Is This The Real Life? (2 page)

After ‘Hammer to Fall’, Mercury takes his first pause for breath. Slipping a guitar over his shoulders, he addresses the crowd. ‘This song … ah … is dedicated to you beautiful people here tonight,’ he tells them. ‘Ah … that means all of you … thank you for coming along and making this a great occasion.’

The musical mood flips again. Having already delivered what Brian May calls ‘mock-opera’, synth-pop and heavy metal, it’s time for the cod-rockabilly of Queen’s 1979 hit ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’. Mercury claimed he wrote while sitting it in the bath. By the song’s last lap, Freddie has stopped strumming the guitar altogether, slung it over his back and trotted to the front to tease the crowd, as if he can’t quite stand to leave them alone even for a few seconds.

On the home run now, Roger Taylor hammers away at the familiar tattoo to ‘We Will Rock You’ while the audience takes over from Mercury on the first chorus. An hour and a half before
Queen, U2 had delivered an arresting performance, but a fan’s U2 banner seems out of place now. May’s distorted guitar solo hurries ‘We Will Rock You’ to its conclusion, before Mercury returns to the piano.

‘We Are the Champions’ is the Queen song that has always worked the band’s fiercest detractors into a lather. In 1977, the song’s shameless sentiment – bigger, better, more, and damn the losers – was at odds with the prevailing musical mood of the time. Back then, a generation of younger punk bands singing about real-life issues was supposed to depose the likes of Queen. Live Aid’s audience, some of whom may never have counted themselves as fans before today, care not one iota. ‘We Are the Champions’ is a Hollywood blockbuster of a song, a piece of escapist tosh, just like last year’s
Terminator
or next year’s
Top Gun
movies. There could be no other way to end the show.

Bowie, Elton John and Paul McCartney will all follow in Queen’s wake, but to no avail. In just 20 minutes the consummate stadium rock band have run the gamut from rock opera to electro-pop to heavy metal to rockabilly and power ballads: every song a hive, every song instantly recognisable and infectiously memorable. It is an unforgettable performance that will have a lasting impact on the band itself. ‘Live Aid was a shot in the arm for us,’ said Roger Taylor. All plans for rest and recuperation are put on hold. The rocky marriage is, it seems, back on course. But then as Freddie Mercury admits, ‘When you’ve tasted success as beautifully as I have, you don’t want to let it go in a hurry.’

I
t is Christmas 1964, and at Isleworth Polytechnic – just six miles from the noisy sprawl of Heathrow Airport – the drama group is staging its end-of-term production. Arnold Wesker’s social drama
The Kitchen
is the story of a thwarted love affair between a young chef and a married waitress.

The part of the porter, Dimitri, a Cypriot frustrated by his menial job, is played by an eighteen-year-old art foundation course student named Farrokh Bulsara, known to all as ‘Fred’. Eager to fit in, and to be involved with any of the college’s social activities, Bulsara is popular with his peers and instantly recognisable for his trademark jacket: a maroon-coloured blazer slightly too small for him that he brought with him from his previous home on the island of Zanzibar. In
The Kitchen
, Fred Bulsara has traded the blazer for a white porter’s jacket. His stage prop is a broom.

Ten years later, the front page headline of the 28 December 1974
edition of
Melody Maker
is ‘Q
UEEN’S
C
HRISTMAS
M
ESSAGE
’. Beneath it is a photograph of Queen’s lead singer Freddie Mercury, looking illustrious in fur waistcoat, flanked by seasonal tinsel and proffering a glass of champagne. Alongside his head is a speech bubble with the word ‘Cheers!’ Queen have ended the year on a high. After an earlier number 2 album,
Sheer Heart Attack
, the final date of their latest tour at a 6,000-seat venue in Barcelona has sold out in twenty-four hours.

Inside the paper is an interview with Queen, but for one ex-Isleworth Polytechnic student, there is something oddly familiar about the photographs of Freddie Mercury. The photographer has captured Freddie’s popular habit of sucking his lower lip to conceal his top front teeth. Despite the rock-star hair and clothes, it is an immediate giveaway. ‘That was when it clicked that it was Fred Bulsara,’ remembers his old college friend. ‘That nervous tic was even more of a distinct trademark than the maroon blazer.’

Just a few months before Freddie made his UK stage debut in
The
Kitchen
, his family had arrived in England for the first time. Farrokh Bulsara was born on 5 September 1946 in Zanzibar City on Unguja, the largest of Zanzibar’s two islands. A protectorate of the British Empire since the late nineteenth century, Zanzibar was once the epicentre of the African slave trade; its prime industry had since become the export of spices.

Freddie’s father Bomi worked as a High Court cashier for the British governor. His wife Jer had joined him in Zanzibar from Gujarat, Western India. Both were Parsee Indians, followers of Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s oldest religions. Many Parsees had fled to the Indian subcontinent centuries before to escape persecution in their original home of Persia. A thriving Parsee community had grown up on Zanzibar. Bulsara’s birth date fell on the Parsee New Year’s Day, and the name Farrokh was especially fashionable in the religious community. As a young boy, the future Freddie Mercury was initiated into the faith with the traditional Naojote ceremony involving the recitation of ancient prayers and a bathing ritual.

As the family of a senior civil servant the Bulsaras enjoyed a comfortable standard of living in Zanzibar City’s ancient Stone
Town district. They employed domestic staff, including an
ayah
(nanny) for their young son and his baby sister Kashmira, who was born in 1952. ‘By Zanzibar standards, they were upper middle-class,’ recalls a family friend. ‘It was a common thing for folks in that income group to have some additional help. They weren’t rich, but Bomi had the income of a civil servant working for the colonial government, which meant he could afford an Austin Mini as his family car.’

Freddie himself would claim to have had what he called a ‘sheltered’ upbringing, recalling the splendour of his uncle’s villa in Dar es Salaam in neighbouring Tanganyika: ‘I’d be woken by the servant. Clutching an orange juice, I’d literally step out on to the beach.’ In truth, Freddie’s paternal uncle, Manchershaw Bulsara, worked for the Zanzibar Electrical and Telegraph Company, also in Stone Town. Interviewed in 1974, Mercury would also scotch the notion that he’d enjoyed a privileged childhood, deploying the smoke-and-mirrors approach he liked to use when asked about his personal life: ‘It wasn’t as affluent as people think. But I suppose I give the appearance of being affluent. I love that.’

At the age of five Freddie began attending the local missionary school, and showed the first glimmer of interest in music, singing for his family and guests at social functions. In early 1955, his life would undergo its first upheaval. Believing that his education on Zanzibar was limited, the Bulsaras enrolled their eight-year-old son at a boarding school in India. ‘I was a precocious child,’ said Mercury. ‘My parents thought boarding school would do me good.’

Later, when asked by one interviewer why he was ‘so sensitively defensive of his Persian roots and the family ties he has in India’, Mercury snapped, ‘Oh, you sod. Don’t ask me about it. Oh, it’s so mundane.’ During his lifetime then, the finer details of his upbringing remained vague. Contrary to earlier claims, the Bulsaras did not move as a family to India. Instead, Freddie alone made the voyage to Bombay (now Mumbai), where his maternal and paternal aunts lived.

Once in India, Freddie travelled by train 168 miles north to his new school in the Maharashtrian province. According to its
records, Bulsara began his new life at St Peter’s Boys School in Panchgani in 1955. St Peter’s was founded in 1902. It ran on traditional disciplinarian lines, with a school motto of ‘Ut Prosim’ (‘I may profit’), and had an outstanding academic record, priding itself on educating its pupils to English university standard. While welcoming pupils of many faiths, including Parsees, St Peter’s was essentially a Church of England school. It also adopted many of the traits of the English public school system. Boys roomed together in dormitories, and Freddie became part of Ashlin House, one of four schoolhouses. In a letter from 1958, Bulsara wrote: ‘My friends at the Ashlin House are like a second family.’ It was a fortunate arrangement, given his physical distance from the real thing.

Another pupil, in the year above Freddie, remembered him as ‘a shy, timid boy, who had to wear a very painful brace on his teeth’, and who could sometimes be the victim of cruel comments from his schoolmates. ‘Of course there were feelings of being sent away from my parents and sister – feelings of loneliness, feelings of rejection – but you had to do what you told,’ Mercury said later. ‘So the sensible thing was to make the most of it. One thing boarding school taught me was to fend for myself.’

At St Peter’s, Fred became friends with Subash Shah, the school’s only other pupil from Zanzibar. ‘We were born on the same day and in the same year, my parents knew his father, but we had never seen each other in Stone Town,’ says Shah now. During some school holidays, the two would make the long trip back home together. ‘We were together on that ship twice. It would stop in the Seychelles, Mombassa, Zanzibar and then on to South Africa.’ To pass the time, the boys played endless games of table tennis, at which Freddie became an expert. ‘On one trip the captain realised that there were a few of us from the same school travelling together,’ says Shah. It was here that the future Freddie Mercury experienced his first upgrade. ‘Most of us were travelling third class, but the captain made an exception and let us join the second-and first-class customers, which meant we had special privileges and much better games.’

During other school holidays, when he couldn’t take the ship, Freddie would remain at St Peter’s or stay at his maternal
grandmother and aunt’s house in Bombay or with friends from school. It was his Aunt Sheroo who noticed he was becoming a good artist, and she bought him a set of oil paints. She also spotted his growing interest in music and suggested to his parents that they sign him up for piano lessons at the school. With the encouragement of his teachers, Freddie studied with an elderly Irish pianist, who, according to one former pupil, ‘absolutely doted on him’.

During his first few terms, Freddie became close friends with four other pupils in Ashlin House: Bruce Murray, Farang Irani, Derrick Branche and Victory Rana. ‘We used to listen to the pop charts on the radio,’ recalls Bruce Murray now. ‘It was a programme sponsored by a toothpaste company. We’d hear these songs, and then Freddie would go to the piano and play them note-perfect, only after hearing them once. His passion was for Little Richard, Fats Domino, Cliff Richard …’ Subash Shah adds, ‘His knowledge of Hindi was limited but he could also listen to Indian songs and somehow capture the same rhythm on the piano. When he wanted to, he could be incredibly focused.’ Freddie joined most of his friends in the school choir, which gave them a rare opportunity to mix with pupils from the affiliated girls’ school. ‘Hindu, Muslim, Christian … if you could sing you were in the choir,’ says Murray.

Although shy, the future Freddie Mercury’s flair for drama showed itself at St Peter’s, in more ways than one. He played a doctor in the school’s production of the nineteenth-century farce
Cure for the Fidgets
, and, during one performance, was accidentally jabbed in the backside by another actor’s sword. Outraged, he slapped the guilty pupil across the face and stormed off the stage. ‘There was a side to him which was somewhat frenzied,’ recalled Derrick Branche, who likened the teenage Freddie’s demeanour to that of Dean Martin’s goofball comedy partner Jerry Lewis: ‘Hands flapping and legs going every which way.’

In Panchgani, the boys were surrounded by classical and Indian music, but Western pop was the soundtrack of choice. As Bruce Murray explains, ‘We all wanted to be Elvis.’ Three years into their time at school, Freddie, Bruce, Farang, Derrick and Victory formed their own group, The Hectics. The band commandeered the art
room close to their new dormitory, and drove their art teacher to distraction with their primitive twanging and thumping. Murray sang, Branche played guitar, Rana the drums, while Farang Irani copied the popular English skiffle groups of the time by fashioning a makeshift one-string bass out of a tea chest, a stick of wood and a piece of wire. Freddie played the school’s upright piano.

In an environment starved of the real thing, The Hectics became the star attraction at any school function, playing to a mixed audience that included a highly enthusiastic contingent from the neighbouring girls’ school. ‘They would stand at the front and scream,’ recalled Derrick Branche, ‘just like they’d heard girls the world over were beginning to do when faced with current idols.’ Yet Freddie was happy to let Bruce Murray hog the limelight. ‘Freddie didn’t seem a natural frontman at all,’ said Branche. ‘He was quite content to stay well in the background.’

‘I was the singer as I was the best-looking one,’ laughs Murray. ‘We played The Coasters’ “Yakety Yak”, lots of Elvis, Dion, maybe some Ricky Nelson stuff. Fred sang backing vocals, but his thing was still the piano. He also had this quirky way of moving onstage, which you could see a little of later with Queen. We never played outside the school, except one time when I was visiting my aunt in Bombay and I saw Freddie on the street. He came into the house and he played the piano while I sang. For years after, my aunt would ask about “the boy with the buck teeth that played the piano”.’

A photograph of The Hectics onstage shows a typical teenage school group of the early sixties. In the standard dress of white shirts, black ties, pleated trousers and identically greased hair, they pose self-consciously with their instruments; Farang Irani preparing to leap from the top of his cumbersome tea chest, onto which the band’s name has been wonkily stencilled. Bulsara looks even less like a future pop star than his bandmates, still a gawky schoolboy, grinning and showing the protruding front teeth, caused by the presence of four extra teeth at the back of his mouth.

Bruce Murray insists that nobody called Freddie ‘Bucky’ to his face (‘or they would have had us to contend with’). But others maintain that he was widely known by this nickname or, as Subash Shah remembers it, ‘Buckwee’. Similarly, while Bruce Murray says
that Freddie was always known by his adopted English name, Subash Shah remembers him only being known by his birth name of Farrokh while at Panchgani.

At the age of twelve, Freddie won the school’s annual Junior All-Rounder prize for combined academic and sporting achievement. As the years passed, he became a capable cricketer (though he later claimed to loathe the game), field hockey player and bantamweight boxer. It was in the boxing ring that his friends saw further evidence of their classmate’s strength of character and focus. ‘I never fought him as I was a different weight,’ remembers Shah. ‘But those who did fight him had to go for a technical knockout. Because of his teeth, his mouth would bleed very badly. So to protect himself, he used to really give it to his opponent.’

Bruce Murray witnessed a particularly vicious bout. ‘Freddie’s mouth was bleeding; he had blood all over his face. I was his second in the corner of the ring, holding the towel. I kept saying, “Look, Freddie, give up. You’re getting hurt.” But he would not stop. He had this steely look in his eye, as if he was looking at you but straight through you. I saw him again later when we met in England. This attitude of “Fuck them, I will do this” …’

By his final year at St Peter’s his results were slipping. Perhaps distracted by music and art, he had become an average student. While he was alive, the official party line was that he had acquired ‘several O-Levels, including English Literature, Art and History’. In truth, he failed to pass any at Panchgani. Another possibility is that teenage hormones proved a distraction. While having female friends at the neighbouring girl’s school, Freddie was never romantically linked to any of them. One ex-pupil, Gita Bharucha (later Choksi) supposedly became the object of his first schoolboy crush. ‘If he liked me, he didn’t tell me,’ said Gita, interviewed in 2000. ‘But it was a very simple, uncomplicated life. Boy meets girl. Boy holds hand with girl.’