Is This The Real Life? (17 page)

The slogan ‘Behind every great man there is a great woman’ seems curiously appropriate in the story of Queen. Without the machinations of the band’s female friends at the Maria Assumpta, Queen’s history might have taken a very different turn. In 1969, Brian May’s student girlfriend had sweet-talked engineer Terry Yeadon into investigating Smile and helping them record a free demo; in the same year the McConnell sisters had brokered an introduction between Smile and Ibex, and given Fred Bulsara his first singing job. It would be five months before Queen performed live with Douglas Bogie’s replacement, but, again, it was the ‘good Catholic girls’ at Maria Assumpta that helped the band find their man.

In late February 1971, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Harris attended a disco at the college. Through a mutual friend, they were introduced to John Deacon, a nineteen-year-old student in
electronics at London University’s Chelsea College. Deacon had previously played bass guitar in a schoolboy group in his hometown of Oadby, Leicestershire, but had given up playing when he moved to London. Caught by the musical bug again, he began going for auditions but without success. In October, he had been among the small crowd at Queen’s College of Estate Management gigs, where Alan Mair had winced at Freddie’s singing. (Deacon said later: ‘They didn’t make an impression on me.’)

In November 1970 he and his flatmate, a budding guitarist named Peter Stoddart, and a couple of like-minded students, had formed a band to play covers at a Chelsea College gig. Needing a name for the promotional flyers, they called themselves Deacon. It would be the last time the self-effacing bass player ever put himself at the centre of anything. Deacon would never play another gig. Queen had found their missing link.

John Richard Deacon’s story began on 19 August 1951 in St Francis’ Private Hospital in Leicester, where he was born to parents Lilian and Arthur. His father worked at the Norwich Union Building Society and died when John was just ten years old. Deacon spent his first nine years living in Evington before moving with his parents and younger sister Julie to nearby Oadby, a suburban town that had been slowly growing since the end of the Second World War. The family settled in a detached house at 54 Hidcote Road, and John began attending the local Langmore Junior School and, later, Gartree High School.

Fascinated by electronics, Deacon spent his time tinkering with a homemade radio receiver and a reel-to-reel tape recorder on which he would tape songs from the radio. Nigel Bullen had met John at Langmore Junior. At the age of thirteen, the two began playing music. After hearing The Beatles’ ‘Please Please Me’, John saved up enough cash from a paper round to buy a cheap acoustic guitar. With Nigel playing drums, the two began making a noise together.

The catalyst for their first band would be Richard Young, who encountered Deacon and Nigel Bullen in the local Uplands Park in the summer of 1965. Young was older, had attended Woodbank private school and Scarborough College and, at the age of sixteen, had just started working in his father’s electrical wholesaling
business. Interviewed in 1996, Bullen described Richard as ‘the kid with the expensive bike’.

‘I’d already formed a group at Scarborough,’ says Young now. ‘I was working in my dad’s business and that provided me with the money to finance the group. The rest of the guys were still at school.’ Young put together the band: himself as lead singer and guitarist, Bullen playing drums, Deacon on rhythm guitar, and another local lad, a snappy mod dresser named Clive Castledine, playing bass.

After rehearsing in Bullen’s garage, the new group made their debut at a party in Castledine’s parents’ house in September. Young: ‘I don’t remember much about Clive’s party but it did dawn on me that the weakest link was, sadly, Clive.’ Calling themselves The Opposition, the band went public in October with a gig at Gartree High School, followed by a bigger show in December at Enderby Co-operative Hall. By now, Richard Young had decided to switch to playing keyboards. ‘My voice was capable but I began to realise the importance of a frontman,’ he explains. ‘Also I was playing guitar, but I felt that I was not good at it.’ Young was now having piano lessons and it was a natural move to the side of the stage.

Plying their services in the
Oadby & Wigston Advertiser
, The Opposition began picking up £2–£4-a-night bookings in neighbouring church halls and youth clubs. But there was a problem: Clive Castledine’s bass playing still hadn’t improved. ‘He found difficulty in keeping time and I think the idea of being in a group appealed to him more than mastering the bass guitar.’ (‘I was getting distracted by girls and bikes,’ admitted Castledine, years later.)

Despite the fact that it was Clive who’d introduced Richard to his girlfriend Patricia (‘Clive and his girlfriend and me and Pat all went to see
Help!
at the Odeon in Leicester’), the bass player was out. Deacon switched from rhythm to bass, and was taken to Cox’s music shop on Leicester’s King Street and bought a £60 EKO bass, paid for by Richard Young: ‘There was a lot of groups starting up around Leicester. The only way to stay ahead of the rest was to make good music, which meant you had to have good equipment.’

The line-up shifted again with the arrival of guitarist Dave Williams in July 1966. Williams had been at Gartree High with Deacon, and Bullen had played in a band called The Outer Limits. They were older boys, and dressed like mods. Much like Brian May’s 1984 and their mini-heroes The Others, The Outer Limits were something to aspire to.

That summer Deacon and Bullen moved up to Beauchamp Grammar School, but continued to play with the group, despite John’s mother insisting that he did not play pubs. Richard Young’s diary records an entry for September 1966, when ‘Deaks wasn’t allowed to do it, so Brian from The Glen [local band The Glen Sounds] stood in.’ Stoic, shy, and rarely flustered, ‘Easy Deacon’ as he was nicknamed, was already displaying the traits for which he’d become known in Queen.

Now calling themselves The New Opposition, and fronted by singer Pete ‘Pedro’ Bartholomew, they could be found regularly chugging through Tamla Motown covers at the Leicester Casino. By the end of the year, they’d lost ‘Pedro’ and acquired a new guitarist Ron Chester, noted for a Sherlock Holmes-style deerstalker hat from which he was rarely parted. With Chester in the band, The Opposition (the ‘New’ had been dispensed with) were photographed by the
Leicester Mercury
. ‘We were finalists in the Midlands Beat Championships,’ remembers Richard Young. The final was meant to take place at Leicester’s De Montford Hall, but the promoter did a runner with the money, and it never happened: Our first experience of the shitty side of the music business.’ The
Leicester Mercury
photo captures a band stuck between the sixties beat-group boom and the encroaching psychedelic era. Williams’s jumbo-collared silk shirt points one way; his tweed jacket another.

With the extrovert Williams now fronting the band, The Opposition briefly acquired a couple of schoolgirl go-go dancers named Charmaine and Jenny (Young: ‘the dancing girls were to create interest … anything to stop the music becoming stale’). Their setlist became heavier, and the band began dabbling in flower-power fashions. By March 1968, The Opposition had changed their name to Art. At the Beauchamp Grammar School midsummer ball, Dave Williams created havoc by exploding a
homemade smoke bomb during a version of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s hit single ‘Fire’. By the end of the year, Richard Young was ‘getting into Argent, Deep Purple, Chopin and Bach’.

The following year, Art cut a self-financed single at a studio in Wellingborough. Alongside a couple of soul covers, they knocked up an instrumental of their own, ‘Transit 3’. Like the rest of the band, it was John Deacon’s first time in a studio. Only two copies of the disc are known to have survived, and Richard Young’s isn’t one of them (‘I do not have any copies of the Art single’). One rumour has it that the others used Richard’s copy as an ashtray at rehearsals.

Deacon played his final gig with Art in August 1969. A month later he moved to London and into a rented flat in Queensgate. He left his bass guitar behind in Oadby. Art split, but Bullen, Williams and Young would all continue working in original groups or covers bands. The Opposition’s founder member/financier now runs a piano shop in Oadby, just 300 yards from the old Deacon family home in Hidcote Road. ‘It’s still strange to think that one of the members of my first group made it,’ he admits.

Bullen would occasionally visit Deacon in London, but was astonished when John told him he wanted to join another group, presuming that he’d given it up to concentrate on his college course. None of his former band members had considered Deacon ambitious enough to want to make a career in music. Interviewed in 1996, Bullen recalled Deacon telling him that he’d begun answering ads in
Melody Maker
but ‘bottled out when he discovered they were for a name act’. As Richard Young admits, ‘Little did we know when practising in a cold, draughty garage that the shy, unassuming kid, probably still paying me some of his pocket money on an instalment on his bass guitar, would become the famous one.’

Just a couple of days after their meeting at the Maria Assumpta college, Deacon showed up at the Imperial lecture theatre with his bass guitar and a tiny practice amp. His audition comprised of a lengthy blues jam and a run-through of three Queen songs, including ‘Son and Daughter’. Recalled Brian May: ‘Having been through a lot of hugely thunderous bass players, this quite shy guy
turns up, and as soon as he started putting basslines to what we were doing, we realised it was right.’

Also present at the session was ex-Sour Milk Sea guitarist Chris Chesney. At the time, Freddie had hatched a plan to expand Queen by adding a second guitarist. ‘I’d seen them play at Imperial with the blonde guy [Barry Mitchell],’ recounts Chesney. ‘Freddie had come up to afterwards and said, “I’d like you to join the band.”’ Previously Queen had supported Wishbone Ash, the denizens of progressive blues-rock, notable for having two lead guitarists. Maybe the inspiration was there, or, more likely, the rather static Brian was less of a visual foil for Freddie than Chris had been. When it came to their individual playing, ‘Brian was ahead of me technically,’ offers Chesney. ‘But I thought I nudged him on feel.’ In the absence of a guitar of his own, Chris had to borrow the Red Special. ‘It was a nightmare,’ he admits. Unused to the homemade guitar’s unusually large neck and idiosyncratic fretboard, Chesney struggled to play properly. ‘It was nice of Freddie to consider me,’ he laughs.

Before long, Chesney had quit London and enrolled at university. After a spell in the US, he returned to the UK and skirted the fringes of the punk scene. A career making video and TV commercials ensued, while covers bands, session gigs and stints as a backing musician to the likes of Percy Sledge and Ben E. King kept him involved in music. After his fumbled audition with Queen, Chris would not cross paths with Freddie Mercury again until 1987.

‘Easy Deacon’ made his Queen debut on 2 July 1971 at a college gig in Surrey. He did not embarrass the band with any ‘incongruous behaviour’, and as a student himself, wasn’t shackled to a day job. His bass playing was excellent (Chris Chesney recalled that at his audition Deacon didn’t drop a single beat) and his electronics expertise was considered a bonus. But there was much more to it than that. As Roger Taylor observed, ‘We were all so used to each other and so over the top, we thought that because he was so quiet he would fit in with us without too much upheaval.’ As Deacon told an interviewer later, ‘When we argue, I yell much less than the others.’

John Anthony was invited to check out the new-look Queen. ‘I
saw them rehearse with John. To be honest I thought he was neither fish nor fowl,’ he says. ‘He always reminded me of a character in the seventies TV comedy
Please Sir!
There was a school bully who wanted to beat everyone up, and he had a sidekick who was always egging him on – “Yeah! Yeah!” That was John Deacon.’ At the time, Anthony was about to set up his own production company, Neptune Productions, with Trident Studio’s engineers Robin Geoffrey Cable and Roy Thomas Baker: ‘I told Queen I was booked up for nine months producing other bands, but that I really wanted to do something with them.’

In the meantime, John Deacon’s apprenticeship would continue with a trip to Cornwall. The band rented a cottage in Devoran and played eleven dates around the county. Sometimes billed as ‘The Legendary Drummer of Cornwall Roger Taylor … and Queen’, their garish stage clothes and Freddie’s mannered posturing was paraded before the personnel gathered in the NCO’s mess hall at RNAS Culdrose. One pub gig was marred by a row over the volume of their PA, and the band were, literally, chased out of town by angry locals. It was all grist to the mill. Roger’s old pal Rik Evans promoted an outdoor gig at Tregye Country Club near Truro, with Queen warming up the crowd for Hawkwind and Arthur Brown.

Back in London, ‘Cornwall’s legendary drummer’ bit the bullet and went back to being a student. Taylor’s year off was over, and he signed up to study biology at North London Polytechnic. Adamant that the course would not stand in the way of Queen, Roger had to give up the market stall. In Taylor’s absence, Freddie closed the stall and carried on working for Alan Mair. The close proximity between the two stalls also allowed the singer to continue using the market’s public telephone box as his personal office. ‘You could always call Freddie on that phone and he’d answer,’ says Ken Testi.

Whatever progress Queen were making as a live act, they were still even further away from a record deal than Smile had been. Two years earlier, Pye Studios maintenance engineer Terry Yeadon had recorded a demo for Smile in a late-night session. That autumn, Yeadon took a phone call from Brian May. It was the first time they had spoken since Smile, and the call was a sign of May’s
desperation to get something, anything, happening for Queen. ‘Brian told me that he had a new band, that Tim had gone but that they had a great new singer, and could I do anything?’ says Yeadon. ‘His timing could not have been better.’