Is This The Real Life? (9 page)

But The Reaction’s soul revue-style show would not last much longer. Rick Penrose was a year older than Taylor and Dudley and already holding down a full-time job as well as playing in the band. Rick faced further challenge when the band stripped back to become a three-piece. Inspired by Cream and The Jimi Hendrix
Experience, this new version of The Reaction came about when Mike Dudley sold the organ and purchased a white Jimi-style Stratocaster. Roger and Mike’s listening habits had changed to include
The Who Sell Out
, Hendrix’s
Are You Experienced?
and Cream’s
Disraeli Gears
, and the setlist changed, too. ‘I found it difficult,’ admits Penrose. ‘When there were five or six of us in the band, it was reassuring. With just three of us we had to work harder. I came to enjoy it, but by then I was under pressure from outside the group to leave.’

Rick was finding it hard to commit to the band and manage a full-time job. In February 1967 his mind was made up for him after an accident on the way to a gig. Roger was driving the group’s Thames Trader van. In the back were Rick, Mike Dudley, and four other friends, including fellow Truro School pupils-cum-roadies Neil Battersby and Peter Gill-Carey. As the seventeen-year-old Taylor had just passed his driving test, Battersby, the usual driver, handed him the keys.

Driving through heavy rain and fog near the Cornish village of Indian Queens, Taylor failed to spot an unattended fish lorry parked half on the road with its lights turned off. The lorry and the band’s van were turned upside down by the impact, with Roger himself thrown through the windscreen. Incredibly, he escaped largely unhurt. Meanwhile, Rick Penrose was showered with glass and sustained numerous cuts, and Mike Dudley was left with a broken nose and hand. However, Peter Gill-Carey was more seriously injured, suffering a punctured lung. Although he eventually made a recovery, he spent several months in hospital recuperating. The subsequent insurance claim took several years to settle, with the fish lorry owner refusing to take responsibility for the collision. The incident cast a long shadow over all involved. ‘That dreadful accident made a big difference,’ says Rick Penrose. ‘People wanted me to leave the band and then that happened as well. It all became incorporated.’

For Roger and the others, there was also the issue of further education. Taylor later claimed that he was ‘a lazy scholar’, but in the summer of 1967 he still managed to leave Truro School with seven O-levels and three A-levels in Physics, Chemistry and
Biology, though his A-level grades were, by some accounts, not as high as expected. His old schoolfriend David Penhaligon later joked, ‘It was always alleged that he [Roger] ruined four or five academic careers because he involved others in the group.’ Weakening that claim is Mike Dudley, who took up a place at Oxford University. But as Rick Penrose remembers it, Taylor was now under heavy parental pressure: ‘Roger was all set to go to college and his mum said to him, “You are not to go up there and start playing in a group, Roger.”’

Leaving his drum kit behind, in October 1967, Taylor began the first year of his dentistry degree at the London School of Medicine in Whitechapel. He found a ground floor flat at 19 Sinclair Gardens, Shepherd’s Bush, sharing with four others, including another Truro lad Les Brown. Fortuitously, Brown was studying at Imperial College. Taylor began his degree course, just as Brian knuckled down to his second year at Imperial and Freddie Bulsara began his second year at Ealing art college. Taylor respected his mother’s wishes in London throughout the following year. Without a drum kit, he satisfied himself with trips to the Marquee, while the Sinclair Gardens flat soon echoed to the heavy ‘progressive’ sounds of Free’s debut album
Tons of Sobs
and, later, Family’s
Music in a Dolls
House
.

A trip back to Truro for the summer holidays in 1968 found him reviving The Reaction, with whichever local musicians were available. Inspired by the musical ‘happenings’ taking place in London, Taylor struck a deal with his friend and marquee-hire company owner Rik Evans to stage a few of their own.

Billing these events as the Summer Coast Sound Experience, The Reaction would provide the music, Rik would hire a doorman, and the proceeds (‘five shillings on the door per person’) would be split. ‘We’d take our marquee to different locations around Cornwall,’ says Evans. ‘The best one we did was on Perranporth Beach. The local life-savers club had a barbecue and The Reaction provided the music. Unfortunately, the council didn’t want us on there, so we never came back. There were times when we’d just set up in these little coves, not even knowing who owned the land, and they’d just plug in and play, and we’d make a few bob. It was all very seat of the 
pants.’ One such event in a secluded cove at Trevellas Port near St Agnes coincided with a massive thunderstorm, and only a handful of paying punters turned up. ‘I think I saw five teddy boys dancing in a puddle,’ laughs Rik Evans.

With the holidays over, The Reaction drifted apart for good: wives, families, proper jobs and universities all playing a part in its demise. Mike Dudley returned to Oxford, continued to play music but went into a career in insurance; Rick Penrose played in a cabaret band before becoming a photographer; Geoff ‘Ben’ Daniel worked as an engineering consultant and, later, moved to Hong Kong. Rik Evans still runs the marquee hire company in Truro. When asked about his days in The Reaction, Taylor has always seemed coy. ‘My friends and I started a band at school. It built up from school until, finally, the bad bands became good bands,’ he said once. ‘I was always the leader. I must have been the pushy one.’

Back at the London School of Medicine in the autumn of 1968, Taylor’s pushiness would come to the fore. Playing again in Truro had given him a taste of what he’d been missing. On top of this, he was fast losing interest in the dentistry course. ‘I only went out of middle-class conditioning,’ he claimed. ‘You had to get a proper job and make a good career … And it was a good way to stay in London without having to work.’ Eager to put together a new band, he even contacted Rick Penrose and invited him up to London: ‘But I said no,’ explains Rick. ‘I have no regrets about that. I sometimes think your life is mapped out for you.’

Taylor wouldn’t have to wait long to find new players. In autumn, his flatmate Les Brown spotted a postcard pinned to a noticeboard at Imperial College. The request was simple: ‘Ginger Baker/Mitch Mitchell-style drummer wanted’. It would mark the beginning of a new life for the nineteen-year-old drummer. ‘Playing in a group was always a dream for me,’ insisted Taylor years later. ‘I always wanted to do it, and eventually it got the better of everything else. I broke out, and that was it.’

I
t was while studying at Ealing Technical College and School of Art that The Who’s Pete Townshend first felt compelled to destroy an electric guitar. Pete, a student for two years until 1964, enjoyed his Eureka moment while listening to lecturer Gustav Metzger expound his theory of auto-destructive art. Metzger was one of a handful of Ealing lecturers gifted with what Townshend admiringly called ‘wild thinking’. Among his similarly-minded Ealing colleagues was Roy Ascott, who once shut a group of students in the lecture theatre, bombarded them with continuous flashing lights, before leading them to the college’s entrance hall, the floor of which was covered with hundreds of marbles. Ascott’s aim was to challenge and disorientate. To Pete Townshend, Ascott was ‘a fucking genius’.

When Freddie Bulsara rolled up at Ealing in the summer of 1966, the ‘genius’ at Ealing was more likely to have been Pete Townshend. By 1966, the rollcall of art-students-turned-rock stars was growing: Townshend, Ron Wood, Charlie Watts, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton …

A grey-brick affair on St Mary’s Road, close to Ealing Green in the depths of suburban West London, Ealing didn’t have quite the same reputation as its rivals. ‘Camberwell and Chelsea were well known for painters,’ explains ex-Ealing graphics student Renos Lavithis. ‘St Martin’s and Holborn were good for painting and fashion. Ealing’s fashion course and industrial design course were good; its art department was not so good.’

Mark Malden met Freddie Bulsara when the two enrolled as the only male pupils among thirty women on the fashion design course. ‘Fred told us that his family was of Persian origin, but he let us assume they’d lived in England for generations,’ says Malden now. ‘When he spoke, his accent and pronunciation was like that of someone who had attended a good private school in England.’ From the start, Freddie told Mark that he’d wanted to study graphic design, but had decided to try fashion first. However, the course made little use of his Art A-level and focused instead on textile technology, fabric printing and pattern design. The pair made themselves fashionable batik T-shirts, and, later Freddie would model one of Malden’s own creations, a chevroned leather and fur jacket, at the end-of-year fashion show.

On the fashion course, Freddie and Mark fell in with three other fashion students: Gillian Green, Celia Dawson and Glynnis Davies, aka ‘Glyn the Pin’. The five would frequent the nearby Castle Inn pub, and gigs in the college theatre and its annexe building in Drayton Green. Freddie and Mark would travel further afield to Richmond’s Crawdaddy club, where they saw a then unknown Elton John, and to a school hall in Hayes to watch their old Ealing alumnus Pete Townshend destroying a guitar onstage with The Who. At weekends, Bulsara would sometimes tag along with Gillian and Celia to the Green Man pub in Putney Heath.

Though still living at home, Fred was expected to earn some money of his own, and took a weekend job as a baggage handler at Heathrow Airport (Malden: ‘I know it’s hard to imagine Freddie Mercury doing manual labour’). But before long, he had discovered a more lucrative source of income, as a life model for the college’s evening art class. Fred introduced Mark Malden to the job, and before long both were earning £5 for a couple of hours’
work, posing naked for what Malden remembers as ‘a lot of old women and a few old men’.

The year after Fred Bulsara arrived at Ealing, two budding artists from Yorkshire, Chris Smith and Paul Humberstone, showed up for their first term. Both had enrolled on the advertising and graphic design course. Smith was also a keyboard player and was studying privately for a music degree. ‘I could have gone to music college,’ he says, ‘but I went to an art school simply because that’s what Keith Richards had done.’ While exploring the college on their first day, the pair stumbled across the fashion department. ‘Not wishing to sound too macho, but our first thought was, “Fashion? Great. There’s bound to be lots of nice women in there,”’ says Paul Humberstone. ‘So we stuck our heads round the door and the first thing we saw was this bloke with lots of black hair: Freddie Bulsara.’

At some point between 1967 and 1968, Fred crossed over from fashion to graphic design, joining Alan Hill, his old compadre from Isleworth. ‘I still don’t quite know how he managed it,’ says Alan now. ‘But after thinking he wanted to do fashion, Fred decided, no, he wanted to do graphics. The truth is he thought we were having more fun and going to more parties.’ Mark Malden knows otherwise: ‘Fred was kicked out of fashion design by the principal James Drew,’ he reveals. ‘But he talked his way into letting him switch to the graphics course instead. I sometimes wonder if he did it on purpose as a way of prolonging his time at the college, and deciding what he was going to do with his life.’

The course was loosely split between graphics, commercial art and illustration. Fred joined a clique of musically-minded students that included Chris Smith, Nigel Foster and 1984’s lead vocalist Tim Staffell. The four of them would, as Smith recalls, ‘sit in the corner and talk about music all day long. Everything from Jimi Hendrix to Igor Stravinsky.’ Lunchtimes were spent flitting between the student common room, the refectory (Alan Hill: ‘Freddie and I both had a thing for the same girl and used to sit there at lunchtimes and wait for her to turn up’), the Castle Inn and the guitar shops on Ealing Broadway.

Tim Staffell soon introduced his new friends to 1984. After seeing
the band play the college’s Christmas ball at Ealing Town Hall, Chris Smith ventured his opinion: ‘I said to Tim Staffell straight away, “You and the guitarist are miles ahead of the others,”’ he laughs. Fred was similarly impressed by his classmate’s group, and extended his friendship from Staffell to include Richard Thompson. ‘I lived in Hounslow so I was near to where Fred lived,’ says Thompson. ‘We used to hang out together. He’d travel to 1984 gigs in the van with me, and I used to go over to his house. His dad had one of those old stereograms, so we’d sit round there listening to Fred’s Beatles records.’

Subash Shah, his old schoolfriend from India and Zanzibar, had been writing intermittently to Bulsara since his family’s move to Ohio. ‘I never received a reply,’ says Shah. ‘So I made a pact with myself that if he didn’t respond to me by 1968, I would stop writing. That year I wrote and told him my thoughts about the Vietnam War and everything else that was going on in the world, but he never wrote back. I realised then that he had crossed over to the other culture, and that he didn’t really wish to be reminded of India and Zanzibar.’

Freddie was clearly too distracted by everything else that was going on around him. Smith, Humberstone and Mark Malden echo his Isleworth classmate Brian Fanning’s description of Freddie Bulsara as ‘a curious sponge, soaking up all the influences’, in particular Cream and his beloved Jimi Hendrix, but it was still difficult for some to tell just how serious he was. Alan Hill became a regular with Fred at London’s Marquee club: ‘We went to see Cream together, and Fred always wanted to get near to the front, right by the speakers, and he’d start playing imaginary guitar. If they’d had an air guitar championship back then, he’d have won it hands down.’

‘At college he’d get the ruler out and start doing his Hendrix impression,’ adds Humberstone. The eighteen-inch yardstick, sometimes replaced by a T-square, was his favourite prop during those impersonations. ‘The thing is, you could be talking to Freddie about something serious and then, suddenly, bang! Out came the ruler,’ adds Chris Smith. ‘And he even played it left-handed so he could be just like Jimi Hendrix. At times, it could get on your nerves, but it was just Fred being Fred.’

According to Roger Taylor, ‘Freddie saw Hendrix fourteen nights in a row in different pubs.’ While the guitarist never played fourteen pub shows in a row, no one could dispute Freddie’s devotion. ‘Hendrix was the reason James Drew kicked Fred off the fashion course,’ says Mark Malden. ‘He was taking too much time off from college to go and see him.’ Malden had accompanied Freddie to his debut Hendrix gig. ‘It was some obscure club in Soho in late 1966 or early 1967,’ says Malden now (the likeliest venue being the Bag o’ Nails in Kingly Street). ‘I remember it because Fred bought an ex-RAF greatcoat to wear to the gig as it was so cold. I found Hendrix interesting, but not to the extent that Fred did. He idolised the man.’

Richard Thompson also recalls joining Freddie for a Hendrix gig at the Marquee. Chris Smith missed out on the gig after blowing a term’s grant on a new amplifier (‘I starved after that’) but remembers seeing Fred the day after and being told about the performance in forensic detail. Alan Hill’s last meeting with Freddie Bulsara was at his wedding in 1970. The two hadn’t seen each other in over a year, but Freddie came bearing a wedding gift: a Jimi Hendrix LP.

Smith’s observation that Tim Staffell and the guitarist were the best players in 1984 proved correct. By early 1968, Brian May had quit and Tim would soon follow. They planned to start a new group: Smith playing the organ, May on guitar and Tim Staffell handling lead vocals and bass. ‘We had a meeting in the Duke of Wellington pub in Wardour Street,’ remembers Smith. ‘We decided to work together but we needed a drummer, which is how we came up with the idea of putting an advert on the notice board at Imperial College.’

The ‘Ginger Baker / Mitch Mitchell-style drummer’ they found was Roger Taylor. May met Taylor in the bar at Imperial College, later writing the drummer a letter outlining his musical ideas; a move that demonstrated the guitarist’s painstaking attention to detail and love of good planning. When Staffell, Smith and May arrived at Taylor and Les Brown’s flat in Kensington, they found that Roger’s drum kit was still at his mother’s house in Cornwall. Making do with the popular hippy accoutrement, a pair of bongos, he still managed to impress them. ‘We spent an hour just talking to
Roger that night,’ says Smith, ‘and he also sang, and that impressed us. I remember Tim saying to me afterwards, “Oh, he’s got a better voice than me … And he’s better-looking than me …”’

What Taylor shared with Brian May was ambition, but, like Tim Staffell, he had a looser, more easy-going personality. ‘Roger’s playing was punchy and flamboyant,’ explained Staffell. ‘But also his personality was always “up”.’ For Taylor, too, making an immediate connection was a relief. ‘I had gone for a few auditions but they were always very depressing affairs: eighteen drum kits in a line and so on.’

Though still commuting to Ealing from the family house in Feltham, Fred would also find a second home at Chris and Paul Humberstone’s flat (‘Fred lived like a gypsy,’ recalled Brian May). After first moving to London, Smith and Humberstone had lived in Elsham Road, directly opposite the Kensington Tavern. Later, the pair found lodgings nearby at 42b Addison Gardens. The musos’ social network soon centred around the Kensington, Addison Gardens and Roger Taylor’s flat in Sinclair Gardens.

With Taylor’s drums now in London, they began rehearsing in any available space at Imperial College, including, says Chris Smith, ‘the broom cupboard’. ‘Brian had never met anyone before who could actually tune drums,’ recalled Taylor in 2002. ‘He wasn’t even aware that you could tune drums. Typical guitarist! But he and I clicked straight away. His playing was beautiful.’

The band adopted the name Smile, a Tim Staffell creation, which he immortalised with a self-designed logo of luscious lips and pearly white teeth. Imperial College’s place on the university circuit made Smile an ideally placed support band. But their guitarist’s academic career was still an issue. Tim and Chris had another year to complete at Ealing. Roger would drop out of his dentistry course, receiving the first half of his degree and appeasing his mother with a vague plan to take just a year off to concentrate on music. (He would resume his studies later, switching to biology at North London Polytechnic.) Brian, though, had now finished the final year of his degree, and wanted to remain at Imperial as a post-graduate to work on a PhD thesis on the movement of interplanetary dust. May’s future as an astronomer seemed assured: he
had already spent time in Switzerland studying zodiacal light at an observatory hut, and, after graduating, had been invited to carry out astronomical research at Jodrell Bank Observatory at the request of the eminent astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell. As one of May’s professors explained: ‘Brian was first and foremost a bright physicist … There was no question of him becoming a rock star.’

His academic future may have been mapped out for him, but May was now a fixture in the audience at the Marquee, watching bands, especially their guitarists, and mentally taking notes. At least one prominent guitar player still recalls the lanky, busby-haired youth as a permanent presence at his gigs, approaching him after the show to ask technical questions about the equipment he was using. The conflicting influences in May’s life appeared almost side by side on 24 and 26 October 1968. On 24 October, Brian, watched by his parents, was awarded his Bachelor of Science by the Queen Mother at the Royal Albert Hall. Two days later, Smile played a gig at Imperial, opening for Pink Floyd.

Tim Staffell has always maintained that the Floyd show was Smile’s debut performance. However, Chris Smith, while agreeing that the group’s debut was at Imperial, believes it was supporting The Troggs. ‘We turned up and they were soundchecking,’ he explains. ‘If you’ve ever heard
The Troggs Tapes
[a bootleg recording of the band arguing in a studio], then that’s exactly what they were like. Also their drummer hardly seemed to play with both hands at the same time. I remember looking at the other guys, open-mouthed. These were pop stars. They’d done “Wild Thing”. We couldn’t believe it. Why are we supporting them? We could blow them off!’

The group also encountered another problem: Brian’s stage clothes. ‘Brian had the afro-type hair by then but he still looked very much the student,’ says Smith carefully. ‘He turned up for the gig wearing a bri-nylon shirt and one of those knitted string ties you’d have worn in 1964. Extremely square. So Roger took him back to his flat to change. But with Roger being much smaller than Brian, there wasn’t much in his wardrobe that fitted, except for this purple waistcoat … which he put over the bri-nylon shirt.’