Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury by Lesley-Ann Jones Page A
Authors: Lesley-Ann Jones
Ads: Link
remembered Ken Testi. “He was a star before he was a star, if you know what I mean. He’d strut around the stage like a proud peacock.”
The band were still based in Liverpool, where Freddie became the short-term lodger of Geoff Higgins’s family. The Higginses lived above a pub called Dovetale Towers on Penny Lane, a street immortalized by the Beatles. Freddie slept on the floor in Geoff’s bedroom, but he never complained, determined as he was to honor his own parents by being the perfect houseguest. Geoff’s mother Ruth is said to have adored him.
“My mother liked him because he spoke properly, because he was from the South,” Geoff explained to Mark Hodkinson, author of Queen: The Early Years . “Freddie was very, very kind to her.”
Although the band played as much as they could around the UKthroughout 1969, no record deal was forthcoming. Eventually they talked about calling it a day. Miffer had family problems, and needed to earn a regular wage. Friend of the band Richard Thompson replaced him as drummer. The new lineup played a single disastrous gig. Everything that could go wrong—lights, sound, equipment—did go wrong. Even the microphone fell short of expectations. Whenever Freddie did a turn as front man, he would twirl his mic around like a majorette’s baton. This one came complete with a cumbersome heavy stand. At one point he seized the mic and attempted to swing it, but the bottom part fell off. Unfazed, Freddie carried on with the top half. A trademark was born.
The strange contradictions of Freddie the performer and Fred Bulsara the person were becoming too extreme to ignore. Even on a makeshift stage, and without ever having been appointed official lead singer, Freddie projected supreme confidence, every gesture and movement flamboyant and melodramatic. Offstage, he would cower in kitchens and cupboards, the make-do dressing rooms of the pub and club circuit, where he’d struggle coyly into handmade skintight outfits so skimpy that, once on, he could barely breathe in them, let alone sit down. Relatively small, slight, and not conventionally handsome, Freddie knew that he stood out thanks to his dark skin and swarthy looks. His features at times embarrassed him. He took to hiding his dark eyes behind a floppy fringe and his buck teeth behind his hand whenever he felt the urge to smile. His inherent shyness would get the better of him when he attempted to chat to fans after a gig. He could never think of much to say. Worse, although he enunciated English beautifully, his speaking voice was whispery and hesitant. He also lisped a little, probably because of all those teeth. Of these, he was painfully self-conscious. Only when he felt relaxed among friends did his humor and “real-life” personality shine through, and would he let himself laugh openly. The rest of the time, when not on stage, he tried his hardest to blend into the background. Not yet in the habit of getting blindly drunk or out of his head on drugs—he couldn’t afford to, so would make do with the odd “girlie” port and lemon in pubs—Freddie never mastered the art ofprojecting confidence among strangers. However happy and at ease he felt at his own parties, he was a fish out of water at anyone else’s.
Freddie grew tired of hacking up and down to Liverpool, of never making ends meet, of crashing out on other people’s floors in whichever town the band found themselves. He quit Ibex just after his twenty-third birthday, headed back to London for good with Mike Bersin, and applied himself to scouring the ads.
As Ken Testi would later put it, “I think Ibex filled a gap for Freddie. He wanted to be singing in a band, and Ibex benefited enormously from having him. It was a marriage of convenience for all parties. We were all very naïve . . . to Freddie, it was like his first secondhand car, the sort of thing you buy when you can just scrape a bit of money together. Eventually, you want a better one.”
No one
The band were still based in Liverpool, where Freddie became the short-term lodger of Geoff Higgins’s family. The Higginses lived above a pub called Dovetale Towers on Penny Lane, a street immortalized by the Beatles. Freddie slept on the floor in Geoff’s bedroom, but he never complained, determined as he was to honor his own parents by being the perfect houseguest. Geoff’s mother Ruth is said to have adored him.
“My mother liked him because he spoke properly, because he was from the South,” Geoff explained to Mark Hodkinson, author of Queen: The Early Years . “Freddie was very, very kind to her.”
Although the band played as much as they could around the UKthroughout 1969, no record deal was forthcoming. Eventually they talked about calling it a day. Miffer had family problems, and needed to earn a regular wage. Friend of the band Richard Thompson replaced him as drummer. The new lineup played a single disastrous gig. Everything that could go wrong—lights, sound, equipment—did go wrong. Even the microphone fell short of expectations. Whenever Freddie did a turn as front man, he would twirl his mic around like a majorette’s baton. This one came complete with a cumbersome heavy stand. At one point he seized the mic and attempted to swing it, but the bottom part fell off. Unfazed, Freddie carried on with the top half. A trademark was born.
The strange contradictions of Freddie the performer and Fred Bulsara the person were becoming too extreme to ignore. Even on a makeshift stage, and without ever having been appointed official lead singer, Freddie projected supreme confidence, every gesture and movement flamboyant and melodramatic. Offstage, he would cower in kitchens and cupboards, the make-do dressing rooms of the pub and club circuit, where he’d struggle coyly into handmade skintight outfits so skimpy that, once on, he could barely breathe in them, let alone sit down. Relatively small, slight, and not conventionally handsome, Freddie knew that he stood out thanks to his dark skin and swarthy looks. His features at times embarrassed him. He took to hiding his dark eyes behind a floppy fringe and his buck teeth behind his hand whenever he felt the urge to smile. His inherent shyness would get the better of him when he attempted to chat to fans after a gig. He could never think of much to say. Worse, although he enunciated English beautifully, his speaking voice was whispery and hesitant. He also lisped a little, probably because of all those teeth. Of these, he was painfully self-conscious. Only when he felt relaxed among friends did his humor and “real-life” personality shine through, and would he let himself laugh openly. The rest of the time, when not on stage, he tried his hardest to blend into the background. Not yet in the habit of getting blindly drunk or out of his head on drugs—he couldn’t afford to, so would make do with the odd “girlie” port and lemon in pubs—Freddie never mastered the art ofprojecting confidence among strangers. However happy and at ease he felt at his own parties, he was a fish out of water at anyone else’s.
Freddie grew tired of hacking up and down to Liverpool, of never making ends meet, of crashing out on other people’s floors in whichever town the band found themselves. He quit Ibex just after his twenty-third birthday, headed back to London for good with Mike Bersin, and applied himself to scouring the ads.
As Ken Testi would later put it, “I think Ibex filled a gap for Freddie. He wanted to be singing in a band, and Ibex benefited enormously from having him. It was a marriage of convenience for all parties. We were all very naïve . . . to Freddie, it was like his first secondhand car, the sort of thing you buy when you can just scrape a bit of money together. Eventually, you want a better one.”
No one
Similar Books
