Is This The Real Life? (6 page)

The band began regular rehearsals at Chase Bridge primary school in Twickenham, next door to the rugby stadium, reaping the benefits of a Richmond council scheme that allowed groups to use local schools and youth clubs for a small annual fee. ‘They formed this organisation called The Whitton Beat Club,’ recalls Dave Dilloway. ‘So we used to practise at the primary school. The hardcore of the band was now myself, Brian, Tim, Richard and John Garnham on rhythm guitar, but John Sanger was still on the periphery, playing the piano.’ Their set was made up of covers of pop songs of the day, including, as Brian May recalled, ‘a mixture of adapted soul stuff like Sam and Dave, and Otis Redding.’

The group had also decided on a name, 1984, taken from the title of George Orwell’s post-war novel. Brian and Tim were both ardent science fiction fans, and the name stuck.

By now, after months of his schoolfriends seeing Brian polishing the guitar’s neck in between lessons, the Red Special was complete. ‘I first saw it when it was still a drawing on a piece of paper and a mantelpiece,’ laughs Dave Dilloway. ‘There’s no bullshit. All those stories about his mum’s sewing box and the motorcycle springs are all true. They didn’t even have a lathe; they turned the motor-bridge pieces with a drill. That’s Brian, though – ever the perfectionist.’

Before long, The Whitton Beat Club network had delivered a booking. ‘We were asked to play a youth-club gig,’ explains Dave Dilloway. ‘There was a friend of someone we knew, and he and his girlfriend or wife booked us this gig at St Mary’s Hall in Twickenham.’ On 28 October 1964, while Farrokh Bulsara was still settling into Isleworth Polytechnic, 1984’s debut concert took place, in a venue just opposite Eel Pie Island.

John Sanger tagged along to play keyboards. ‘This was in the days before electronic keyboards,’ continues Dave. ‘At some gigs John would play the school hall’s upright piano, if they had one, with a
microphone stuck in the back. But at that first gig, they didn’t have a piano so we borrowed a reed organ. The trouble was, it was like a glorified mouth organ with keys stuck on, and it sounded like a Hoover motor starting when you switched it on. Once you miked it up, all you could hear was this noise like a wind tunnel.’

Later, Brian would state that the ‘guitar gave me a shield to hide behind’ and that playing onstage as a teenager was infinitely preferable to being on the floor ‘wondering whether I should ask someone to dance’. ‘Brian never seemed as au fait with the world as, say, Tim and I were,’ offers Richard Thompson. Yet Brian now had a girfriend, Pat, a pupil at the neighbouring Richmond Girls’ School. Their relationship would survive until Brian’s first year at college. It was Pat and her friend, Tim Staffell’s girlfriend, that secured 1984’s next booking, on 4 November in the girls’ school hall.

‘Tim and Brian both had girlfriends at the school, and, yes, that’s how we got the gig,’ recalls Dave. ‘But we struggled with the repertoire. We had two hours’ worth, but we had to play for three hours, so there were probably a few repeats.’

As John Garnham explains: ‘We did a mix of songs in 1984, but there was no real direction. Brian and Dave liked The Beatles, and I was more into Chuck Berry and rhythm and blues, and I also took note of the soul stuff. I was always saying, “We must do stuff that people can dance to”, because I liked dancing and I liked girls, and the girls liked dancing.’

While playing in the group brought them attention, John insists, ‘None of us were that girl-minded. Out of all of 1984, Brian certainly never appeared to be. He did eventually have Pat, but I don’t remember her being brought along to gigs, done up in a short skirt, like my girlfriend or Richard’s.’ (Dave Dilloway: ‘John had some real crackers.’)

The group’s girl-friendly setlists that year veer from The Beatles’ ‘Help’ and ‘I Feel Fine’ to Little Richard’s ‘Lucille’ and Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Jack o’ Diamonds’ to Rufus Thomas’s ‘Walkin’ the Dog’, with an encore of blueser Sonny Boy Williamson’s ‘Bye Bye Bird’. But as Tim Staffell put it: ‘The songs were dredged from all sorts of areas. Because of the nature of the material we approached, we were almost schoolboy cabaret.’

The Chase Bridge rehearsals and occasional gigs continued, but minus John Sanger, who’d taken up a place at Manchester University. ‘I had no grand plans to be a musician,’ he said (though he re-joined 1984 years later). The group continued on as a five-piece, with Tim and Brian having weekly rehearsal competitions to see who could hit the highest note. ‘Their ambition was to see who could sing higher than John Lennon,’ recalls Garnham.

Brian was chaperoned to school halls and youth clubs in his dad’s Javelin, while the older ‘Jag’ transported as much of the group’s equipment as he could cram into his Isetta bubble car. ‘My dad used to take my drums in the car,’ remembers Richard Thompson. But on one occasion, the band came close to losing a vital piece of equipment. ‘Before one gig we arranged to meet Brian on Putney Bridge,’ says Thompson. ‘We picked him up, drove to the venu and when we got there Brian realised he’d left his guitar, the actual Red Special, on the bridge. We got back there an hour later and, incredibly, there it was, propped up against the bridge where he’d left it. Brian could be a little scatterbrained.’ For a few gigs, Garnham and Dilloway even swapped instruments, with ‘Jag’ playing Dave’s homemade bass. ‘But it was a bit of a plank,’ says Garnham, ‘not of the quality of Brian’s Red Special.’

The ‘schoolboy cabaret’ also faced stiff local competition. ‘There was another popular band in the area called Fire,’ remembers John Garnham (Fire’s guitarist Dave Lambert would later join The Strawbs). ‘We all kept up with what these groups were doing, especially a group called The Others.’ In October 1964 – just as 1984 made their live debut – The Others, a band comprised of five Hampton Grammar pupils, three from the same year as May and Dilloway, released a single, ‘Oh Yeah!’, a song recorded by Bo Diddley. ‘That made them mini-heroes at school,’ recalls Dave, and Garnham adds that ‘they used to do early Stones stuff, things like “Route 66” … they had a bit of attitude.’

‘The Others were big at the time,’ remembered Brian May. ‘They were rebels who weren’t interested in the academic side. And they were very influential to me. I felt very jealous of all those people that were doing it at school, being in semi-professional groups, because all the pressure on me was to keep on with the studies. My
parents thought you should stay at home and do your homework … and then go out when you were about twenty years old. I was a bit sheltered really.’

The Others gave the impression of being anything but sheltered. A surviving promotional photograph shows five youths with Brian Jones-style fringes and skinny ties, displaying the same surly demeanour visible on the cover of the first Rolling Stones LP. ‘Oh Yeah!’ was cocky English pop; a schoolboy Yardbirds, with lots of wailing harmonica and faux menace. While The Others would never crack the charts (re-emerging briefly as The Sands three years later), their tougher sound was the antithesis of 1984.

While The Others seemed to have cornered some of the ‘raw sex and anger’ that May so admired in The Yardbirds, Brian himself was still the shrinking violet. ‘He was never an extrovert onstage,’ says Garnham. ‘Brian was a super-brain, a goody two-shoes at school. But he was still a quiet person when he was in the early groups. It always struck me as peculiar that once Queen got going, he was rushing to the front of the stage doing the Pete Townshend windmilling arm and being The Great Rock Guitarist. I used to think, “This is not the same person.” I think Brian’s outward character changed when he was in Queen, but his inward character stayed the same.’

‘Brian was always serious-minded,’ agrees Dave Dilloway. ‘He was never the life and soul. In 1984, Tim and Richard were the loosest characters and the biggest personalities. John was just in it for fun, and I was the bass player …’ He laughs. ‘And we don’t have personalities.’

As Hampton’s other musos passed their exams and headed off to universities, others stepped in to take their place. ‘People started slotting into other groups just to keep things going,’ explains Garnham, whose pre-1984 sparring partner Pete ‘Wooly’ Hammerton would later find himself in The Others. In the meantime, Hammerton and Brian May circled each other on the local youth-cub scene; two hotshot guitarists eager to outplay each other. ‘I wouldn’t like to say who was better but both were well above average skills and speed,’ says Dave Dilloway.

‘There was a competition to see who could play new stuff
quickest,’ said Brian. ‘So when the new records came out we would all feverishly study them at home.’ A Swedish instrumental group The Spotnicks offered the ultimate challenge with their 1963 cover of the bluegrass standard ‘Orange Blossom Special’ and another, later, single, ‘Happy Hendrick’s Polka’. ‘We really killed ourselves, trying to play it. We’d make our fingers bleed.’ Only later did they discover that The Spotnicks sped up their tapes in the studio.

This revolving-door policy would find Brian occasionally guesting with The Others, and brought May and Hammerton together for a one-off gig at Shepperton Rowing Club in 1965. ‘Wooly’ handled lead vocals and guitar, with Brian switching to bass and Richard Thompson playing drums. Among The Beatles and Martha and The Vandellas covers and The Others’ ‘I’m Taking Her Home’, the trio tried their hand at a game version of The Who’s ‘My Generation’; a song that, among others by The Yardbirds, would signal a shift in direction for 1984 over the next twelve months.

But in autumn 1965, it was time for 1984, and its star pupil, to move on. Brian May left Hampton Grammar with ten O-levels and four A-levels, in Physics, Applied Mathematics, Pure Mathematics and Additional Mathematics. As being a full-time guitarist was not yet an option, May set his sights set on astrophysics, and was accepted for a three-year degree course in Physics and Infra-Red Astronomy at London’s Imperial College of Science and Technology. Richard had already been working for some time, but John took a job at the BBC, Dave headed off to study electronics at Southampton University, and Tim enrolled on a graphics course at Ealing Technical College and School of Art.

Before Imperial College, though, Brian paid for a new amp by taking a summer-holiday job at the Guided Weapons Research Centre in Feltham. It was a position more suited to his scientific bent than his previous holiday jobs: making windscreen wipers and doling out the wages at a fire extinguisher factory.

For 1984, there began a period of, in Dave Dilloway’s words, ‘rehearsing by letter’. Still, they managed to play most other weekends around the West London suburbs, plugging in at Putney’s Thames Rowing Club, Twickenham’s All Saints Church
Hall, Feltham R&B Club … A gig at Southall’s White Hart tavern gave them their first taste of boozy violence, when a fracas broke out in the audience and the police were called; another found them playing behind a barely-clothed female dancer with a snake. Later, they’d break up their three-hour sets by cracking jokes and fooling around onstage with plastic bricks and shaving foam; anything to stand out from the other teenage bands playing the same songs on the same circuit.

The Yardbirds’ ‘Heart Full of Soul’ and ‘I Wish You Would’ had now crept into the set, while Brian’s lightning-fingered rendition of ‘Happy Hendrick’s Polka’ gave the audience something to gawp at when they weren’t dancing. ‘Thousands of people must have seen Brian May playing these small clubs,’ reflects Dave Dilloway, ‘and not had the slightest idea that he was later in Queen.’

Throughout the year, though, it was still a juggling act to rehearse, play live and find time to study. Dave, John and Brian’s parents accepted their sons’ musical hobby, but Tim’s were less impressed by what they called ‘that band nonsense’. At the end of 1965, after a year, Dave Dilloway quit Southampton University and opted for an HND electronics course at Twickenham College of Technology. Being back in West London sped up the process of getting to and from gigs.

May’s college connections also brought 1984 bookings at Imperial, including one at a fancy dress party in the spring of 1966. The following year found them playing marathon sets in an upstairs room at Imperial, keeping the students dancing, while, as Dave Dilloway explains, ‘the main band played the main hall downstairs’. Dashing between the two rooms during the interval, they found a way to sneak into the main hall without paying, to catch snippets of their rivals’ sets.

During their final years at school, the band members had been regulars at Eel Pie and Richmond’s Station Hotel, watching The Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, The Tridents and The Yardbirds. ‘I saw The Yardbirds at the Marquee, soon after Jeff Beck joined,’ recalled May. ‘Eric Clapton came on and jammed at the end. I’ll never forget it.’ Clapton’s next band, Cream, would make an even greater impression. The trio made their live debut in the summer of
1966, unveiling their first album,
Fresh Cream
, in December. Like The Jimi Hendrix Experience, with whom they seemed locked in a dead-heat musical race, Cream’s freewheeling sound and virtuosity spun the blues off into myriad directions. Between them, Clapton and Hendrix opened up May’s eyes to a world of musical possibilities.

Not long after Brian saw Hendrix blow The Who offstage at the Saville Theatre, Dave Dilloway witnessed Jimi up close on 1984’s home turf: Hounslow’s Ricky Tick Club. ‘A club smaller than the local village hall,’ says Dave. ‘The PA was a pair of four-by-twelves and a Marshall stack. Incredible.’ Before long, Clapton and Hendrix’s influence would be felt in 1984, with the latter’s ‘Stone Free’ stripped into the set. ‘Brian’s influences changed dramatically from The Beatles to Hendrix and Cream,’ remembers John Garnham. ‘But I still had this thing in 1984 that we should do songs that people could dance to, which wasn’t true of, say [Cream’s] “Sunshine of Your Love”. I played that crash-bang-wallop Chuck Berry style. I couldn’t play the fancy Eric Clapton stuff, but Brian could.’ As we had a guitarist who could play Clapton and Hendrix, that’s what we did,’ adds Dave Dilloway. ‘We muddled along, gradually moving with the music of the time.’

A February 1967 article in the local newspaper, the
Middlesex
Chronicle
, found Tim Staffell in an effusive mood, proclaiming that ‘psychedelic music is here to stay’. In keeping with the psychedelic era, electronics whizz Dilloway was now experimenting with a primitive light show, inspired by the up-and-coming Pink Floyd. But 1984’s student grants would hardly run to the oil slides and projectors Floyd were using. ‘Our lighting rig was very basic. We had the ideas and the technological know-how, but we didn’t have the money,’ laughs Dave. ‘We couldn’t afford bigger bulbs! We used to get paid peanuts but everything we earned we ploughed back into the band. All the time Brian was with us, we didn’t even have a PA: just two AC30 amps.’