Freddie Mercury (2 page)

S

Pino Sagliocco    
Spanish concert promoter.
Amin Salih    
Accountant.
Joe Scardilli    
American Airlines cabin crew, friend.
Jane Seymour    
Actress.
Wayne Sleep    
Principal dancer and one-time friend.
Lord Snowdon    
Photographer.
Gladys Spier    
Cleaner.
Billy Squier    
Singer, composer, musician and friend.
Rod Stewart    
Singer and peer.
Gerry and Sylvia Stickells    
Tour manager and friends.
Peter Straker    
Singer, actor and friend.
Phil Symes    
Press representative.
Barbara Szabo    
Office accountant.

T

Gail Taphouse    
Soloist at Royal Ballet.
Mr Tavener    
Builder.
Chris Taylor (Crystal)    
Member of Queen road crew.
Dominique Taylor    
Wife to Roger Taylor and friend.
Elizabeth Taylor    
Great movie star.
Gavin Taylor    
Video director.
Roger Taylor    
Drummer and one quarter of Queen.
Baroness Francesca von Thyssen    
Socialite and friend.
Douglas Trout    
Hairdresser and one-time friend.

V

Barbara Valentin    
Actress and friend.
Vince the Barman    
Barman and lover.
Paul Vincent    
Guitarist.

W

Clodagh Wallace    
Artists’ manager and friend.
Misa Watanabe    
Japanese music publishing executive, friend.
David Wigg    
Journalist and one-time friend.
Margie Winter    
Cleaner.
Stefan Wissnet    
Guitarist and recording engineer.
Carol Woods    
Actress and singer.

Y

Susannah York    
Actress.
Richard Young    
Photographer and friend.

Z

Brian Zellis (Jobby)    
Member of Queen road crew.

I
n the beginning, it was 1973.

The very first sighting I ever had of Freddie Mercury was in the Rainbow Room restaurant at the shop called Biba in the old Derry and Toms building on Kensington High Street in London. I remember his very being there was a performance.

The Rainbow Room was originally an art deco ballroom with a wonderful layered plaster ceiling, in which different lighting effects were used, often giving the colours of the spectrum, hence providing the name the Rainbow Room. Freddie was so struck by this ceiling that it influenced the designs of some of the ceilings in his future home. But that was still a long way away.

I’d gone to the Rainbow Room with my then girlfriend, Pamela Curtis. Pam and I had had a hard afternoon’s shopping around that wonderful store. Biba was the kind of emporium where you didn’t actually have to buy anything but still had to look in every nook and cranny because the stock and its positioning were all changed so often. The displays in every part of the shop were a wonder in themselves. Freddie was there taking afternoon tea with his then girlfriend Mary Austin, who was at this time working at Biba. He still stood out even though at that point I actually had very little knowledge of contemporary music. Queen were not very well-known in 1973 although Freddie, as one of the new rising stars of rock music was unmistakable.

Freddie’s charisma took over the space he occupied. The cream seats of the restaurant were shaped like big seashells and so Freddie, ensconced in his seat with his long black hair and dressed in the short fox fur jacket, really turned heads. Of course, we did not meet then and I was not to meet Freddie properly for the first time until late in 1979. In the intervening years, he would become a household name,
touring the far reaches of the world, and I would take up employment full-time in the Royal Ballet wardrobe department, with whom I toured more specific parts of the world: Canada, North America, Mexico and Greece, as well as working in the fabled Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.

Before I go into too much more detail about Freddie, I should fill in a few details about my own life which had brought me to this point. Although I had been born in Carshalton, Surrey, I only spent the first six years of my life in England. My elder brother Leslie and I spent the next five years in a boarding school in southern India at a place called Lushington Hall in Oootacamund, a town set amongst the tea plantations of the Nilgiri Hills. It was one of the often mentioned ‘hill-stations’ whence the Raj escaped during the summer heat on the plains and the last bastion of the only surviving independent native Indian people, the Todas. Incidentally, it was also in Oootacamund that snooker had been invented many, many years ago. Home was a hotel which was being run by my parents in Calcutta. I call it home although I only spent two months of the year there. Does this already sound familiar? There is an obvious and immediate analogy with Freddie’s life, although at least I had the luxury of being able to see my parents for three months of the year because they used to come down and spend the month of May with my brother and I during our Easter holidays.

When I was eleven, we returned to England for what was supposed to be a six month break but in those six months, my father was persuaded by his brother not to return to India. While I regretted this decision at the time and for many years, I suppose that should we have returned, this book would never have been written. I completed my education at Isaac Newton Secondary Modern school in North Kensington and, as most children did then, took up weekend employment first assisting the milkman on his rounds, advancing to working in the bargain basement at Whiteley’s in Queensway when what is currently a mall was still a department store and where I was the weekend supervisor.

While still a pupil, I progressed from Whiteley’s to Selfridges and it was there that I took up full employment after GCE while deciding what I was going to do with my life. Selfridges created a catering management scheme with me as the first recruit. This was real nine-to-five employment and I was very bored in the evenings after work
until a friend of mine from Selfridges suggested that I join him in doing an occasional evening job at the Royal Opera House. On April 22, 1975, I started dressing the men’s opera chorus, a situation which brought about another coincidence: the performance of Verdi’s
Il Trovatore
, including the aria ‘D’Amor Sull’ Ali Rosee’, featured amongst its great singers Montserrat Caballe, who will figure so much in this story.

In school days at Isaac Newton, my English composition homework was always done to the sound of Wagner overtures from our stereogram, a gramaphone and radio combined which was popular at the time. I didn’t have many records but was always drawn to classical rather than pop music, although where my love of classical music had come from I really cannot say. Wagner must have been particularly inspirational, full of drama and excitement and spurred me even to attempt my own version of Enid Blyton’s
Famous Five
tales. It was already clear that my life needed that little extra spice.

It wasn’t long before the tug of the Opera House overcame my already weakened ambition to be a Selfridges caterer and at the beginning of the new season in 1977, I joined the wardrobe department of the Royal Ballet full time. On Sunday, October 7, Derek Deane and Wayne Eagling of the Royal Ballet were organising an evening charity gala at the London Coliseum in St. Martin’s Lane in aid of the City of Westminster Society for Mentally Handicapped Children. Freddie, then at the height of his early career, had been asked by Wayne Eagling if he would be the special guest star at the end of the show. Sir Joseph Lockwood, the chairman of EMI records, Queen’s record company, had been the catalyst. Sir Joseph was on the board of directors of the Royal Ballet and had effected Freddie’s introduction to Wayne Eagling.

Thus it was that I was first properly introduced to Freddie Mercury in the Royal Ballet’s running wardrobe at the Royal Opera House, the department responsible for all costumes that were in use during the performances. Prior to the show, the new costumes would be the responsibility of the Production Wardrobe. My job was to effect the running repairs and the sequences of changes during the performmances. Hence, ‘running’ wardrobe.

Freddie came into our department with Paul Prenter in order that the wardrobe people involved in the gala could see what he would be wearing because his appearance involved a quick change actually on
stage. There was no room for error. He had rehearsed with the members of the ballet company with whom he would be performing for some time beforehand at the Royal Ballet school and rehearsal studios at Barons Court but this was the first time he had made an appearance upstairs at the Opera House itself.

Freddie’s appearance in the show was not going to be announced until he actually came onto the stage, dressed in his leather biker’s cap and jacket to give the first public performance of ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’. As the song finished, the dancers then masked him from the public and with some assistance from them, he changed into a silver-sequined leotard in which he reappeared before the audience carrying out fairly intricate choreography which included him being man-handled and thrown into the air while singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’!

This was the first of many times that I was to hear these songs but never again in such a spectacular way because when he performed them live with Queen he was always playing an instrument, either guitar or piano respectively.

Because of my association with the ballet company, I was invited to Legends nightclub for the party afterwards. It was here that I actually spoke to Freddie for the first time, a conversation that lasted no longer than five words. I also got into a longer talk with Paul Prenter who was Freddie’s and Queen’s personal manager at the time. I must have made some impression.

Paul Prenter was an easygoing Ulsterman, although like many of his compatriots he had a very fierce and quick temper. I well remember a few occasions on which people got on the wrong side of Mr Prenter and came off the worst. However, I only ever personally experienced this wrong side once or twice.

Two weeks later, Paul rang up Michael Brown, the wardrobe master of the Royal Ballet enquiring as to the availability of anyone who could carry out a six-week British tour with Queen and when I offered my services, Paul remembered me and took me on. This was Queen’s ‘getting back to basics’ tour – the Crazy Tour. They wanted to revisit smaller venues, few of which held more than two thousand seats, culminating in their show for relief in wartorn Kampuchea on Boxing Day at the Hammersmith Odeon, as the Labatt’s Apollo was then called.

Having made the decision to volunteer and having been accepted, I
panicked. I had no idea of even how many musicians were in the band called Queen, never mind what each of them looked like. I knew they had sung ‘Seven Seas Of Rye’, ‘Killer Queen’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ but that was the extent of my knowledge of their repertoire. I had two weeks before the tour began to find out about my new employers.

On the first day I went to a rehearsal – I was driven there by one of Queen’s office staff – Paul Prenter met me and took me into one of the sound stages at Shepperton Film Studios in which Queen was rehearsing. This was one of the few spaces large enough for them to set up their full stage. I was stunned.

Not being an avid Queen fan, I never knew the extremes they went to in putting on their show. The band hadn’t arrived yet but just to see the amazing amount of equipment and lights set up on the rehearsal stage was awe-inspiring. The technicians were practising with the ‘pizza oven’ lights and the effects were staggering. This set-up was so-called because the colors, red, green and orange, brought to mind a Mediterranean flag, I believe, and as it was one massive bank of these colours, it wouldn’t have looked out of place in an infra-red bakers’ oven. Paul ushered me over to the vast, wheeled wardrobe trunks and told me to sort through them and make sense of them and said he would introduce me to the band when they had all arrived.

You have to realise that in the trunks at this point was an array of Zandra Rhodes originals screwed up carelessly into crumpled balls as nothing had been sorted out since the end of Queen’s last tour. There was also an assortment of make-up strewn here, there and everywhere, as well as a special French make-up remover by Rene Guinot, a pink gloop which Freddie used exclusively, cotton wool balls, hairspray, all the things you would expect to find in every gentleman’s going-away luggage. There was a special dry shampoo – basically talc-in-a-tube which soaks up grease instead of washing under a shower – for the rock star in a hurry. There was a whole array of boots and shoes, trainers and the special Brian May clogs in various colours. And hairbrushes. Hairbrushes galore!

Someone had thoughtfully opened the trunks before my arrival so most of the mildew smell had evaporated. The trunks had been packed hurriedly at the end of their last show with no thought as to what the state of the unwashed, unlaundered contents would be when
next opened. There were also several costumes in both black and white PVC with all sorts of holographic pictures including the Statue of Liberty, The Stars and Stripes and the Empire State Building. These had been designed by an American and Freddie had worn the outfits on the last tour but was rarely, if ever, to wear them again. I think he wore the black jacket once or twice.

I had noticed a large number of people coming and going and bustling about but the only person who actually stood out in all this activity was the figure of – I was soon to learn – Jim Beach, then Queen’s business manager, who was walking around wearing a full-length wolf coat, presumably as a protection from the cold. Paul called me over to a small group of people and I was finally introduced to the band who had up until then been indistinguishable amongst the hurly burly. Freddie made me feel immediately at home just by saying, “Well, of course I remember you, dear.”