I SEE A LITTLE SILHOUETTO OF A MAN...
As I write this on a dull summer’s day in June 2000, there is a huge advert decorating various London Underground stations for an online investment company called Egg. It features the following lines from Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.
“I see a little silhouetto of a man
Scaramouche scaramouche
Will you do the fandango
Thunderbolt and lightning
Very very frightening me
Galileo Galileo Galileo Galileo Galileo Figaro”
In bigger, bolder, red letters, however, the lingering traveller is also instructed, DO NOT SING THIS! Entrapped by one of the oldest teases in the book - asking you not to do something, while simultaneously encouraging you do it - the viewer’s eye is then led to the killer pay-off line - “You may not be able to control yourself, but you can control your investments”. Perfect.
The advert manages to be blindingly obvious in its appeal to our base curiosity and knowingly clever in the way that post-modern online advertising tends to be. For once, though, the copywriter who thought this concept up deserves the no doubt inflated salary he takes home, because, on closer inspection, the ad is also clever in a whole other level. First up, it made me, a reluctant tube traveller, and an ever more reluctant advertising victim, smile. And, it made me smile on an overcrowded Tube platform on the Northern line during the morning rush hour. (The reason I smiled, in retrospect, was because the words were already dancing in my head by the time I read the instruction to try not to sing them.)
Secondly, it made me think - though not about what the advertisers wanted me to think about ( no one, however clever and persuasive they might be, is going to persuade me to ponder the benefits of investment, online or otherwise, on the Northern line in the morning rush hour.) No, what it made me think about was the specificity of the choice of song; how some no doubt pony-tailed guy in a chic and minimal advertising office, who probably was not even born when Freddie Mercury was writing the lyrics quoted above, had found the perfect, perhaps the only vehicle, for his advertising concept. That vehicle was not even a whole pop song but a snatch, a mere fragment of the greater whole that is Bohemian Rhapsody. A fragment, though, that, once absorbed, remains in the listener’s - and, in this case, the viewer’s - head, despite all efforts to remove it.
This, in turn, made me think about pop song lyrics in general, their seemingly effortless ability to lodge themselves in the brain like no other popular art form; their ability to become part not just of one’s personal consciousness but of the collective popular consciousness. And, in this particular instance, not just the British, European or American popular consciousness, but the global one. Then, inevitably, I found myself moving from the universal to the particular, thinking specifically about this pop song called Bohemian Rhapsody - though, on one level, of course, it is as far from the traditional idea of the pop song as it is possible to go.
One of the first things that stuck me about all this, on a personal level, was the fact that, though it has been lodged firmly in my consciousness, immovable from the first moment I heard it back in 1975, Bohemian Rhapsody was, for most of this time, not even a song I liked. In fact, for a long time, during and after the would-be Punk purge of 1976/77, when Queen represented the enemy incarnate, it was a song I actively hated. I saw it as a big, blowsy, pretentious, overblown epic that, like many of its even more big and blowsy and pretentious progressive rock (hereafter referred to as prog-rock) cousins, was exactly the kind of thing I defined my whole pop life against. (Since those far-off punk days, of course, I have wised up considerably, and now, having passed through the knowingly ironic phase of appreciation for Bohemian Rhapsody, I can simply bow to the sheer lunatic genius of the lyrics, the arrangements, the operatic overstatement - though I still, it must be said, retain an abiding aversion to all things prog-rock.)
My ruminations on the singularity of Bohemian Rhapsody, and its attendant uniqueness as an advertising vehicle, continued apace on the fitful journey northwards from Oval towards Soho, not least because the lyrics, now lodged firmly in my head once more, were impossible to banish. What other pop song lyric, I found myself wondering, possesses this kind of power? What other song lyric possesses the same sort of across-the- board impact? What other pop song possesses a similar kind of collective, cross cultural, cross generational resonance? Let’s think... Imagine by John Lennon? Well, for start, it would not have made me, nor my partner, nor countless other long suffering London Transport customers, break into an involuntary grin as soon as they clapped eyes on the lyrics, and then do the same again when they tried in vain not to inwardly sing them. Maybe, Like A Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan? Again, no. Too specialised, too rarefied, too intellectually challenging to fit the bill. How about Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven, that other great epic but cryptic seventies’ anthem, which, for a while, like Bohemian Rhapsody, threatened to be a millstone around its creators’ neck? Again, it fails to pass muster. Too little known outside the heavy metal fraternity, too narrow a catchment audience. My Way, then, by Frank Sinatra? Nope. Too slow and old fashioned, and way off the mark in terms of the required tone.
I went on like this, racking my brain for a pop anthem that could have worked on me, and on the general public at large, and on the predatory mind of the advertising copywriter in such a perfect way. I mentally trawled the Beatles’ back catalogue, of course, and The Stones’ greatest hits, and good old Elton’s endless stream of hummable, sing-along-able pop tunes. I even turned to the relatively small, but recently inescapable, track records of upstarts like Oasis and, ever more desperate, The Spice Girls. But, no, there was simply no substitute. It had to be, could only be Bohemian Rhapsody, a song that everyone with even a passing interest in popular music knows, but that no-one - bar possibly, but not definitely, the late, great Freddie Mercury himself - could possibly profess to understand.
Now, think about that for a minute. A song enters the collective popular consciousness on a global level while simultaneously staying resolutely beyond our individual logical, or even instinctive, understanding of its lyrics. There is a particular sort of genius at work here. A fiendish imagination. A Machiavellian pop mind. Now, consider that the song in question manages to merge the structures and shadings of light opera with the primal dynamics of heavy rock and the multi-tracked, baroque geometry of prog-rock. On top of this already rich cocktail, the singer, in mock operatic tones reminiscent in places of a Gilbert & Sullivan hero, delivers his unique narrative - if, that is, you could call the inspired lunacy of those lyrics, a narrative.
If the song’s form recalls a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, had that esteemed duo dabbled in psychoactive drugs, the content is closer to the associative word play and wilfully nonsensical verse of an older generation of English literary eccentrics like Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll. Then, just to gild the lily even more, the opus in question clocks in at nearly 6 minutes (5 minutes, 52 seconds to be precise, edited down from an original 7 minutes), when the unwritten rule of pop songwriting, stretching back to Chuck Berry, states that the average length of the perfect pop single is, as we all know, under three minutes. Having broken this cardinal, and usually dependable rule, and most of the other unwritten rules of pop as well, the record then shoots to the top of the pop charts like the proverbial bullet, and stays there, inviolate, unbudgeable, for 9 weeks, the longest spell at the top since Paul Anka’s Diana back in 1957. Bohemian Rhapsody, then and now, represents, among other things, the triumph of the implausible. It happened, though, it really happened, and we have, one way or another, been living with the implausibility of its success ever since that fateful day, 29 November 1975, when it hit the number one slot.
Since then, successive generations of, it must be said, often reluctant, music fans have had their individual and collective consciousness colonised by those “scarmouches” and “fandangos”, have hummed them, sung them, mocked them, tried to banish them, and, in the end, simply surrendered to them. (This, of course, is what that inspired copywriter behind the Tube ad campaign instinctively understood.) Since then, too, it has been voted Britain’s best single of all time in the Music Of The Millennium poll. It has become, courtesy of its inclusion in the American hit comedy, Wayne’s World, a post-modern, post-slacker anthem. (What a trajectory!). And, though the group and their fans would be loath to admit it, it has also served as a no doubt unconscious template for an equally ambitious, equally inflated, equally long, but utterly un-tongue-in-cheek, contemporary prog-rock anthem, Radiohead’s Paranoid Android. (Whisper it softly, for they are precious and sensitive souls, not given to the kind of humour that underpinned many of Freddie’s big and bold projects.)
In short, Bohemian Rhapsody’s legacy has been as surprising, and indeed as implausible, as its original ambition. Of one thing, though, we are certain: there is simply nothing else like it in pop’s endlessly self-referential, effortlessly self-perpetuating history. It is utterly unique. Singular. Unmatched. Just like its creator. So it is that, when we come to praise the late, great Freddie Mercury, even, as we are doing now, in his much less feted solo capacity, it is, as I have just neatly illustrated, the place we have to start from. In short, Bohemian Rhapsody encapsulates everything that was inspired/inflated/insanely ambitious about Freddie Mercury, pop’s most elusive, and, yes, most mercurial showman (His adopted name, like everything else about him, from his stage personae through to his costumes and his song titles, was carefully chosen.) It was the pivotal point where Queen moved from a popular post-glam, post prog-pop group to a pop phenomenon, and a pop phenomenon that, from that moment on - and this is hugely important, and often overlooked - defied all the defining critical and/or cultural shifts in taste and fashion of the last thirty odd years. Until Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen were simply another rock group, albeit one who possessed a unified vision, and an attendant attention to detail that was rare in rock music. After Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen, and Freddie Mercury in particular, became something else entirely; something huge and unstoppable, something phenomenal.
Though both Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues and The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields predated it, Bohemian Rhapsody was also the first modern pop promotional video. Unlike its illustrious predecessors, it was widely seen, and subsequently talked about almost as much as the song itself. It was also, then, and how could we forget, the moment where Freddie Mercury, in all his sparkle and splendour, his over-the-top otherness, his sheer, unavoidable presence, entered our pop consciousness with a fanfare that few entertainers, before or since, have matched. We didn’t just listen to Freddie singing those mad lyrics, we saw him act them out in what we would soon find out was his own inimitable manner. There he was perched at the piano stool like a glammed up, singer-songwriter, then, briefly, in silhouette like Olivier as Richard III, then strutting through clouds of dry ice like the leader of a glam-metal stadium band, and - the piece de resistance - prism-ed and repeated like a kaleidoscopic representation of himself. Talk about a a statement of intent! Here, in the space of one albeit epic song, was Freddie the showman, the chameleon, the fantasist, writ large. Little did we know back then that this was just a mere hint of what was to follow.
MERCURY RISING...
We must delve some way at least into the childhood of Farrokh Bulsara, to try to extricate the essence of Freddie Mercury, the pop chameleon. He was born on September 5, 1946, to parents, Bomi and Jer Bulsara, on Zanzibar, which the tourist brochures tell us is the island of exotic spices. (I often thought he should have reemployed the name Farrokh briefly for his dynamic creative pairing with Montserrat Caballé; it should have been his operatic name; and a neat line in semantic reversal - King Faroukh as opposed to Queen(’s) Freddie.) His parents hailed from Gujarat in western India, and were of the Parsee faith, and thus followers of the man-god, Zarathustra.
Though born in Zanzibar, Freddie Mercury, né Farrokh Bulsara was emphatically Indian: he was educated at St. Peter’s boarding school near Bombay for ten years, and did not arrive in England until he was 17. Though he played down his ethnic origins, he should be remembered, and celebrated, as, among other things Britain’s first and biggest Indian pop star. (The Parsees, intriguingly, still see themselves as Persian rather than Indian, though they fled Persia over 1000 years ago. Freddie’s family, too, though born British-Indian, consider themselves a part of the Parsee race, a distinction that highlights subtle but often deeply felt difference between citizenship and roots.)
It was in India that the seeds of Freddie’s showmanship were sown. In the early photographs included here, you can see him making an impression as a sportsman - Best All Rounder and medal winner, and as a performer - acting in a school play, at St. Peter’s Boarding School, India, looking hammy but holding centre stage. Slightly older, he poses, dead centre, in a line up of the all-Indian combo, The Hectics, his first group, in which he played piano and sang tentative vocals on Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley songs. Older still, he lounges on a summer seat in the school grounds in 1962, looking like some self-styled Gatsby-type hero, in shades, crisp white shirt, pressed pants and matching shoes. It is the following photograph, taken six years and a whole continent later, that is the most intriguing, though. Beneath a dandyish velvet hat, the hair has grown and is no longer brushed back. In jeans, t-shirt and bare feet, he nestles a Fender Stratocaster guitar in a distinctly Jimi Hendrix-style pose. He looks very different, altered, on his way to somewhere else, somewhere far from St. Peter’s Boarding School and the Hectics; far, too, from this spartanly furnished living room in Feltham, not far from Heathrow, Britain’s gateway to the world.
The Bulsara family moved to England in 1964, fleeing the revolution that brought independence from British rule. As an adolescent pitched from one culture into another, Freddie seems, revealingly, to have had little trouble adapting to his new life. He went to Ealing College of Art in 1966, following in the footsteps of Pete Townshend of The Who and Ron Wood, guitarist with the Faces and later The Rolling Stones, and graduating with a Diploma in Graphic Art & Design in 1969.
In those three years, while Freddie studied art, the pop world shifted off its axis, and, from a rented flat in trendy Kensington, Freddie Bulsara dipped tentatively into London’s burgeoning psychedelic counter culture. He shopped in Biba, swinging London’s hippest emporium, and at Kensington Market, dressing in silks and velvets in homage to his hero, Jimi Hendrix. He later manned a stall there, alongside his new friend, Roger Taylor, selling Edwardian silk scarves, fur coats, exotic fabrics, alongside the graduate art work of Freddie and his more interesting fellow students from Ealing Art College. “We even sold Freddie’s thesis”, Taylor told Mojo magazine, “which was all based on Hendrix. There were some beautiful things - there was a Planetscape and he’d written the lyrics of Third Stone from the Sun...” Freddie, who alongside Taylor, was now also a fully fledged member of Queen, confessed to having seen Hendrix “play live on nine consecutive nights - one show after the other.” One imagines, given all that was to follow, that it was the image of Hendrix as much as the man’s explosive music that held him rapt.
At his peak, Jimi Hendrix’s onstage persona, as even a cursory glance at any remaining film footage shows, was mesmerising to the point of shamanistic. He dealt in the realm of extremes and paradoxes: androgynous yet intensely sexual; fragile yet explosively violent; a wraith in feminine silk scarves and velvet crotch hugging pants who would, on occasion, set fire to, then graphically act out a grinding, thrusting sexual assault on his guitar. It is well nigh impossible now to overstate the importance of Hendrix on British pop audiences, nor the catalytic impact he had on the legion of performers who flocked to his shows. Brian Jones and John Lennon, the doomed avatars of psychedelic pop, were constant presences stage front, as was the young, as yet directionless fledgling rock singer, Freddie Mercury.
ONE VISION...
It was five years on from that Hendrix style photograph that Freddie Mercury - Freddie the chameleon, Freddie the already full-scale Fantasist - first entered my life. Back then, as a young, uncertain teenager in Northern Ireland, sure only of one thing, that life was elsewhere, I was in thrall, not to pop music, but to rock music. Back then, there was a big difference. Pop music was Sweet and Mud and David Cassidy. Rock Music was the mighty Led Zeppelin and Roxy Music and David Bowie. Pop was singles; rock was albums. Pop was Jimmy Saville on Top of the Pops, which I still watched religiously because Bowie or Roxy, but never the might Zepp, might be on; rock was “Whispering” Bob Harris and The Old Grey Whistle Test, in which Bowie and Roxy and a whole host of even more exotic groups appeared with an at times alarming regularity.
Every Tuesday evening, if my memory serves me well, I would run across the road to a neighbour’s to watch the Old Grey Whistle Test on BBC2, a relatively new channel that had not yet been beamed into my house. What I remember most vividly about those Tuesday nights in front of the television is how seriously “Whispering” Bob took his role as the keeper of the “real rock” flame; how, like a slightly stoned academic, he would reel off band family trees, album histories, remembered live gigs in a hushed, reverent whisper as if imparting secret, sacred knowledge. Which, in a way, he was. What I also remember is the strange cartoons used to illustrate certain, usually brand new, tracks - this was the era before video killed the animator. I later found out that those cartoons were eagerly watched by stoned rock fans the length and breadth of Britain, a secret society of giggling Whistle Test aficionados, in thrall to “Whispering” Bob’s Zen cryptic ruminations and these weird, abstract animations as much as the music. One week, it must have been in 1973, the track accompanying the animation was by an unknown group called Queen. It was called, we were gravely informed by “Whispering” Bob, Keep Yourself Alive. As its title suggested, it was fast to the point of frantic, yet it possessed a certain sleekness, a sense that it had been worked on, sculpted, streamlined and polished. It was, we can now see, a statement of intent as much as anything.
The next I heard of Queen was a song called Seven Seas of Rhye, from the 1974 album Queen II. I was confused. I can see, in retrospect, why. Put simply, it sounded like a different group. Here is Cliff Jones, some time rock scribe and leader of a contemporary glam-pop group called Gay Dad, of whose name, at least, I’m sure Freddie would approve: “The lyrics hark back to Freddie’s obsession with Tolkien.” He wrote in Mojo magazine in August 1999, when Queen were featured on the cover, “Play this against anything from Never Mind The Bollocks (by The Sex Pistols) and it stands up. Although Freddie was wearing black jump suits with diamond studded gloves, this was essentially a punk track, a high-octane speed delivery and all the teenage aggression a great record needs. Forget people who say Queen are pomp-rockers - they blow the arse of any me-too punk band”.
At the time, though, if truth be told, the four members of Queen - Freddie, drummer, Roger Taylor, guitarist, Brian May and bass player, John Deacon - weren’t certain what they wanted to be, and seemed to be touching all the bases from pomp to proto-punk in an effort to find out what they did best, where they fitted in. Later, of course, they would find out that, like all great pop bands, they did not fit in at all. That dawning realisation must have occurred around the time of the next single, Killer Queen, which I would humbly suggest, was the first fully fledged Queen record proper: that is, a single that possessed a definite and, with hindsight, immediately identifiable signature. Killer Queen, a mini magnum opus, if such a thing can be said to exist, was more even sculpted and sleek than its predecessors, and less frenetic. It was also much more ambitious. Freddie claims to have written the lyrics “in a night“, but, perhaps because of the song’s quite complex lyrical and musical structure, the latter fitting the former like a glove, it sounds painstakingly crafted. The first thing that grabbed my attention were the lyrics, the tone of which is best summed up by the opening quartet:
“She keeps Möet et Chandon
In her pretty cabinet
‘Let them eat cake’ she says
Just like Marie Antoinette...”
Not, then, the regular subject of a rock and roll record, though both Mick Jagger and Bryan Ferry were, in their very different ways, indulging in what might be called posh-rock lyricism at roughly the same time. I has always assumed that Killer Queen was about a high class transvestite - the monarch of the title being a drag rather than a regal queen. Instead, it was, as Freddie would later admit, somewhat reluctantly, “about a high class call girl”, adding, no doubt self-mockingly. “I’m trying to say that classy people can be whores as well”. Once the lyrical sophistication had sunk in, there was Freddie’s high-camp, mock-operatic delivery - part Gilbert & Sullivan, part male diva - to absorb; intimations of what was to come. Then, in and around the words, were woven the multi-tracked vocal harmonies, and Brian May’s harmonic guitar stylings, which would, from this moment on, remain a constant, defining feature of all Queen’s subsequent great records. With Killer Queen, the group had arrived at a sound that was all their own. A sound that was not quite prog-rock, though it possessed identifiable traces of that inflated genre, not least the last vestiges of Freddie’s Tolkein obsession; and not quite glam-rock, though it dallied near the same subject matter and dressed itself up in the same sequins and spangles. Back then, Freddie mostly wore satin and silk, his finger nails varnished blood red or jet black. He looked exotic, even slightly menacing at times, stalking the stage like he had to territorially claim it, make it his own.
I must confess here and now that I did not grow up with Queen as a soundtrack to my teenage years. Their music was not an integral part of my adolescent life in the way that certain Led Zeppelin or Roxy Music songs were. Nor did I rush out and buy their singles and albums on the day of release the way I did with the latter two groups. No, Queen’s songs were simply there: on the radio, at the disco, in the background at parties. I kind of liked them, but, truth be told, my taste was for a rawer, more primal rock sound. I had, through the NME, discovered some even more exotic, slightly diseased specimens like The New York Dolls and Iggy & the Stooges, denizens of the Big Apple’s musical demimonde. I was, without knowing it, waiting for Punk to happen. It happened, on cue, in 1976.
So, too, in a whole other pop universe, did Queen. Punk came and went in the twinkling of an eye, its fallout affecting every new music that came after it; Queen, defiantly a pre-punk group in their aptitude and their attitude, stayed the distance, resolutely defying the punk purges and every other change in music and pop culture that followed after. (Queen are a footnote in punk history, though. It was their sudden withdrawal from the Today television show, hosted by Bill Grundy, that led to The Sex Pistols appearing on the same, and gate crashing the public consciousness in true punk fashion with their swear words and generally obnoxious behaviour.)
The point where Queen began their journey into the pop stratosphere, and into our collective pop consciousness, was, as I have already illustrated, Bohemian Rhapsody. After that, nothing was the same again. Looking back, it was, in its way, as momentous a single as Anarchy In The UK by The Sex Pistols insofar as it represents a defining pop cultural moment from which there was no turning back. You were either on Queen’s side from here on in, seat belt fastened for the whole, big, bumpy ride, or you were bailing out of the emergency exit heading for an uncertain landing on planet punk. I, dear reader, was of the latter persuasion. From Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975 until the video for I Want To Break Free in 1984, when I suddenly realised how mad, bad and subversive Freddie Mercury could be, I tried to live my pop life in avoidance of Queen and their music. I actively defined myself against everything I thought they stood for. And, of course, they simply grew bigger and bigger, more unavoidable, more inescapable.
Basically, Queen conquered the world, but they never conquered the pop press. That was their lot in the pop cultural scheme of things: always popular, never fashionable. “We were never critically acclaimed”, Roger Taylor mused in Mojo, “which seemed to become quite important after a while because the more critically acclaimed you were, the more you were assured of failure”. From the start, failure was not a word that featured much in the Queen vocabulary. “We aimed for the top slot and were not going to be satisfied with anything less,” Freddie would recall years later. “We wanted the best. It wasn’t a question of world domination, although I know it probably came across that way. You have to have a lot of arrogance and confidence, and an absolute determination... Arrogance is a very good thing to have when you are starting out in this business. That means saying to yourself that you’re going to be number one, not number two, hope for the best and head for the top.” Nor did they give a second thought to fitting in. It is worth remembering that Queen came up through the seventies, out of, but never really part of the key pop cultural contexts of that odd time. They began life when prog-rock and glam-rock were the predominant forms, but fitted in neither camp. They hit big in the mid-to-late seventies, when Punk was railing against all things big and bombastic, when the kind of music they played - epic, inflated, wide screen - was supposed to wither up and die.
And they continued to grow and mutate into a stadium rock roller coaster of excess and epic ambition throughout the early to mid eighties, ignoring, or blithely aware of, their continuing unfashionabilty. While serious rock students nodded to the jangly guitar and bed sit solipsism of the Smiths and their imitators, Queen strutted and preened, loud and proud and unapologetic, on a different planet. In short, Queen were the rock group that ruled the world utterly on their own terms. Their 1975 album, A Night At The Opera, stayed in or around the top of the British charts for a year, reaching No 4 in America. At the height of punk, the follow up, A Day At The Races, topped the UK chart like a giant raspberry blown at Johnny Rotten and co. So it continued: 1977’s double A sided single, We Are The Champions / We Will Rock You, said it all and, as was their wont, said it loud and clear and in-your-face. Likewise, the anthemic Radio Ga Ga, complete with a video that, unconsciously or otherwise, drew parallels with stadium rock grandiosity and Third Reich rallies. They become tax exiles. They released a single called Fat Bottomed Girls / Bicycle Race, accompanied by a video that left little of the song’s innuendo unexplored. They became the rock group the pop press and the Left really loved to hate when they played eight shows in Botswana’s Sun City - a rare wrong move in the area of Public Relations - and were subsequently placed on the United Nations’ cultural blacklist. Impervious to accusations of, in no particular order, bombast, blatant sexism and political irresponsibility, they just kept on keeping on.
In the music press, tales of Queen’s - and Freddie’s - eighties’ appetite for excess were legion. We were never invited to their album launches or after-show parties - he hated the music press, and the NME, where I then worked, in particular, ever since an article about him was published under the headline, Is This Man A Prat? - but we heard all the stories. We heard about topless - and even bottomless - waitresses serving champagne, about lesbian double acts laid on to entertain the inner circle, about transvestites, drag queens and dwarves with shaved heads on which were arranged long lines of Columbia’s finest cocaine. (The latter story has entered the realms of the legendary rock and roll anecdotes, up there with the Stones’ and Led Zeppelin’s oft-reported debaucheries, though denied by all and sundry.) As their one-time stylist, Diana Mosley attests, “Queen could certainly throw a party”. In 1978, they celebrated the release of the Jazz album with an all-night bacchanal in New Orleans, featuring the cream of the city’s strippers and transvestites, and all manner of weirdness that included sexual contortionists and a guy who cavorted under a pile of chopped liver! “It was deliberately excessive”, recalled Brian May years afterwards, “partly for our own enjoyment, partly for friends to enjoy... partly...” (and one feels he is being truthful here) “...for the hell of it”.
And, still, Queen grew and mutated, commercially conquering all before them. Rock in Rio in 1985, Live Aid later the same year, and Knebworth in 1986 became the three live shows that illustrated their extraordinary, and unassailable, position as the biggest performing act of the eighties. The first virtually drew a whole city to a standstill; the second saw them literally conquer the world, via a seamless seventeen minute medley of hits, that stole the global thunder from under the noses of the cream of the world’s pop elite; the third was their last live show, a spectacular homecoming before an audience of a quarter of a million on a - wait for it - six thousand square foot stage.
Sometimes, along the way, though, Queen did occasionally stumble and fall. Pre Live Aid, on albums like 1978’s Jazz and 1982’s Hot Space, they seemed lost, like a group going through the motions. During recording of The Game, in Munich in 1980, they fought bitterly, over direction, even over royalties. “We all tried to leave the band more than once”, Brian May admitted later. “Then we’d come back to the idea that the band was greater than any of us. It was”, he added almost ruefully, “more enduring than most of our marriages!” Basically, the motivation that had sustained them for so long had dissipated. They had, in short, achieved most of what they set out to do, and felt jaded, lacking in incentive. They had grown blasé about their success, their bigness. Live Aid, though changed all that. “They were absolutely the best band of the day”, organiser, Bob Geldof enthused, “They played the best, had the best sound, used their time to the full. They understood the idea exactly - that it was a global juke box. They just went and smashed one hit after another. It was the perfect stage for Freddie: the whole world”.
And, on that day in July, 1985, Freddie Mercury was indeed the main man, the centre piece, the great entertainer. Even, stripped of his props, his lavish stage designs, his extravagant costumes, Freddie Mercury shone brighter than the rest. (It was his performance at Live Aid, too, that led to his official selection as one of the Post Office’s millennium icons, alongside Charlie Chaplin. Freddie Mercury’s image duly appeared on a stamp, designed by pop artist, Peter Blake, the man responsible for the most famous album cover of all time, The Beatles’ Sergeant Peppers. “I had never been to a Queen concert apart from Live Aid”, elaborates Blake, “but I could feel the enormous rapport between the group and the audience, and that’s what I wanted to capture. The top half of the stamp is taken from those giant screen images that feature in big events, and the bottom is an expression of the same moment in the live performance. It was that multi-faceted element I wanted to capture. I was trying to capture the spirit of Live Aid which, I believe, reignited Queen’s career.” Incidentally, Roger Taylor, who is just visible behind Freddie, and behind the drums, is the first living Englishman, other than royalty, to be featured on a stamp.)
I WANT TO BREAK FREE...
Back there, then, for a long pop moment, Queen were it. The biggest, the most bravura, the most knowingly, wilfully garish; the rock group as pure spectacle, pure entertainment. And yet, there was subversion in there too. Sometimes it was unconscious - the bass line from Another One Bites The Dust travelled way beyond the group’s control, sampled to such a degree that it now is regarded as one of the key musical motifs that kick-started a whole genre, hip-hop. We Are The Champions coupled with We Will Rock You, too, travelled lunar distances from there intended meanings. We Are The Champions becoming one of the most enduring football terrace chants as well as a stadium rock anthem; We Will Rock You being similarly adopted by American baseball and ice hockey fanatics.
And, sometimes the subversion was a whole more obvious, but no less powerful. Where his sexuality was concerned, Freddie walked a tightrope between complete discretion and outright exhibitionism, never openly declaring that he was gay but coming out so obviously, so totally in his videos, his personas, his projected self, that only the deaf, dumb and blind, or the totally deluded, could fail to guess his orientation. The sudden appearance of the moustache, the gay clone look, the post-Village People macho man image, all said, “Look at me! I’m gay!” He may as well have worn a big sign featuring those words, written in day-glo colours, around his neck.
“Freddie lived gay.” his erstwhile stylist, Diana Mosley elaborates, “He didn’t have to shout about it, or even come out. He had that flamboyancy that was gay, but he didn’t see himself as a figure head. He didn’t want to be public.” Still, it appears that many of his fans thought otherwise. Or, simply didn’t think about it at all. Miranda Sawyer, writer and pop journalist for The Face and The Observer speaks for many when she says, “I grew up listening to Queen, seeing this outrageous character on video, and I never once though that he might be gay. He was simply larger than life in the way that real stars were meant to be. I just thought he was an outrageous performer, given to dressing up. That’s the power of pop fandom, it can blind you to the obvious”.
The apogee of Freddie’s outrageousness, at least on the public stage, remains the video for I Want To Break Free, a song from their thirteenth hit album, The Works, released in 1984. This was the moment when I, a snobbish rock critic who had dismissed Queen as simply a showbiz irrelevancy, big but meaningless, began to think twice about the band I had done my best to ignore ever since Bohemian Rhapsody had colonised my pop consciousness back in 1975. Began to think twice, to be exact, about this character called Freddie Mercury.
I Want To Break Free was made at a time when the pop video form had become, in certain instances, more important than the music it was meant to promote. The cost, too, had spiralled accordingly, with the likes of Duran Duran and Michael Jackson making their promo-videos for budgets that could have funded small feature films. Queen’s, of course, were not impervious to this kind of extravagance; in fact they positively thrived on it. Their previous single, Radio Ga-Ga, a Roger Taylor composition that mocked the increasing blandness of pop radio, had employed 500 extras, dressed in silver boiler suits, to clap in time to the chorus. It had been their most expensive video to date, and it had worked: the single hit the number one position in 19 countries across the globe. Given all this, and the fact that the group were now huge in middle-America, an important market that had proved stubbornly resistant to various British invasions since the hey-day of Led Zeppelin’s all conquering cock-rock, I Want To Break Free was a brave move. Some might say, a suicidal one. Written, like Another One Bites The Dust, by John Deacon, the song was tailor made for Freddie, who obviously saw it as another moment to come leaping out of the closet once more on video, though this time in the most blatant way imaginable - even by his outrageous standards.
The first image is of a hairy, bangled arm pushing an old, fifties’ hoover. Then, a be-wigged Freddie emerges, clad in a pink sleeveless top that strains to cover the most outrageous pair of falsies, a vinyl micro-mini skirt, stockings, suspenders and stilettos. He hoovers around John Deacon, nestling in drag on a sofa, reading the Daily Mirror, looking for all the world like that weird old lady that Terry Jones used to play in all those cross-dressing Monty Python sketches. In a suburban living room, filled to the brim with period kitsch, including three china ducks flying in formation, Freddie hoovers up and pouts and sings about how (s)he wants to break free. Around him, Roger Taylor poses by the cooker every inch the sexy schoolgirl, and Brian May scurries past to root in the fridge, resplendent in a pink night gown. I can still recall the first time I saw the video: the initial shock - what the hell is going on here, exactly? - turning to delight, then to admiration at the sheer cheek and the sheer hilarity of it all. A hilarity Freddie revels in - that collusive wink to the camera as he starts singing the opening lines, then that regal toss of the head as he banishes a stray lock of hair from in front of his eyes. Priceless.
Then, when you think it simply cannot get any more outrageously camp, Freddie pushes the living room door open to reveal a whole other planet of camp. The suburban house gives way to a set that would not look out of place in the English National Opera, as Freddie, in black and white body suit pays homage to Nijinksky in Debussy’s L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune. He blows on a horn, rolls across the prone, outstretched bodies of the extras, and leaps off a rock into their adoring arms. Mad! Hilarious! Knowingly, brilliantly, totally camp. Pure Freddie Mercury.
In the living rooms of middle America, though, this was a leap too far into irony and campness, two concepts that remain relatively alien to the transatlantic blue collar rock audience. “I remember being there when the video for I Want To Break Free came out,” recalled Brian May years later, “and there was universal hatred and shock and horror. It was, ‘they dressed up as women! How could they do it?’ It was not a rock and roll thing to do and it wasn’t something that was accepted - cross dressing in videos if you please! It was a really big shock. I think the mid west of America suddenly perceived that Freddie might actually be gay. That was shocking. That was not allowed. It was a bit scary...”
Though this reaction seems scarcely credible now, it was, alas, too true. On the back of that brilliant, groundbreaking, and hilarious video, Queen more or less lost their mass America audience. “The thing about Queen”, elaborates the American rock producer, Arthur Baker, who has worked with New Order, Ash and a host of other British groups, “is that they always confounded their audience’s expectations. perhaps too much so for heartlands’ America. When I was growing up in Boston in the seventies, they were the hip hard rock band you had to like. They even displaced Led Zeppelin for a while. Nobody, though, got that Freddie was gay and that there was a whole other level of meaning going on in his songs. Even the name, Queen, didn’t give it away. It simply never crossed people’s minds. Or else, they fooled everybody. To this day, I’m not sure which. All I know is that they kept me on my toes: I had them pegged as a hard rock group, then Another One Bites The Dust became the most played record on R&B stations - a huge black radio hit. Then I saw the video for I Want To Break Free and, boy! I mean, I was on the floor! It was the funniest most over-the-top pop video ever, but outside New York and, maybe the west coast, Americans’ just didn’t get it. It offended the rock audience which in America, is essentially a very conservative audience. Cross-dressing? A gay rock singer? I mean, forget it!”. Whatever, as Baker acknowledges, there is nothing quite like it in contemporary pop. Probably because no one else would have the imagination, the humour, the vision, the sheer, bloody minded nerve.
I WANT IT ALL...
The term mercurial is defined in my Oxford English Dictionary as “sprightly, ready-witted and volatile”. It would not be overstating the case to suggest that Freddie Mercury, the man as well as the pop chameleon, lived up to his adopted surname, and then some. He lived a complex life, one characterised by seeming contradictions. Though he was Britain’s first Indian pop star, he was secretive to the point of paranoid about his roots in Zanzibar and India - his first publicist never even knew his real name. Looking at Farrokh Bulsara in some of those early teenage photographs, it is not difficult to see where his insecurity, and his attendant longing to be accepted, to be loved - which Freudian psychoanalysts would say is the key determinant, rather than ambition, of the will to succeed - stemmed from. He looks, even dressed up like a Gatsby hero and lounging on a summer seat, gauche and slightly ill at ease with himself. His prominent teeth, which earned him the nick name ‘Bucky’ at St. Peter’s School, were a lifelong source of unease, but he feared that cosmetically altering them might affect the timbre of his singing voice.
In a world where England and America provided the predominant physical role models for the rock and roll look, from Presley onwards, his otherness, ethnic and cultural, must initially have seemed like a burden, and perhaps one he never totally transcended. Of such a deep rooted sense of otherness, though, is the star born. And, because it is an arena which encourages, which celebrates otherness, because it is a place where the outsider can not just find a home, but a huge empathetic audience, the pop life is nearly always a complex, contradictory one. In all of his contradictions, then, in his almost total self-belief and his attendant insecurity, Freddie Mercury was not unique. And yet his life, particularly after his initial success, was a uniquely complex one. His first important, and enduring, romantic relationship was with a woman, Mary Austin. They lived together as boyfriend and girlfriend, albeit he the attention-seeking extrovert, and her the quiet, reflective introvert. It is difficult to imagine a more diametrically opposed significant other for Freddie than Mary Austin. And yet...and yet, their friendship, their love endured.
Mary met Freddie before he was famous, when Queen were still in the embryonic stage, meeting and rehearsing, trying to fit together the beginnings of a sound. Initially, she saw him as “ a kaleidoscope personality”, someone “who opened my eyes to a lot of colour...he would see the irony in life, he looked for the humour. He did not like the darker side”. Later, as his fame increased, and his once suppressed sexuality blossomed, their love affair, in Freddie’s own words, “ended in tears”. To both their credits, they remained close, as close as it is possible to be between a man and a women without a physical element in the relationship. “A deep bond grew out of it (our love affair) and nobody can take that away from us. It’s unreachable.” he once admitted, adding, as if we hadn’t got the message, “ All my lovers asked me why they couldn’t replace Mary, but it’s simply impossible”.
This is complex stuff. A gay man, who would confess to having “had more lovers than Liz Taylor”, holds on to a profoundly heterosexual ideal of enduring romantic love. Perhaps, in love, as in life, Freddie simply wanted it all, and, in Mary Austin, he came as close as he could to the romantic ideal of perfect coupledom that, despite his bouts of promiscuity, obviously attracted him. Writing about him in The Sunday Times in November 1996, to mark a photographic exhibition of Freddie’s life at the Albert Hall in London, the broadcaster and cultural commentator, Waldemar Januszczak, noted that: “Although he was outrageously camp in private, Freddie had always been coy in public about his sexuality. No, not coy: misleading. He certainly kept it hidden from his parents. In all the photos I see of the many Bulsara gatherings he attended, he is accompanied by Mary Austin, the former boutique owner whom he dearly loved, with whom he once lived, and to whom he left the bulk of his estate. Jim Hutton, the live-in lover who nursed Freddie through the worst years of his illness, is nowhere to be seen.”
After he had broken up, at least physically, with Mary Austin, and his success grew, he surrounded himself with a retinue of real friends and admirers, as well as would-be suitors and hangers-on. It became known as the court of King - though surely that should have been Queen - Freddie. He threw extravagant parties in Munich, New York and, most notably, in Garden Lodge, his London home. For a while, he was, off stage as well as on, the epicentre of attention, a living, breathing, larger-then-life illustration of the term, party animal. It inevitably took its toll, emotionally as well as physically. “My affairs never seemed to last”, he once noted, ruefully, “ There must be a destructive element in me, because I try very hard to build up relationships, but somehow I drive people away...Love is Russian roulette for me. No one loves the real me, they’re all in love with my fame and my stardom”.
Love is Russian roulette for me. Boy! For a while back there, though, as he admitted more than once, Freddie literally played Russian roulette in the wilder gay clubs of New York and Munich, rather than London where he was simply too well known not to attract the attention of well meaning fans and the not so well meaning paparazzi. As far back as the second Queen tour of America in 1976, he told tabloid journalist, Rick Sky, that “Excess is part of my nature. To me, dullness is a disease. I really need danger and excitement...I am definitely a sexual person...I love to surround myself with strange and interesting people because they make me feel more alive. Extremely straight people bore me stiff. I love freaky people around me”.
To this end, he delved deep into a subterranean world where casual sex was not so much an option as a given. In his sexual life, he was, as with almost everything else, a risk taker. But, as we now know, in the eighties, the stakes were high; the gamble was literally a life and death one. “He went where angels feared to tread,” Rick Sky told Freddie’s biographer, Lesley-Ann Jones, “He was that classic refined person who loved to slum it. His ultimate fantasy would be to take a rent boy to the opera.” Instead, in 1987, having settled down somewhat in London, following a wild, hedonistic period living in Munich, he took himself to the opera, and brought home a diva. It was the last, and most unlikely, of all the great projects that Freddie Mercury undertook in his relatively short, totally incident packed, lifetime.
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA
“The opera queen must choose one diva. The other divas may be admired, enjoyed, even loved. But only one diva can reign in the opera queen’s heart, only one diva can have the power to describe a listener’s life, as a compass describes a circle”.
Wayne Koestenbaum: The Queen’s Throat - Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (Penguin Books)
The opera queen in question was Freddie Mercury; the diva, Montserrat Caballé. It would be poetic to say they found each other, but, in reality, Freddie found her. She, until then, was blissfully unaware of his existence. In his extraordinary book, The Queen’s Throat - how Freddie would have loved that title! - Wayne Koestenbaum unwittingly points to part of the appeal of opera to someone raised in, and on, rock music, which, even at its most vaultingly ambitious, its most bombastic, its most, in fact Queenly, does not come close to the ambition and bombast of Aida or Carmen. “The volume, height, depth, lushness and excess of operatic utterance”, he writes, “ reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been, how impoverished your physicality...”
Which is probably why one of the few, if not the only person, to render Freddie Mercury speechless, dumbstruck, was today’s diva incarnate, Montserrat Caballé. He discovered her in May 1983 during a production of Verdi’s Un Ballo In Mascherd (A Masked Ball), which he had attended, with his assistant, Peter “Phoebe” Freestone, primarily to see and hear the world’s most famous living tenor, Luciano Pavarotti. “Pavarotti came on and sang an aria in the first act, and Freddie thought it was brilliant”, elaborated Freestone in Lesley-Ann Jones’ biography of Freddie, entitled simply Freddie Mercury, “In the second act the prima donna came on, and it was Montserrat Caballé...She started to sing and that was it. Freddie’s jaw dropped. He only wanted her from then on...”
The album they eventually recorded together is, to me, the musical centre piece, the one utterly realised triumph, of the triumvirate of solo albums gathered in this lavish package. It is a record in which Freddie’s voice comes alive in a way that he does not on any of his other solo works. The impatience with the constrictions of rock and pop that showed itself from time to time throughout his career - initially in his stretching the boundaries of the form with Bohemian Rhapsody, itself a mini rock-opera in three parts - now finds a release in the company of a proper singer. (The first thing he said, revealingly, when he heard her almost ghostly tone, was, “Now, that’s a real singer”.)
What I love about the coming-together of Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé is, in a way, the same thing I love about Bohemian Rhapsody, and the video for I Want To Break Free - the ambition, the nerve, the devil-may-care attitude of the man. There is something implausible about the idea of a pop singer and an opera singer duetting, something that suggests a no-win situation, a stand-off or a compromise between low and high culture, in which neither will emerge victorious. Or dignified. This, however, was not the case. Freddie understood Montserrat, and she understood Freddie; they revelled, from the start, in each other’s company, staying up until the early hours, singing show tunes and pop tunes and light opera tunes around the piano. They were divas together, in consort, in harmony.
Inevitably, they found a stage big enough for both of them, performing in Barcelona with the city’s Opera House Orchestra and Choir before an audience that included the king and queen of Spain. The occasion was the La Nit open air Festival, during which the city formally received the Olympic flag from Seoul. (That they actually mimed, rather than sang - due to Freddie’s recurring problem with throat nodules, the singer’s nightmare, hardly mattered - it was the sense of occasion, of symbolism that was important.)
In many ways, the Montserrat Caballé duets on the Barcelona album, represented Freddie Mercury’s last great triumph. Sure, there was another solo album and more Queen hits after it, but this was collaboration as, more than anything else, a triumph of the will. He saw a chance to reinvent himself outside rock music, and he made the leap. And what a leap, of faith, of confidence, of self belief. Listening now to the other solo work collected here, it is possible to get a glimpse of yet another Freddie Mercury, someone both confident in his singular abilities, yet strangely adrift without the other “three” around him. There is emotion and musical range aplenty on both Mr Bad Guy, which, in commercial terms, was not a success, and The Great Pretender (the US version of The Freddie Mercury Album, and an altogether more fitting title), and they add to the received image of Freddie Mercury, entertainer, chameleon, dropping in and out of musical guises with consummate ease. They suggest to me a man trying to reach out, but not entirely stretching, his abilities: it’s almost as if he was tentatively testing the waters for a future solo career. Who knows?
Personally, the Freddie Mercury of Barcelona is a more exciting, not to mention intriguing, prospect. You can literally hear how excited he is, how inspired and excited by the newness of it all, by the challenge. He is, in short, in his creative element. It, alone, is worth the price of admission; It is also a fitting valediction to a life lived against the grain, against expectations, against constraints, both creative and social.
THE SHOW MUST GO ON...
“Those were very sad days, really, but Freddie didn’t get depressed. He was resigned to the fact that he was going to die. He accepted it; we were all going to die someday. And, anyway, could you imagine an old Freddie Mercury?”
Peter Freestone quoted in Freddie Mercury by Lesley-Ann Jones.
Freddie Mercury was officially diagnosed HIV positive in 1987, one year before the Barcelona album. His final years were spent in London and Montreux, among a close circle of friends that included his personal assistants, Peter Freestone and Joe Fanelli, his manager Jim Beach, and the second great love of his life, Jim Hutton. “He took on board and excepted the inevitability,” Mary Austin remembers, “I saw a man become incredibly brave”. He told each of his immediate circle in turn, and the band, all of whom had expected the worst for some time, instructing each of them not to speak of the matter again. “He accepted,” says Peter ‘Phoebe’ Freestone, “that he was one of the unlucky ones. He had no regrets. Well, maybe one - that he had so much music left in him”. To this end, he recorded with Queen for as long as he could. When the other band members officially found about his illness they, “clustered around him like a protective shell”, as Brian May memorably put it. Queen made a further two critically acclaimed albums, The Miracle in 1989, and Innuendo in 1991, the singer, to the end, insisting on what were now physically exacting standards of quality control.
In his second last video appearance, dolled up like a deranged Lord Byron, Freddie sang I’m Going Slightly Mad. The man had style, and attitude to burn. In the last Queen video, Days of Our Lives, he looks fragile, ethereal, as if he could be borne away on the wind at any moment. Gone are the extravagant gestures, the constant movement, replaced by a fragile, still dignity. His last words on film were, “I still love you”, whispered intimately to his adoring public. A diva until the end.
One of the last characteristically extravagant things Freddie Mercury did was buy an apartment in Montreux, near Queen’s recording studio, and decorate it in grand style, knowing that he would never live there. A final act of defiance against encroaching mortality. Likewise, his insistence that he should dine out to the end, often spending days in bed so that he could have the energy to entertain his friends at an exclusive restaurant. Pure style, pure class. Amid the picture post card serenity of Montreux, which he once would have found boring in the extreme, he seemed to find a sense of peace and solitude, the very things he had spent much of his life running from. He spent days looking out on the lake, lost in private reveries. He wrote two final sad songs, A Winter’s Tale - the title said it all - and, with Brian May, the elliptically biographical Mother Love, a song about returning to the womb. A song about safety, comfort, spiritual, emotional and physical solace.
Back in London, he began to paint and draw for the first time since leaving Ealing College of Art. Propped up on his in bed, he drew his cats, painted abstract watercolours. Queen’s fortieth single was released in October 1991, entitled The Show Must Go On. Pure bravado, pure Freddie, pure Queen. The b-side was Keep Yourself Alive. On 23 November, a statement, approved by Freddie, was issued to the press, confirming what many had suspected, that Freddie Mercury had Aids. He died the following day. A statement was issued at midnight: “Freddie Mercury died peacefully this evening at his home in Kensington, London”, it stated, simply, “His death was a result of bronchial pneumonia, brought on by Aids”.
At his cremation, the music was a recording of You’ve Got A Friend sung by Aretha Franklin. As the oak coffin disappeared into the flames, the recorded voice of Montserrat Caballé sang D’Amor sull’ali rosee, the aria from Verdi’s Il Trovatore, Freddie Mercury’s all time favourite piece of music. Even in death, he had a talent to surprise.
Made In Heaven, a Queen album that employed digital technology to bring all four members of Queen together again, even in Freddie’s absence, was a fitting epitaph, though, ironically, it was, in tone and content, the least Queenly album the group ever released - stately and reflective, heartfelt and tender. Finally, the many masks that had hidden the true face of Freddie Mercury, seemed to have slipped during the writing and recording of these last valedictory songs. “My make-up may be fading but my smile stays on”, he sang gamely, but there was an honesty, a vulnerability on display here that was touching, and touchingly unfamiliar.
On 20 April, 1992, the other three members of Queen hosted a Freddie Mercury tribute concert at Wembley Stadium, featuring an array of guest vocalists singing what amounted to Queen's greatest hits live. George Michael, David Bowie, Annie Lennox, Liza Minnelli, Axl Rose and, of course, his great friend Elton John, were among the stellar line-up, with Elizabeth Taylor, tireless Aids campaigner and celluloid diva incarnate, making a speech in Freddie's honour. His absence though, was felt keenly on that Wembley stage, as artist after artist gave full vent to those anthems and love songs and epics; every performance, ironically, calling to mind the master. Where Queen's back catalogue of hits is concerned, nobody, but nobody, does it better that Freddie Mercury. The Mercury Phoenix Trust was also established that year, and continues to raise money for Aids related causes. In 1991, Bohemian Rhapsody was re-released,and once again, went straight to Number One, raising over a million pounds for the Terence Higgins' Trust.
No one knows where Freddie Mercury’s ashes are scattered bar those that were closest to him. There is no monument to Freddie Mercury in Britain, save his musical back catalogue. On his birthday, and on the anniversary of his death, fans congregate at Garden Lodge, where Mary Austin now lives, surrounded by Freddie’s cultured legacy - the fine art, the artifacts, the Empire furniture, all the expensive and aesthetically pleasing fragments he shored up against his final departing. Every year, Mary reads them a short statement,a prayer of remembrance. I am reminded, even in the nature of his death, and the mourning that still attends it, not of a mere pop star, but of Valentino, of Callas. Freddie, I’m sure, would approve of the comparisons.
He would surely approve, too, of the eight foot tall statue of him in full-on performance mode, that looks out from a plinth on the Montreux shore line across Lake Geneva. Sculpted by Irena Sedlecka, a Czech monumentalist best known for the heroic reliefs that decorate the entrance to the Lenin museum. Fist raised, biceps taut, Freddie stands in stadium rock pose, facing the sunset across the lake, his back to the curious and the faithful who flock to the site. “If I had known he would have his back to the people”, Irena remarked afterwards, “I would have spent more time on his bum”.
THE GREAT PRETENDER
Where, ultimately, do we place a performer as singular, as chameleon-like as Freddie Mercury? He was certainly a pop star (and, for a while, way back there, lest we forget, a rock star); he was also an entertainer par excellence, as well as a scene stealer, a risk taker, and a diva. But he was also much bigger, and much more complex, than all of those labels.
In an era when rock music often became literally strung out on its own importance, weighted down with all that attendant angst and anxiety, Freddie Mercury created a public image, and a series of personas, that harked back to an older time when entertainment and escapism went hand in glove; when the very essence of entertainment was the providing of escapism. “I think Queen songs are pure escapism,” he said, “like going to see a good film. After that, they (the audience) can go away and say, ‘That was great!’, and go back to their problems”.
There is a great, and enduringly relevant, Hollywood film called Sullivan’s Travels, written and directed by Preston Sturges in 1941. It’s hero is a hugely successful Hollywood studio director, the Sullivan of the title, whose string of big production romantic comedies have all been box office smashes. Gripped by the desire to do something meaningful, something both truly artistic and socially worthy, he sets off to travel depression era America, disguised as a tramp, in order to research a social conscience movie about the lot of the common man. After a series of adventures, including wrongful imprisonment, he realises that what the common man wants is not social messages or political education but ...you guessed it...entertainment, escapism.
Freddie Mercury never had to make that journey of discovery: every fibre of his being, every impulse that drove him to be bigger, brighter, brasher than the rest, told him that pure, unadulterated entertainment - the triumph of the spectacle, of the illusion - was a worthy and exalted end in itself. Because of his dedication to rock music as entertainment, and, by extension, his dedication to entertainment as escapism, we - particularly us critics - thought we knew Freddie inside out. We thought we had him in a nut shell. We saw him, as indeed he sometimes saw himself, as The Great Pretender, trying on guises, personas and images like ordinary mortals try on clothes. Because he was, as he told us over and over, simply a “natural performer”, an “extrovert”, we do not accord him an iota of the pop cultural import we heaped on far less successful, but more “serious”, performers. (Interestingly, the late Kurt Cobain, the leader of American band, Nirvana, and the last great figure-head of angst-ridden rock and roll, wrote, in his suicide note, that he felt he was short-changing his fans and could never ever be a great entertainer “like Freddie Mercury”. While both Beck and Sonic Youth, two stalwarts of American independent rock, have name checked Queen II as an influential album.)
Because he wilfully ignored the baggage of rock and roll - the angst, the anxiety, the suffering for your art - we filed him away in a corner called, simply and pejoratively, “entertainment for the masses”. (As if, given what we know about the century’s great entertainers, from Chaplin to Minnelli, there was anything simple about that all-consuming calling.) Which, on one level, is all probably just as well because Freddie, even from the little that we - his public, the critics - know of him, would have been the last person to want that kind of cultural canonisation. His last instructions to Jim Beach, his manager, were “Do what you like but never make me boring!”
And yet, we know that he was hurt by the put-downs and the critical pastings, which reached a nadir of sorts with the now infamous mid seventies’ NME feature entitled Is This Man A Prat? “I’m a very hated person...” he confessed, “I think I’ve learnt to live with it. I’d be a liar to say I’m not hurt by criticism, because everybody is”. We know, too, that he had his revenge, the ultimate revenge, in fact, on the self-appointed taste-makers, on the hipper-than-thou critics, on the pop cultural snobs: put simply, the more they ignored him, the bigger he grew. And the bigger he grew, the more impossible-to-ignore he became.
As with all relatively short, but incredibly rich, lives, it is difficult to know exactly where to begin in attempting to place Freddie Mercury in the greater scheme of things. In pop cultural terms, he was nowhere near as influential nor as enigmatic as pop’s more serious icons - the likes of Dylan, Lennon, Hendrix or Prince - and it would be wrong to judge him critically against them. That, as I have already said, was not where he was coming from.
He did not want to try and change the world through his words and music like Dylan or Lennon, nor even change the course of pop music like Hendrix or Prince; he simply wanted to sparkle and dazzle, snag our attention, all of it, for a brief moment, then move on. This intention, however throwaway, is, of course, the essence of great pop, and maybe even - though the jury is still out - of great rock . Thus, even, when Freddie Mercury was being over-vaultingly ambitious - and what was Bohemian Rhapsody if not an exercise in vaulting ambition, always close to, but never quite teetering into total absurdity - there was in his work an attention to detail, but not necessarily to depth. “There are no hidden messages in our songs...” he insisted, more than once, as if the very idea was anathema to his essentially showbiz sensibility. Freddie, in musical terms at least, was pure surface. But, boy, what a surface. What a dazzling, sparkling, kaleidoscopic surface. What a showman. What an illusionist. What a chameleon. Right to the end.
Like Madonna or Elton John or, even Maria Callas, Freddie Mercury ultimately became, through the sheer size and ubiquity of his celebrity, one of those stars whose fame ultimately transcends their work. That is, he entered the popular pantheon, a celebrity who was no longer primarily famous for what he did - write, record and perform songs - but, simply, for who he was - Freddie Mercury, mega-star. That, of course, has always, to an extent, been the self-serving, self perpetuating nature of fame: you eventually are famous simply for being famous.
These days, though, we live in an age where celebrity has colonised the public consciousness like never before, where the minutiae of famous, and increasingly, semi-famous lives, relayed in detail through a voracious media, exercises our imagination to an at times unsettling degree. The endless passing parade of second and third division faux stars whose dull gaze, repeated ad infinitum from the pages of the tabloids and lifestyle mags, reflects our own jaded interest, and has debased the value, the currency of celebrity. We have become, in the process, almost inured to the appeal of the real star, the true star. Almost. Freddie Mercury, I contend, was a true star.
Sometimes we didn’t see it, particularly us critics who increasingly look for meaning beyond the obvious, but it was there all along, staring us in the face. Freddie Mercury had star quality, charisma, presence - call it what you will - in spades. For a start, he had an intuitive understanding of the contract between the celebrity and his adoring public that was old-style, almost vintage Hollywood, in its application. He was, for instance, both offstage and on, more Liza Minnelli than Mick Jagger. He was showbiz and he was rock and roll, but, ultimately, he was a lot more showbiz than rock and roll. (I’m talking old school showbiz here - Garland, Astaire, even Valentino, to whom Freddie, only half-jokingly, often compared himself - “I”m a true romantic, just like Rudolph Valentino”.)
He had an old school professionalism, and, from day one, a precocious grasp of the contract that even rock and roll demanded: “These days, music and talent is not enough. You have to be able to do more than write a good song. You have to deliver it, and package it... You must learn to push yourself, and learn how to deal with the business side right from the start...Go out there and grab it, utilise it, and make it work for you...You have to feed it to the masses...It’s called Hard Sell”.
Had he been around during the first golden age of Hollywood, or the dawning of the rock and roll era, or had he blossomed during the psychedelic sixties, you get the feeling Freddie Mercury would have applied himself to the task in hand with ambition, wit and style, would have made it big. That’s simply the way he was; he thought, acted, lived BIG. He knew, too, how to maintain a sense of mystery, and a sense of privacy. He knew how much to give his fans, and how much to hold back for himself and his intimate circle. He was an inveterate party thrower, and a present giver, showering his true friends and intimates with well chosen, often extravagant, gifts at every opportunity. He lived life to the full in the manner of a true diva.
With hindsight, then, it is possible to place Freddie Mercury in a lineage, or a tradition, that is even more outside pop and rock and roll than we might like to think. His penchant for mock opera - Bohemian Rhapsody, of course, and a dozen or so other songs which, though not as outre, betray a certain impatience with the constrictions of mere rock and roll - is one clue to the myriad forces that shaped him. Likewise, his late flowering love of real opera and ballet, both of which betray a mind in thrall to aestheticism and exotica, to older, more colourful, and - this is perhaps revealing - more demanding entertainments than the rock performance.
You can also, without delving too deep, detect traces of Music Hall and old style Variety in some of Freddie Mercury’s lyrics, and in his delivery of them, particularly during his more camp moments, both live and on record. In his costumes and stage presence, his myriad personas, and, most of all, in that strutting, preening, posturing commitment to all things over-the-top, he recalls, too, the older magic of nights at the circus, the carnival, and, of course, the opera. (Remember that tight fitting body suited decorated with huge false eyes? Pure circus surrealism.)
Which is to say that there was always, right from the start, when he was tarted up in satin, chiffon and black nail varnish, something exotic, something other-worldly about Freddie Mercury. Those Zandra Rhodes costumes, for God’s sake. I mean, what other rock group, save maybe the Stones in the early seventies, or the misunderstood, much under-rated New York Dolls, would have gone to such lengths to look so wilfully effeminate so early in their career. (Interestingly, Freddie’s image became less other-worldy, less outre, as he accepted and embraced his sexuality, his costumes pared down to almost caricatured expressions of gayness - the moustached macho man, the leather clone, the drag queen, the body narcissist in tight black hot-pants and Flash t-shirt. But, always, the self-deprecating humour: the leather clone outfit was spot-on save for the ballet slippers and socks. It was as if he had to poke fun at himself, at his own sartorial outrageousness before someone else did. What, I ask you, would Freud have made of that?)
On the occasion of the Freddie Mercury Photographic Exhibition, the posthumous celebration of his life which opened at the Albert Hall in London (Since then it has toured the world visiting many cities including Bombay, Cologne, Montreux, Timisoara and Paris) - no half measures even in death - Waldemar Januszczak, wrote “Transplanting levels of fantasy that belong in 1001 Arabian Nights - that was Freddie’s achievement”. For a self-styled simple entertainer, that was no mean feat. He was, ultimately, I believe, then, a weaver of spells, a creator of personas, masks, mythologies, a fantasist. “A lot of my songs are fantasy. Really, they are just little fairy stories. I can dream up all sorts of things because that’s the world I live in”. He was, we can see with hindsight, someone who literally willed his fantasies, onstage and off, to come through - and, perhaps more crucially, to come true.
To this end, his life was lived in the glare of the spotlight and the flash gun, but neither stole his soul, nor, as the events of his final years proved, compromised his dignity. He remained a showman, an illusionist, and a chameleon right to the end; both a diva who played to the gallery right up to his final curtain call, and an intensely private individual who, even in death, did it his way. As elusive and mercurial as his adopted name, Freddie Mercury was a one-off, and the pop world is a less glamourous, less outrageous place without him. Of one thing we can be certain: we will not see his like again.
Sean O'Hagan
