When they first met, Rosemary had no inkling that Freddie might be gay, but as their relationship grew ever more closer, she began to notice that Freddie showed an increasing interest in her circle of gay friends, which included the film-maker Derek Jarman and the artist David Hockney. Rosemary was the only female invited to their dinner parties and Freddie pestered her to introduce him to the circle. She began to feel confused, especially when Freddie expressed longings to explore gay relationships. ‘I felt that if he ever met these people, then that would be it. They would take him from me, and I would be shut out.’17
Reluctantly, Rosemary decided to end the relationship in 1970 after a year together. ‘It was awful. He begged me not to go, and said he didn’t understand. I knew that I could not bear to be simply his friend, hearing about his other relationships. So it had to be the end.’18 Looking back on the relationship over 35 years later, she said, ‘He was a very ardent lover, he was faithful to me, he was devoted to me although we didn’t live together. But it wasn’t as though we’d just met and it was mad passionate sex, just a very good closeness. I don’t think I could say I was passionately in love with him. We weren’t ever right for each other.’19
Freddie’s relationship wasn’t the only part of his life that had ended at this point. After playing only ten gigs or so, Wreckage disbanded just before Christmas, 1969. Freddie auditioned for a few other bands and eventually joined Sour Milk Sea after seeing an advert in Melody Maker. ‘Freddie auditioned with us in a youth club in the crypt of a church in Dorking,’ recalls drummer Rob Tyrell. ‘We were all blown away. He was very confident. I don’t think it was any great surprise to him when we offered him the job.’ Rhythm guitarist Jeremy Gallop agrees: ‘He had an immense amount of charisma, which was why we chose him.’20 Guitarist Chris Chesney, also recalls the audition: ‘I remember Freddie being really energetic and moving around a lot at the audition, coming up and flashing the mic at me during guitar solos. He was so impressive. There was an immediate vibe. He had a great vocal range. He sang falsetto; nobody else had the bottle to do that.’21
Once accepted into the band, Freddie played a number of gigs in and around London but soon his desire for creativity and control became too much for the other members of the band, Chesney remembers: ‘When Freddie joined, the band lost its focus. The cohesion between the four of us was significantly weakened. Musically, we were more pastoral than what Freddie was into, he was coming from a different place. He was heavily into Led Zeppelin. I thought the musical frictions were very exciting. We became un-blues based, whereas before we were stuck on that R&B template.’22
Jeremy Gallop also recalls the dynamics at the time: ‘Freddie very quickly wanted to change us. I can remember him trying to make us learn “Lover”. I can still recall how it went. We were all thinking – me especially – “Fucking hell, this isn’t the way we want to go!” If only we could relive life again . . . but Freddie was a very sweet man. He was a very good arbitrator. Chris and I used to argue like hell. I used to have fights with the bass player – and get beaten up – and Fred was always the one who’d cool down the situation with diplomacy. On-stage, Freddie became a different personality – he was as electric as he was in later life. Otherwise he was quite calm. I’ll always remember him being strangely quiet and very well-mannered. Extremely well-mannered, in fact. My mum liked him.’23
Drummer Rob Tyrell, though fond of Freddie, felt the singer had another agenda with Sour Milk Sea. ‘We liked Freddie,’ he admits. ‘He was fun, but he was quite a schemer in a way. He had other things cooking. I could feel it in my bones he wasn’t really interested in us. He knew he was good. He used us as a kind of stepping stone.’
In the spring of 1970, Sour Milk Sea disbanded and Freddie found himself, once again, without a band. He had been through Ibex, Wreckage and Sour Milk Sea in little more than seven months.
Meanwhile, Smile were also struggling. Their US single had disappeared without a trace. Then they played a showcase gig at London’s Marquee Club in December 1969, which failed to cause a stir, and were dropped by Mercury Records as a result. To make matters worse, bass player and vocalist Tim Staffell had had enough and quit the band. Suddenly, Brian May and Roger Taylor were left with no group. ‘We wondered if we should give up,’ remembers May, before adding, ‘But then young Freddie Bulsara arrived on the scene.’24
Freddie had been on the outer periphery of Smile for a couple of years and watched jealously as they flirted with success. Now, suddenly, he found himself without a band, and Smile found itself without a singer. As May remembers, ‘Freddie was always there, you know, Freddie was always saying, “Well, I’ll sing, we can do this, you know, put the band together like this, etcetera, etcetera, and we can do this, this, this and this,” and we kind of gradually went, well, okay.’25
Freddie jumped at the chance to be Smile’s vocalist and, in the early part of 1970, although still called Smile, three quarters of what was to become Queen were about to take the stage together for the very first time. Freddie’s journey to rock’n’roll stardom had well and truly begun.
‘It was exactly right,’ says a gracious Tim Staffell. ‘Freddie wanted to do the kind of theatrical stuff that Smile was moving towards and I gradually got uncomfortable with it and moved away. Good job I did. I’m glad I got out of the way because if I hadn’t, the world wouldn’t have had Queen.’26
8
At the beginning of 1970, Freddie was 23 years old and, having joined forces with Roger Taylor and Brian May in the band Smile, was about to embark on the next stage of his quest for musical glory. However, whatever convictions he might have had about his talents as a singer and composer, the angst over his sexuality was causing all sorts of confusion, concerns and doubts within his head.
His relationship with Rosemary Pearson had withered once she became aware of his ambiguous and androgynous feelings and, although he was to begin a relationship later in 1970 with another woman, Mary Austin, Freddie was struggling to come to terms with whether he was straight, gay or bisexual. He was not alone; despite the decriminalisation of homosexuality three years previously, any gay man in the UK in 1970 still faced hostility, abuse, and even prison. It was a particularly tough time for someone like Freddie, a young man who had been brought up with values and habits that not only reflected colonial Asia but also his parents’ strict Parsee religion, a faith that looked upon homosexuality as a form of demon worship. Consequently, he would have had imprinted on him, by his elders and those within the Parsee faith, a lack of self-esteem and a sense of shame associated with homosexuality. Freddie was, after all, a child of the 1950s when it was a widely held belief that the concept of homosexuality was a mental disease.
Between 1945 and 1955, the number of prosecutions for homosexual behaviour in the UK rose from 800 to 2,500 annually, and 1,000 of these involved custodial sentences. By 1955, 30 per cent of those prosecuted ended up being imprisoned and the irony of imprisoning homosexual men in all-male institutions seemed completely lost on the system.
The increase in numbers of homosexual men being gaoled in the 1950s was as a result of the Home Office pursuing a more vigorous policy of prosecuting offenders, which was also linked to Cold War paranoia, and homosexual men were aware that if they reported a crime and the police suspected they were homosexual, the police would ignore the original crime and concentrate predominantly on their aspect of homosexuality. One of the most well-known victims of such an incident was mathematician and Enigma code-breaker, Alan Turing, who called the police to report a break-in, yet was subsequently convicted of gross indecency in 1952, thereby setting off a chain of events that led to Turing’s suspected suicide in 1954.
Those who weren’t imprisoned were often ‘encouraged’ to undergo ‘aversion therapy’ – psychiatry’s new toy in the 1950s. This brutal treatment, in which the ‘patient’ was shown images of naked men and given a series of electric shocks or drugs such as apomorphine to induce him to vomit, was meant to put him off homosexuality forever. To make sure they were ‘cured’, the men were then shown images of naked women or films of nudist colonies to provide them