Freddie Mercury: The Biography Read online

  About the Author

  Laura Jackson is a bestselling rock and film biographer who has interviewed many of the world’s leading celebrities. For twenty years she has tracked the lives of the stars and gained access to their inner circles to produce a series of critically acclaimed biographies. To find out more, visit www.laurajacksonbooks.com.

  Laura’s books include:

  Brian Jones: The Untold Life and

  Mysterious Death of a Rock Legend

  Steven Tyler: The Biography

  Brian May: The Definitive Biography

  Jon Bon Jovi: The Biography

  Kiefer Sutherland: The Biography

  The Eagles: Flying High

  Neil Diamond: The Biography

  Bono: The Biography

  Queen: The Definitive Biography

  Paul Simon: The Definitive Biography

  Sean Bean: The Biography

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978 0 7481 2907 2

  Copyright © 2011 by Laura Jackson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  This book is dedicated to my remarkable husband, David

  Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  1 A Star is Born

  2 Mercury Rising

  3 What’s In a Name?

  4 Blind Faith

  5 Smoke and Mirrors

  6 One of a Kind

  7 Excess of Ego

  8 Alley Creeper

  9 Shifting Sands

  10 Cutting Up Rough

  11 Wembley Wizard

  12 Death Knell

  13 Seeking Sanctuary

  14 Silent Sorrow

  15 The Legend Lives On

  Index

  Illustration

  Acknowledgements

  Grateful appreciation to everyone whom I interviewed for this book, for their honesty in talking openly of the Freddie Mercury they each remember. My thanks for all contributions go to: Michael Appleton; Simon Bates; Mike Bersin; Tony Blackman; John Boylan; Tony Brainsby; Sir Richard Branson; Pete Brown; Michael Buerk; Lady Chryssie Cobbold; Derek Deane; Bruce Dickinson; Wayne Eagling; Spike Edney; Joe Elliott; Elizabeth Emanuel; David Essex; Fish; Dudley Fishburn; Scott Gorham; Mike Grose; Jo Gurnett; Bob Harris; Geoff Higgins; Mandla Langa; Gary Langhan; Malcolm McLaren; Barry Mitchell; Mike Moran; Chris O’Donnell; Tony Pike; Andy Powell; Donald Quinlan; Dr Ken Reay; Zandra Rhodes; Sir Tim Rice; Sir Cliff Richard; Pino Sagliocco; Tim Staffell; Peter Stringfellow; Dick Taylor; Ken Testi; Barbara Valentin; Terry Yeadon; Susannah York; Paul Young.

  Also thanks to: BBC Radio; BBC TV; British Library, Gail Imlach and Elgin Library staff; Secretary to Governor of Maharashtra; Lady Olivier; Alistair, David and Andrew of Moray Business and Computer Centre, Elgin; Elizabeth Taylor.

  Special thanks to David for his eternal support and to Zoe Goodkin and all at Piatkus and the Little, Brown Book Group.

  ONE

  A Star is Born

  Freddie Mercury is one of rock music’s greatest legends. As Queen’s unique front man he had captivating stage presence and his public persona was polished, proud and unparalleled in its fantastic egotism. His character was extreme. By turns, he could be funny and cruel and his frequent use of cocaine heightened his tendency to excess and fuelled his rampant sexual appetites. Mercury was unable to be faithful to those homosexual relationships that were important to him, while remaining constant in his love for Mary Austin whom he had known before fame swept him up into the stratosphere. His reckless gay lifestyle – sometimes sinking into the sordid realms of rough street trade – led to his tragic death from Aids, aged forty-five, in 1991. Not since the murder of John Lennon had a rock star’s demise made such an impact worldwide.

  On the flipside of the coin, Mercury was also a cultured, intelligent and well-read man with a wide knowledge of the arts. A terrific raconteur, he was the master of risqué repartee and capable of extending great kindness, loyalty and generosity to a small, select group of friends. He showed incredible strength and heartbreaking courage as he faced his traumatic illness and death. No surprise, then, that such a paradoxical, larger-than-life character should attract attention from film makers and when news broke that a big-screen biopic of Freddie Mercury was due to go into production in 2011, with Sacha Baron Cohen in the lead role, it ignited intense excitement and anticipation among Queen’s legions of devoted fans.

  When once asked how he would like to be remembered, the irrepressible singer had tossed back with a flick of his wrist, ‘Oh, I don’t know. When I’m dead, who cares? I don’t.’ The truth is, to be immortalised on the silver screen in a major movie would, to Freddie, be no more than his just desserts. But behind the flippancy and flamboyance, who was the real Freddie Mercury?

  Freddie Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara, on 5 September 1946 at the Government Hospital on the spice island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean. He was the pride and joy of Jer and Bomi Bulsara, who doted on their first child. Of Persian descent, his father Bomi was cashier at the British Colonial Office. When he finished work each day, in the early afternoon, the family would go to the beach to teach their son to swim or for a walk in the city’s exotic gardens.

  This idyllic way of life, however, began to disintegrate in 1951, when he was enrolled at the island’s missionary school, run by strict British nuns. Months later, after having spent six years as an only child, a baby sister, Kashmira, arrived, and Freddie was no longer the focus of attention at home. As he was struggling to adapt to this new state of affairs, his father’s reappointment to India heralded a major upheaval for the family when they were required to leave Zanzibar for Bombay.

  The sudden change suited the Bulsaras. Bomi and Jer were devout Parsees – the modern descendants of ancient Zoro-astrianism – and although the faith was once dominant in Persian Iran before its Muslim conquest, since the seventeenth century Parsees have largely concentrated in and around Bombay. In addition to the security of being among their own people, Mercury’s parents believed this was the best place to provide their son with a good education. Furthermore, although the family lived comfortably in a substantial house staffed with servants, there was now some unpredictability about Bomi Bulsara’s job, and it was thought best to send their eldest child, just seven years old, to boarding school.

  St Peter’s School was a type of British public school in Panchgani, Maharashtra. It upheld all the traditional academic teachings with an emphasis on sports such as cricket, boxing and table tennis. Mercury quickly discovered that he loathed cricket, but for a while he enjoyed boxing. Although he would later claim to have been brilliant at the sport, he wasn’t really in his natural element. His whippet-like frame was better suited to the speed and dexterity of table tennis, a sport at which he later became school champion; equally he excelled in athletics.

  Around the age of eight, Mercury began taking piano lessons at St Peter’s. When his mother had taught him, he had practised his scales out of dutiful obedience. Now with professional tuition, he began to flourish, and the more his aptitude became apparent, the more he grew to enjoy playing the piano. He also looked forward to his trips home. His school friends had long since rechristened him Freddie – no longer Farrokh – and his family had adopted the name, too.

  Religion was to play an important role in hi
s early life. Parsees worship at fire temples, where sacred flames burn continually – some for over 2000 years – and before which prayers are said to pledge allegiance. Like other Parsee children, Mercury attended these temples, and, as was the custom, his formal induction occurred when he was eight in a Navjote ceremony conducted by a Magi priest. It was a ceremony steeped in the oldest tradition, and one that Mercury as a child engaged in with all the required solemnity.

  As India’s commercial and financial centre, Bombay boasted a huge urban population, and the city’s vitality thrilled Mercury. Whenever he could, he pitched himself into its chaos. He adored all its aspects, from the glamour of the Malabar Hill district, overlooking the Arabian Sea, through the plush Victoria Gardens on Parel Road, to the bedlam of Bombay harbour, watching merchant ships put out to sea. He would wander the labyrinth of narrow streets lined with bazaars, where snake charmers sat cross-legged on the ground, piping eerily hypnotic tunes, and fakirs spread themselves on beds of nails. This exotic culture of Bombay conspired with its breathtaking architecture in a sense of grandeur, colour and flamboyance that began to inspire Mercury’s emergent creativity.

  As a young boy, Mercury was irresistibly drawn to these hectic marketplaces. Haggling with wily Arab street traders, with only a few rupees in his pocket, he had an eye for what he wanted and learnt to barter effectively. Years later, as a millionaire he would shop in the world’s choicest establishments until those around him dropped from fatigue. Paying huge sums of money for collectable antiques and art treasures, he derived almost as much pleasure in the getting, as in the possessing.

  In tune with its polyglot population, the music of Bombay was a kaleidoscope of genres, practically all strains of which were influential to Mercury’s early development. His parents were cultured and preferred classical music and opera, which he himself would enjoy in later life. But the predominant local influences were rooted in the mystical rhythms of Indian music, and by the mid to late 1950s a trace of the new popular music craze, rock ’n’ roll, seeped into Bombay.

  Soon to attain Grade IV on the piano, in both theory and practical, Mercury was by this time mad about music. He had formed his own band, the Hectics, appropriately named to reflect Mercury’s powerhouse of energy. He was enthusiastic about singing and desperate to perform publicly, something his school’s archaic rules would not allow. Nevertheless, he already sang in the school choir and regularly participated in amateur dramatic productions. When he played these early gigs at school fetes and parties, the combination of his choirboy training and overblown sense of theatrics was obvious in the originality of his performances.

  Although it was a tough regime, in many ways Mercury liked boarding-school life. The downside was that he didn’t see much of his family – a fact, according to those who knew him well, he later grew to dwell on. During his adult years in Munich he would often visit the home of record producer Reinholdt Mack, where he saw a loving rapport between Mack and his children.

  Mack has maintained that he once overheard Mercury privately tell his son how much he had missed out on the homely side of life because of the amount of time he was separated from his parents. Publicly Mercury would only admit, ‘One thing boarding schools teach you is how to fend for yourself, and I did that from a very early age. It taught me to be independent and not to have to rely on anybody else.’

  But despite this bravado, he was often very lonely. Because his father frequently travelled, at times Mercury had to spend school holidays with relatives; on occasions he even stayed at school when the other pupils had all gone home. This meant that during his formative years there wasn’t as much opportunity as he would have liked to develop the best bond, right then, with his family. Hiding his feelings about this, he gradually built a protective shell around himself. As he grew older, this strengthened to the extent that if he wanted to, he could completely shut something out, effectively banishing it from his mind.

  This insular attitude was not the only reason Freddie never mentioned an important development that had taken place in his life by the time he had entered his teens. For what would turn out to be his last couple of years at St Peter’s, two extracurricular activities, both synonymous with English public school life, were to preoccupy him: bullying and homosexuality.

  As far as any bullying was concerned, with his rudimentary boxing skills the young Freddie Mercury was capable of taking care of himself and this didn’t seem to leave him with any residual problem. Homosexuality he viewed differently. Although he later became renowned for his camp and outrageous behaviour in public, Mercury was in fact an intensely private man. Considering his worldwide fame, he granted relatively few interviews, and when he did, he gave little away about either his upbringing or his homosexuality.

  At St Peter’s, it appears Mercury felt not so much confronted by the unorthodox sexual behaviour of his peers as just gradually more aware of it. He once confessed, ‘I’ve had the odd schoolmate chasing me. It didn’t shock me. There were times when I was young and green. It’s a thing schoolboys go through. I’m not going to elaborate any further.’

  He later privately admitted to his first homosexual encounter at St Peter’s, but the matter-of-fact way in which he accepted the situation would suggest that he had no regrets, nor any particular resistance to it. It is in any case unlikely that he would have felt able to confide in his parents: the Zoroastrian faith considers homosexuality morally detestable.

  Doubtless Mercury prided himself on his ability to handle his secret so well. In later life he would become fond of stressing the fierce sense of independence that school life had vested in him. That independence – which may have done nothing more than sow the seeds of an acute vulnerability – was soon to be put to the test. Due to the political unrest in India at the turn of the decade, his parents were among those who decided to leave the country. Packing up their household belongings, they moved to England, settling in Feltham, Middlesex.

  Located not far from London’s Heathrow Airport, Feltham must have been a culture shock for the highly charged Mercury, brimming with teenage energy and already bright and experienced beyond his years. In appearance, accent and temperament he must have felt different, and in his neighbourhood he was treated as such. From the start he suffered from ignorant bigotry – made the butt of constant ridicule and abuse. His first reaction was to retreat into a shell. But, recognising that he was there to stay, he realised it would be impractical for him to hide away. Applying his well-developed streak of self-discipline, he worked out a simple plan of attack.

  Since his narrow-minded tormenters saw him as a funny foreigner, he played the Persian popinjay for them and parodied himself ruthlessly. This took the sting out of their tails, effectively robbing them of their fun. But, brazening it out took its toll, and at home he became unhappy and insecure, desperate to fit in and yet aware that he was different. Perhaps the insecurity and alienation Mercury experienced at this time fuelled a need in him to seek attention as a form of acceptance. But, the more extrovert his behaviour became, the more he inwardly developed a sensitivity and reserve.

  On arriving in Middlesex, the Bulsaras had stayed initially with relatives, until they moved into a small semi-detached Victorian house near Feltham Park. Unknown to Mercury, less than five minutes walk away lived a couple, Harold and Ruth May, whose only child, Brian, was already a budding guitarist.

  The move to Britain was a drastic change for everyone. Bomi Bulsara had exchanged his privileged diplomatic position for a mundane job in the accounts department of Forte’s. It was effectively, he considered, a demotion. Gone were the servants to pamper them, gone, too, the glorious weather. Reality for Mercury was a drab bus ride to his new grammar school in Isleworth, where the mickey-taking took on epic proportions. This is one period of his life that Freddie Mercury later refused ever to discuss.

  Not surprisingly, this third home move in fourteen years – with the attendant unhappiness and disruption at a crucial time in his educational
life – resulted in Mercury’s school grades slipping. He managed to pass just three GCE O levels, in art, history and English. But this in itself wasn’t much of a blow. For a long time Mercury had preferred music and art to purely academic subjects, for which he had never shown any pronounced aptitude. Besides he had no intention of pursuing a place at university.

  He had no desire to work manually for a living either. At seventeen he held down a couple of summer jobs, one with the catering services at Heathrow and another handling crates in a local warehouse. At the warehouse Mercury was so workshy that his colleagues ended up taking on his share of the work on top of their own. His feeble excuse was that, as a musician, he couldn’t possibly roughen his hands with toil.

  At Isleworth Polytechnic one A level in art was all that Mercury needed to get into art school. His parents were reluctant to encourage this ambition, as they had nurtured different plans for their son. Mercury’s need to gain acceptance in his new surroundings had not been shared by his parents, who had clung to their old culture, customs and beliefs. and consequently it hadn’t taken long for a vast difference in outlook to divide the generations. Mercury, driven initially by his need to integrate himself into British life, now found that his parents’ beliefs held little allure for him – and he couldn’t see them playing a relevant role in his future. Concerned that the bohemian atmosphere of art school might further distance him from them, his family wished to dissuade him from going there. But by nature Mercury was a good manipulator. Years later Brian May reflected that the star was the most self-motivated man he’d ever known. In 1966 his sights were set on art college – and Mercury usually got what he wanted.

  TWO

  Mercury Rising

  By 1965 Britain had really begun to swing. There was an explosion in the arts – photography, fashion, theatre and the rest – spearheaded by music, with the main battle for chart supremacy enacted between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Hardly a town in the country remained untouched by the new spirit of freedom, and London, which seemed the centre of the universe at the time, was definitely its hub.