid on refreshments which comprised of orange juice, well, squash in those days, and popcorn, you know real rock’n’roll stuff, and I cooked the popcorn.’²⁰

With refreshments organised, Queen took to the stage wearing fancy stage costumes. Mitchell had already been somewhat shocked to find Freddie straightening his hair with tongs before the gig and then going on-stage with his fingernails painted black. He had also been teased in the run-up to the gig when Freddie suggested they all camp it up and wear women’s clothes on-stage. ‘He really wanted to play on it, but it just didn’t happen, thank God!’ says Barry.²¹ But Freddie was keen to make an impression on-stage, regardless of what the other members of the band thought. He took to the stage in black shiny trousers, a velvet top, snake bracelet, boots and silver hair.

After a gig in September in Swiss Cottage, Queen’s next performance was scheduled for 16th October, but before then, Freddie would suffer some devastating news. On 18th September it was announced that Jimi Hendrix had died from a suspected drugs overdose. The news shattered Freddie and Roger Taylor, both ardent fans of Hendrix. As a mark of respect, they closed down their Kensington Market stall for the day.

That evening, during Queen rehearsals, the band simply played a host of Hendrix hits rather than concentrate on their own material. It might have been a mistake, because their next gig, at the College of Estate Management in London, was a disaster. They were paid £20 for a 75-minute set and one of Freddie’s fellow stallholders at Kensington Market, Alan Mair, was in the audience and remembers how bad it was: ‘Roger and Brian were obviously already very accomplished but it was Freddie that was the problem. In the early days he had a bit of a habit of singing sharp. He would be too enthusiastic, and he would push his voice slightly sharp. And he was also quite awkward on stage. He would throw his head back and step forward but it would be slightly out of time. The hall was very echoey too, it wasn’t packed and it would have had minimum advertising. The audience could have been three or four times bigger. I remember we all went to the pub, The Greyhound, after the gig, which is what we always did on a Saturday night. We were there saying, “What are we going to tell Freddie, guys? As he’s so excited about it and it wasn’t very good.” ’²²

Queen played another six gigs in 1970, including one in the famous Cavern Club in Liverpool. Although Freddie had enormous drive and ambition, success and stardom seemed a long way away. Despite his occasional nervousness on-stage and any lack of progress in the music business off it, Freddie’s belief that he would make it remained undimmed: ‘When Queen first formed all of us were aiming for the top slot and we weren’t going to be content with anything less. You have to have a lot of confidence to get on in this business. It’s useless saying that you don’t need that. If one starts saying, “Maybe I’m not good enough, maybe I’d better settle for second place,” then forget it. We were full of confidence. You’ve got to have that. You have to have a kind of arrogance and lots of confidence and absolute determination, as well as all the other obvious skills, like music. Arrogance is a very good thing to have when you’re starting, and that means saying to yourselves that you’re going to be the number one group, not the number two group. We just had it inside us. We all had a very big ego as well.’²³

One member of the group who didn’t share this arrogance was Barry Mitchell. He had made up his mind in early 1971 to leave the band. Mitchell’s final gig at Ewell could also have been Roger Taylor’s final gig with Queen. Also on the bill was Genesis and afterwards Roger Taylor was approached by Peter Gabriel, wanting to know if Taylor would be interested in leaving Queen and joining Genesis instead. Taylor firmly declined the offer; he had invested a lot in Queen already and was certain the band had a future. It was not an opinion that Mitchell shared: ‘I still didn’t think they would make it because they weren’t truly original or obviously commercial.’²⁴

Determined to leave the band, he was asked to reconsider his decision by band members, but he was adamant: his Queen days were over. But Mitchell’s decision coincided with the growing presence of a woman in the Queen entourage: Mary Austin.