Is This The Real Life? (3 page)

Shockingly for the time, some teachers recall that Freddie had also begun using the term ‘darling’ to address other males, giving him the rarefied air for which he’d become known in Queen. According to some, he was teased about his effeminate behaviour, but more often that not it was ignored simply because, as one
friend explained, ‘it was just Freddie’. While some of his St Peter’s contemporaries maintain that he was obviously gay, others contend he wasn’t. ‘I saw no sign of it,’ insists Bruce Murray. But Derrick Branche took a different view. ‘St Peter’s was no different to all the other public schools of the boarding variety,’ he said. ‘Pupils there, including Freddie, went through their own fair share of confusion as puberty overtook them and their bodies began giving their minds conflicting signals.’

Various conflicting rumours surfaced about Freddie Mercury’s schooldays, particularly in the years following his death. One story claimed that he had a relationship with another older male pupil at school; another that he was romantically involved with a boy in Bombay. Interviewed in the
Hindustan Times
in 2008, a former teacher from Panchgani claimed that one of Freddie’s homosexual relationships had been discovered, with drastic consequences: ‘His father would have been informed and I’m sure very disappointed. The family has a very rigid background going back generations, and Zoroastrians completely forbid homosexuality.’ The closest Mercury came to revealing more was in an interview with
NME
in 1974: ‘All the things they say about them [boarding schools] are true … I’ve had the odd schoolmaster chasing me. It didn’t shock me. I had a crush on a master and would have done anything for him.’ When asked if he was the ‘pretty boy that everyone wanted to lay’, Mercury replied, ‘Funnily enough, yes … I was considered the arch poof.’ When asked, in the parlance of the mid-seventies, if he was ‘bent’, Freddie answered, ‘Let’s put it this way, there were times when I was young and green. It’s a thing schoolboys go through, and I had my share of schoolboy pranks, but I’m not going to elaborate any further.’

In 1962, Freddie left St Peter’s and returned to the family home in Zanzibar. One of the last photographs of him at the school shows a louche sixteen-year-old reclining on a bench outside one of the dormitories. In it, Freddie sports large sunglasses and a perfectly sculpted quiff. A parting message written in a friend’s autograph book that year reads: ‘Modern paintings are like women, you can’t enjoy them if you try to understand them – your pal always, F. Bulsara.’

In 1979, his mother Jer donated photographs of her son and other memorabilia to St Peter’s, but it would be the closest Freddie came to revisiting his old school. In the years following his death in 1991, St Peter’s opened its doors to TV crews and journalists seeking to uncover more about Freddie’s Mercury’s childhood. Much of the school’s premises remain unchanged; the school hall in which The Hectics performed almost the same as it was in the fifties. Even the piano on which he performed remained in tact, until partly destroyed by a fire in 2002.

Of his bandmates in The Hectics, Farang Irani opened a restaurant in Mumbai, where he still shares stories with those stopping off for lunch as part of the Freddie Mercury Indian School Experience tour, Derrick Branche and Bruce Murray moved to England – Branche became an actor in countless seventies and eighties TV programmes and 1985’s Oscar-nominated film
My
Beautiful Launderette
, while Murray went into music management. Victory Rana, The Hectics’ drummer, later graduated from the United States Army War College, and became Inspector-General of the Nepalese army, before being appointed by Kofi Annan as Commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Cyprus in 1999. Branche and Murray both came back into Freddie’s life later. But as another of his contemporaries recalled, ‘I think Freddie was keen to forget India and get on with the next stage in his life.’

That next stage would be a year with his family, trying to finish his education in Stone Town. Here, he again met up with Subash Shah, whose parents had decided to take him out of Panchgani after he had failed one of his exams: ‘Freddie walked into my class, and I was shocked as I had presumed he was already halfway across the Indian Ocean going back to Panchgani. But he never told me why his parents had brought him back from India, and I never asked.’

There would be no Hectics II in Zanzibar. Instead, Freddie gleaned any scraps of information about pop culture from the English magazines that arrived weeks, sometimes months after publication. For his birthday, he received a tape recorder and would record pop music broadcast late at night on British
programmes. At school, Freddie, Subash and the other male pupils would sit in strictly delegated lines behind the female pupils. ‘All the African Arab girls would wear a traditional headdress called the
bui-bui
,’ says Shah. ‘One time we all went to the beach as a class. At this time the dance craze the Twist was very big on the island. It was the first time any of us had seen the girls without their
bui-buis
. There they were, twisting their butts off, with Freddie in the middle doing the same.’

By now, Cliff Richard, Fats Domino and Little Richard, who had fired up The Hectics barely a year before, were about to be usurped. By the close of 1963 in England, The Beatles had arrived and were busily revolutionising pop music, with the Rolling Stones about to follow suit. In Zanzibar, too, everything was about to change, with a political upheaval that would change the Bulsara family’s lives for ever.

By the early 1960s, British colonial rule of the island was weakening. Following an election in December 1963, the British handed power to the Arab-dominated Zanzibar and Pemba People’s Coalition Party. The opposition, the mainly African Afro-Shirazi party, believed the election had been rigged. To maintain order, the new government banned some opposition parties and expelled African policemen from the island, fanning the dissent. On 12 January 1964, several hundred party opponents including many of the expelled policemen, took to the streets amid violent protests. Under the stewardship of ‘Field Marshall’ John Okello and a hardcore of some forty leading rebels, they seized control of government buildings in Zanzibar City, and had all but taken control of the island within nine hours.

‘After the revolution, things went crazy,’ recalls Shah. ‘But we had a routine where I would go over to Freddie’s house at around five-thirty for tea, and then we would go for a walk around town before making sure we were back home for seven-thirty. There had been so much death on the island that I asked him, “Buckwee, how long do you think you are going to live?” And he said, “For some reason, the number forty-five comes into my head.” Then he asked me how long I thought I was going to live, and I said, “Forty-seven.” It wasn’t a planned question; it was just something that
came into my head simply because of the context of what had been going on.’ In 1996, Subash Shah would discover that his friend Freddie Bulsara had, indeed, died aged just forty-five. ‘It was my fiftieth birthday and my father had found a newspaper cutting about Freddie Mercury, who had died five years before,’ he says. ‘I listened to jazz. I knew nothing about Queen. My father read the article and realised that this singer was the same Farrokh Bulsara that we had known as a child.’

In June, Shah and his family moved to Ohio, where Subash had been offered a scholarship at Kent State University. Shah recalls the Bulsaras leaving earlier, in March. As Bomi had a British passport, it’s believed that the family fled, taking as many possessions as they could fit into two suitcases, before flying to England. The family settled in Feltham, Hounslow, an anonymous suburban town a little over three miles from the airport at which they’d arrived. Fellow resident Brian May’s blunt description of Feltham was ‘a place where nothing ever happened’. After first staying with relatives, the Bulsaras bought a Victorian terrace at 22, Gladstone Avenue. Bomi found work as an accountant for a local catering company, and Jer took a job as a shop assistant.

It would prove to be a difficult time for the family: living in modest circumstances in a cold, unfamiliar country where they were now immigrants. According to his family, Freddie was delighted to be in England. During those difficult early months, it was he that stayed upbeat, encouraging his parents and convincing them that they had made the right move. Like India, Zanzibar was now a memory. Freddie would never go back. Later, when friends wheedled information out of him, Mercury recalled his birthplace without affection. ‘I’d ask him, “What was it like in Zanzibar? It must have been so exciting,”’ said one old confidante, ‘and he’d say, “Dirty place! Filthy place, dear.”’

Freddie now had to decide what he was going to do with his life. ‘He knew we wanted him to be a lawyer or an accountant, because most of his cousins were,’ said Jer Bulsara. ‘But he’d say, “I’m not that clever, Mum. I’m not that clever.”’ Subash Shah insists that Freddie never completed his education in Zanzibar because of the revolution. In England, Bulsara was desperate to attend art school;
partly, it seemed, because many English pop stars had done so. However, his lack of qualifications was an issue. In September 1964, the eighteen-year-old Freddie began an arts foundation course at Isleworth Polytechnic. If successful, it would give him the A-level he needed to be accepted at Ealing Technical College and School of Art, alma mater of The Who guitarist Pete Townshend.

According to one of Mercury’s friends, ‘Freddie wished his life had begun aged twenty-one in Feltham.’ This is supported by the fact that he never referred to his time at Isleworth Polytechnic in any interview. Yet his stint at the college formed a crucial two years in his adult life. A 35-minute bus ride from his family home, the Polytechnic finally brought him into contact with the music, films, drama and fashions he had only read about from thousands of miles away. There were eight other students on Freddie’s arts foundation course, including Adrian Morrish, Brian Fanning and Patrick Connolly. ‘We all met at induction and were put into a class together,’ recalls Adrian Morrish now. ‘Freddie, Brian Fanning and I all became close friends. My first impression of Fred was that he was charmingly shy, but also very engaging.’

Initially, Freddie stood out from his fellow students on account of his clothes and hair. ‘He dressed weirdly in drainpipe trousers that weren’t quite long enough and middle-aged jackets that were slightly too small,’ remembers Adrian. ‘I suppose he’d brought those clothes with him from Zanzibar or India. He seemed very gauche, but he desperately wanted to fit in.’

‘He struck me as quite lonely at first,’ offers Patrick Connolly. ‘But I liked him because he was sensitive and caring and not quite so jack-the-lad as some of the others. You could tell he’d come from a cultured background, and was just seeking a way for himself to develop.’ What soon became apparent to his college mates was their new friend’s musical ability. ‘During break-time we would drift into the assembly hall,’ recalls another ex-Isleworth student Geoff Latter. ‘Fred was always playing this upright piano. He’d never sit at it. He would always stand. He could play our favourite pop songs by ear. I was into surf music, especially The Beach Boys. So he’d do “I Get Around” for me. He could just play it, off pat.’

‘He’d hear a pop song on the radio in the morning before college,
then come in and play it on the piano,’ adds Patrick Connolly. ‘Then he’d go, “But we can do this or we can do that?” and start improvising, to try and make it sound better.’

Intriguingly, the issue of the name change comes up again. Brian Fanning insists that the name Fred (rather than Freddie) was given to him at Isleworth: ‘His name was Farrokh, but he felt that an Anglofied name would help his integration. I recall it seemed to be an important issue for him. So he was christened collectively by us as “Fred”.’

Lectures at the Polytechnic were broken up by trips to the local cafe and pub (‘Fred and I would run a critique on the latest jukebox offerings,’ remembers Fanning, ‘things like Otis Redding’s “My Girl”’). Though in Adrian Morrish’s case, lectures were sometime skipped altogether. ‘There was one occasion when I was so engrossed in a young lady’s charms that I decided to miss Liberal Studies. Freddie burst into the student common room, mob-handed, and he and a couple of others physically lifted me up and carried me into the lecture room. Freddie was always telling me off. His favourite phrase was always this rather effeminate, exasperated “Oh,
Adrian
!”’

By Christmas 1964 Freddie had joined the Polytechnic’s youth choir (Brian Fanning had a tape of the choir’s performance, sadly lost) and appeared in the role of Dimitri in
The Kitchen
. ‘He was rather nervous and unsure, but, at the same time, you could tell he loved doing it,’ says Morrish. ‘He liked the attention and he liked being onstage because he was also quite full of himself. That was the first indication we had that he could also be an exhibitionist.’

Alan Hill appeared alongside Freddie in
The Kitchen
and again in a later college production
Spectrum
, ‘a theatrical review,’ as Hill remembers: ‘It was made up of all different pieces. In one, we were supposed to be punting along a river in a boat. In another, we were doing a mime of undying love for this woman.’

Morrish and Connolly both spent time at the Bulsaras’ house in Gladstone Avenue. ‘We’d sit in his room and play records and talk about the things teenagers talk about,’ says Morrish. ‘I recall him showing me his father’s stamp collection, which had these stamps with printing errors that made them very valuable. Later on, I
think they were auctioned as Freddie’s collection, but I always remember them being his father’s.’

Fred also opened up to Patrick Connolly about his background: ‘He told me what luxuries his family had in Zanzibar, how he’d lived in a house with an ivory-white piano. I think there were times when he missed the life they’d had.’ There was also a darker side to the memories. ‘After the revolution, Fred said his father was under threat and was told that if he didn’t leave, the rebels would cut his father’s head off.’