Читать книгу Somebody to Love - Matt Richards - Страница 19

While Freddie and Mary’s relationship thrived, Queen were searching for a new bass player. A 17-year-old bassist from Weybridge in Surrey, Doug Bogie, answered their ad.

‘I was an amateur musician, but I used to look for auditions in the Melody Maker music weekly paper. And one of the adverts in January 1971 was just for a “fabulous new band looking for a bassist”,’ remembers Doug. ‘I rang the number and went along. I lived outside London, went on a bus and auditioned in a lecture theatre in Imperial College, Brian’s university, just behind the Royal Albert Hall.’¹

Doug was accepted into the band, and just in time as Queen’s next booking was for a gig at Hornsey Town Hall on 19th February. Arriving at the venue, Freddie, Brian, Roger and Doug were dismayed when they entered the hall and found an audience consisting of just six people. ‘It was a huge hall,’ remembers Doug. ‘Very dark, a few lights and some oil wheel projections on the wall. And what audience there was, seemed miles away. No seating, just a few folk wandering around.’²

The following night, 20th February, Queen supported Yes and Wishbone Ash at Kingston Polytechnic. Although Queen were supporting two acts who already had record deals, were releasing albums, and who both had devoted followings, they held their own on-stage that night, both musically and visually, as Tony Blackman, one of those in the audience, remembers: ‘Really nobody knew Queen at this time and yet, quite amazingly, I thought, they didn’t come over as in any way inferior to either Yes or Wishbone Ash. And the other thing was that they stood out. They were all dressed in very tight-fitting thin black costumes. There’s no doubt that they were deliberately projecting – especially the singer – a very effeminate image. That wasn’t the thing in those days, yet here were these guys going out of their way to flaunt it.’³

While it appears Queen went down well with some members of the audience, Freddie, Roger and Brian had already taken the decision that, after just two gigs, Doug wasn’t the bass player they were looking for and, according to Doug, Freddie concocted a discussion to ease him out of the band without a confrontation.

‘I thought we had played two excellent and exciting gigs,’ reflects Doug. ‘However, in the back of the borrowed van after the Yes gig at Kingston Polytechnic, there was one of those “taking everything apart” discussions: “so everything is terrible”, “it’s a waste of time”, and Freddie announces he doesn’t want to continue. So, as the new boy, who knows nothing of their past activities and relationships, I just accept that that is the end of the experiment! A shame, but not unusual with bands with creative members. I assumed a couple of years later, when the first album came out, that Freddie and the guys said all that simply to sack me without being nasty to my face.’⁴

It has been claimed that Doug was sacked from the band for stealing the limelight. ‘He jumped up and down in a manner most incongruous,’⁵ says Brian May, and his antics, if they were indeed antics, were probably highlighted by the fact that Doug had enlisted his own friends to be impromptu spotlight operators at the gig. But, to this day, Doug protests that this should not have been the case: ‘Absolute nonsense! I was quite an outgoing guy and, playing bass, well, it’s quite easy to leap about a bit. So I was having great fun, standing beside Roger Taylor – who I admire greatly, drumming and singing. Must have just upset Freddie. It seems Brian was very unimpressed too. Why didn’t they say so? I could happily have adapted. But I loved playing so much. Who wouldn’t jump about? And perhaps they thought my playing was not good enough! It must be said that my experience of most “serious” guitarists is that they can be quite introspective and prone to moodiness. But, hey, I was young. They were, I think, four, five years ahead of me.’⁶

So, on 21st February 1971, Doug Bogie’s Queen career was over and the band were, once again, looking for a bass player. Somewhat disenchanted, Brian and Roger took themselves off to a disco at the Maria Assumpta Teacher Training College in Kensington. That night, a mutual friend, Christine Farnell, introduced them to a young electronics student. His name was John Deacon. ‘I’d heard they were looking for a bass guitarist so I chatted to them. They’d actually been auditioning for a few weeks before but couldn’t find anybody who seemed to fit,’ John recalls.⁷

Deacon had moved down to London in 1969 from his native Leicestershire to attend university. Born in Leicester in 1951, he was slightly younger than the other members of Queen but just as musical, playing guitar from an early age, after being bought one by his parents. ‘I remember my first musical instrument,’ he recalls. ‘A little plastic Tommy Steele guitar when I must’ve been about seven. I had it around a lot but I didn’t really play it much, nothing seemed to click, but a few years later some friends up the road started to practise on two bassed-up guitars. I only went along because I had a tape recorder which they could use as an amplifier but after a few weeks I got interested enough to get my mum to buy me a Spanish guitar and that’s when it really started properly.’⁸

Deacon formed his first band, The Opposition, when he was 14 but saw little prospect of a career in music so he continued with his studies instead and, by the time he left school in June 1969, he had passed eight O-levels and three A-levels, which led to him being accepted onto a degree course in electronics at Chelsea College of Technology. He spent his first year focusing on his studies but it wasn’t long before he realised he was missing music and he began attending gigs around the Queensgate area of London. One of the gigs he is known to have attended is the disastrous Queen show at the College of Estate Management in London on 16th October 1970 when Barry Mitchell was playing bass. ‘They were all dressed in black, and the lights were very dim too, so all I could really see were four shadowy figures,’ Deacon remembers. ‘They didn’t make a lasting impression on me at the time.’⁹

With his desire for making music returning, Deacon began scouring the music papers to seek out groups wanting bass players, but it was that initial meeting with Brian and Roger that led to him turning up at Imperial College with his bass guitar and homemade amplifier a couple of days later for his audition with Queen. In the regulation lecture theatre, he joined Freddie, Roger and Brian for the first time and played a few original numbers before Brian taught him the chords to ‘Son and Daughter’, which would go on to become the B-side to Queen’s first single ‘Keep Yourself Alive’. Finally, the four of them joined forces in a lengthy blues jam.

It was obvious early on that the final piece of the Queen jigsaw had been found as Roger Taylor remembers: ‘We thought he was great. We were so used to each other, and so over the top we thought that, because he was quiet, he would fit in with us without too much upheaval. He was a great bass player, too, and the fact that he was a wizard with electronics was definitely a deciding factor.’¹⁰

A couple of days after the audition, Deacon was informed that he was the new bass guitarist with Queen and from that day in February 1971 until Freddie Mercury’s death 20 years later, the line-up of Queen would remain exactly the same.

However, John Deacon’s addition to the Queen line-up may have presented a problem to Freddie Mercury, one that might not have seemed apparent to outsiders but which potentially encroached upon Freddie’s mind and may have caused him a serious crisis of confidence within the group in those early days. Though Freddie had left Ealing College of Art with a diploma in graphic art and design, he may have felt himself intellectually inferior to the other members of the band. Roger Taylor had given up his dental studies but was in the process of obtaining a BSc (Hons) in biology from North London Polytechnic. Brian May graduated from Imperial College London with a BSc (Hons) in physics and had been approached by Sir Bernard Lovell to join his research laboratory at Jodrell Bank, and now John Deacon was in the band, complete with his first class BSc (Hons) degree in electronics.

What’s more, all three of them could play their instruments with some significant degree of skill, yet Freddie’s singing was still developing and the band hadn’t yet utilised his piano-playing skills. However, along with Brian he was one of the two songwriters of the group and he had also taken it upon himself to create the visual styling of the band as well as designing their logo. Perhaps the perception that he was inferior intellectually had something to do with Freddie trying to force his ideas on the band. He needed to justify his position; Brian and Roger had been together for a number of years now, and with the arrival of John Deacon, the instrumental unit of the band was formed. And they were good, very good. There was no shortage of other singers looking for bands to join, so Freddie had to vindicate his position. What he needed was for Queen to secure some form of recording deal to give his own position in the band a level of security.

But that was some way off. In the meantime the band rehearsed in anticipation of their next gig on 2nd July 1971, a somewhat low-key affair in front of 80 invited friends at a college in Surrey. Nine days later, Queen were booked to play at Imperial College London. They had played here, in various incarnations, many times before, but this time was different as, in the audience that evening, was John Anthony. He was one of the busiest producers of the progressive rock era and had come across Queen before, in August 1970, when Roger Taylor alerted him that they had a new singer in Freddie Mercury. Upon seeing Queen in 1970, Anthony commented that Freddie was ‘gushing and camp’ and that ‘they more or less had their sound together, but they had a dodgy bass player.’¹¹ Now, almost a year later, as he was in the throes of setting up a new production company, Neptune Productions, Anthony was back to check out the new Queen line-up. As always, the band gave it their all that night, but when Anthony left the gig he simply told them, ‘I’ll call you soon . . .’¹²

Despite what might have been perceived as a knock-back by Anthony (given the band’s confidence they had expected him to sign them on the spot), Queen were developing as a consistent and talented group of performers. All the years of Freddie’s performance apprenticeship, when he had been prancing around college rooms singing into rulers, or using his half-a-mic stand posturing technique with Ibex, or had been strutting from one side of the stage to the other while throwing back his head with Wreckage, were beginning to bear fruit. Still supremely confident in his own ability, and that of Queen, Freddie was determined that he was going to make it – and he was going to do it on his terms and do it his way. Dressed-up, made-up, flamboyant, flouncy . . . he didn’t care. It was the persona he had created; the boy Bulsara from Zanzibar had become Mercury the man, and he was destined for the top. Nothing was going to stop him now.

Returning to London in the autumn of 1971, after a brief Cornish tour, Brian and John resumed their studies while Roger decided he’d had enough of the market stall he shared with Freddie. He needed to return to his studies as well and so, having given up any idea of becoming a dentist, Roger enrolled instead at North London Polytechnic to complete a degree in biology.

Freddie, meanwhile, had no studies to return to and, consequently, nothing to fall back on. With his own market stall now no longer in existence, he accepted whatever few graphic design commissions came his way and also took a part-time job looking after Alan Mair’s handcrafted boot shop in Kensington Market. But there was little future for Freddie at Alan’s shop, certainly not the future he had planned for himself. He found himself in a precarious position; it appeared Queen were going nowhere fast and, once again, with the other members all studying at various universities and with the prospect of alternative careers ahead of them should the band fail, insecurities began to affect Freddie.

‘I went to art school with the impression of getting my diploma, which I did, and then becoming an illustrator – hoping to earn my keep as a freelance,’ Freddie said. ‘Music was always a sideline, and that sort of grew. When I’d finished with the illustrating course, I was sick of it. I’d had it up to here. I thought, “I don’t think I can make a career of this because my mind just wasn’t on that kind of thing”. So I thought I would just play around with the music side of it for a while. Everyone wants to be a star, so I just thought that if I could make a go of it, why not?’¹³

But, as he quickly realised, simply playing around with music wouldn’t create the sort of career he wanted. In order to achieve the success and spoils he desired, Queen, and Freddie in particular because he had nothing to fall back on, would have to take it a whole lot more seriously.

‘And then after a while there is a decision-making time, where you’ve got to take the plunge; you’ve either got to say, “I’m gonna go and do this, and just concentrate on this,” or not. And we finally did that.’¹⁴