In some way one imagines Freddie must have been envious of Bowie, whose voracious heterosexual appetite enabled him to play gay with safety and surety. Bowie of course ceased all ‘Gay Pretence’ in 1983, coincidentally at the very advent of the AIDS crisis.
But, in the real world, the fans that followed Bowie’s lead and cautiously came out of the closet often encountered hostility and violence.
‘Looking back,’ says Almond, ‘it was easy for Bowie and Bolan to say they were bi-sexual because at the end of the day they could go back to their straight lives. Gay people couldn’t. Claiming to be bi-sexual was a survival mechanism for gay men then.’10
In most places, wearing glitter and mascara was a sure way to get a beating. So was it any wonder that gay men and women, in their day-to-day lives and jobs, still felt compelled to conceal their homosexuality? It was too great a risk, not only to them personally and their families, but to their careers and their opportunities. Even superstars such as the ice skater and Olympic gold medalist John Curry, who had a long affair with the actor Alan Bates, stayed firmly in the closet. The only successful gays, though they never actually said the word ‘gay’ in showbiz, were on television: safe caricatures, grotesques and clowns. And there were no openly gay singers or musicians. It was still several years before Tom Robinson broke into mainstream culture and it was a decade or so away from Jimmy Somerville and the band Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
So, for now, Freddie had no intention of coming out as gay, even if in truth he had felt able to. And sadly he was likely right that it would have stalled any chance of a career before it began. He also found in his heterosexual band members in Queen a further and convenient smokescreen with which to confuse questions of sexuality.
A closeted gay man playing a straight man fronting a band called Queen. As they in turn adopted his images and attitudes, Freddie hid behind their normality and ordinariness.
And as Smile and Freddie began their journey, the audience suspected nothing.
9
In May 1970, Freddie Bulsara assumed his position as the lead singer of Smile, and his transformation began. It was the role he had been desperately wanting and waiting for, and he was supplanting the man, Tim Staffell, who had introduced him to the group in the first place. Although Freddie’s ambition was insatiable, this was no coup d’état – Staffell had left of his own accord.
With their new singer, Smile began rehearsing earnestly in London. ‘We played together for the first time in a lecture theatre at Imperial College, and Roger brought along an old friend of his, who played bass,’ remembers Brian May. ‘Freddie came armed with a few ideas for songs, and we had a couple of ideas, so we were immediately doing our own material and pretty much nothing else, with the exception of “Jailhouse Rock” and “Hey Big Spender”, which were there to have fun with.’1
The band also had a new bass player, Mike Grose. ‘I met them at West Cromwell Road,’ he remembers. ‘There was Roger and Brian, and Freddie Mercury, who was still Freddie Bulsara at the time, and we all shook hands and that was it. And I presumed we were still called Smile at the time, though nobody ever discussed it. They explained to me that Freddie was in the band – that they’d known him for ages, and in fact that he’d wanted to be in the band for ages. I liked Tim’s voice more than Freddie’s. Tim was good, bloody good. Freddie used to sing flat. When he got to high notes he would pull the microphone away from his mouth so you wouldn’t quite hear him. But Brian used to talk to me about Freddie, and I think it was Brian who really believed in him at that stage.’2
Grose moved into Ferry Road in Barnes and when Smile weren’t rehearsing at Imperial College, the four band members would all convene at the shared house to work on original compositions to extend their live repertoire. ‘Obviously the dominant writers were Freddie and Brian,’ recalls Grose. ‘Freddie would just come along and sit in the garden and he would tell you what he wanted, and would, say, sing a tune, or he’d have the lyrics, and we used to piece it together. Simple as that. He might have come with chords or an arrangement on the odd occasion.’3
Although officially one of the newer members of Smile, even though he had been on the periphery of the group for a couple of years, Freddie was keen from the start to impose his vision on the band. ‘His personality was so strong,’ says Brian May. ‘We didn’t see a great singer or musician first of all: he was very wild and unsophisticated. We just saw someone who had incredible belief and charisma, and we liked him.’4
As rehearsals at Imperial College and informal songwriting sessions in the garden at Barnes continued, the very basic elements of what was to become the Queen repertoire in later years started to emerge. ‘What would turn out to be their first single, “Keep Yourself Alive” and also “Seven Seas of Rhye”, came out of sessions like that,’ suggests Mike Grose. ‘Even ones like “Killer Queen”, which came a good bit later, were rumbling around in those days.’5
As well as having a major hand in the composition of original material, Freddie also used the weeks in the run-up to Smile’s next concert in Truro to scoure the London fashion scene to create a ‘look’ for the band. He was still running his stall at Kensington Market with Roger, who was having a hiatus in his dental studies, and felt that it was his duty to fashion the band, as Mike Grose remembers: ‘Freddie and I went shopping for stage gear – I think on the King’s Road – and he got me into those black velvet trousers that were so tight I could hardly walk!’6
With rehearsals complete, and some semblance of stage attire assembled by Freddie, the four of them, together with roadies John Harris and Pete Edmunds, crammed their gear into Mike’s Volkswagon van and headed down to Cornwall for their first ever gig as the new Smile line-up. This concert was held in Truro’s City Hall, which could accommodate an audience of up to 800 people. However, barely 200 turned up on 27th June 1970 to listen to Smile play its first gig with new bassist Mike Grose and singer Freddie Bulsara.
Clad in their newly acquired attire of striking black silk stage costumes consisting of black crushed velvet trousers, black T-shirts and stack-heeled boots and adorned with silver rings, bangles and neck chains, Smile opened the concert with ‘Stone Cold Crazy’, a song that Freddie had already played with one of his previous bands, Wreckage. In a 1977 interview he recalls both the song and their stage attire: ‘In the early days we just wore black on-stage. Very bold, my dear. Then we introduced white, for variety, and it simply grew and grew. “Stone Cold Crazy” was the first song Queen ever performed on-stage.’7
Although they had rehearsed, the gig was anything but polished as Mike Grose recalls: ‘We were a bit rough at the edges that night. We had practised, but playing live is different to rehearsing in a college classroom. We also got a bit lost with one of us remembering a different arrangement on a song to the rest. We did our best to hide the gaffes but, let’s put it this way, we didn’t expect to be asked back.’8
It was a view shared by the one review of the concert printed in a local newspaper: ‘Four very peculiar-looking young gentlemen clad in silk and too many jewels, making enough row to wake half the dead in Cornwall.’9
Roger Taylor, whose mother had organised the concert, remembers that it was for charity but that Smile still got paid for their efforts: ‘We got fifty quid between us, which seemed huge. We thought we were rich! It was Freddie’s first actual proper performance with us. My mother was quite shocked. And he didn’t really have the technique that he developed later on. He sounded like a very powerful sheep!’10
Regardless of the reaction to Smile’s first concert with the new line-up, Freddie was full of adrenaline travelling home to London and didn’t shut up for the whole journey back. ‘Freddie put a lot into that first concert,’ recalls Mike Grose. ‘I remember he jumped about all over the place, prancing about,