As for Freddie, the relationship with Mary was perfect: she was a friend, a soulmate and a mother figure. He obviously loved her, and loved her deeply and passionately, but while Mary put her life on hold for Freddie, he had his career and his pursuit of men, certainly later in their relationship, to occupy his time. It was an unbalanced relationship that was doomed to fail as a romance, but it was destined to succeed as a friendship that would last until the day Freddie died.
11
While Freddie and Mary’s relationship thrived, Queen were searching for a new bass player. A 17-year-old bassist from Weybridge in Surrey, Doug Bogie, answered their ad.
‘I was an amateur musician, but I used to look for auditions in the Melody Maker music weekly paper. And one of the adverts in January 1971 was just for a “fabulous new band looking for a bassist”,’ remembers Doug. ‘I rang the number and went along. I lived outside London, went on a bus and auditioned in a lecture theatre in Imperial College, Brian’s university, just behind the Royal Albert Hall.’1
Doug was accepted into the band, and just in time as Queen’s next booking was for a gig at Hornsey Town Hall on 19th February. Arriving at the venue, Freddie, Brian, Roger and Doug were dismayed when they entered the hall and found an audience consisting of just six people. ‘It was a huge hall,’ remembers Doug. ‘Very dark, a few lights and some oil wheel projections on the wall. And what audience there was, seemed miles away. No seating, just a few folk wandering around.’2
The following night, 20th February, Queen supported Yes and Wishbone Ash at Kingston Polytechnic. Although Queen were supporting two acts who already had record deals, were releasing albums, and who both had devoted followings, they held their own on-stage that night, both musically and visually, as Tony Blackman, one of those in the audience, remembers: ‘Really nobody knew Queen at this time and yet, quite amazingly, I thought, they didn’t come over as in any way inferior to either Yes or Wishbone Ash. And the other thing was that they stood out. They were all dressed in very tight-fitting thin black costumes. There’s no doubt that they were deliberately projecting – especially the singer – a very effeminate image. That wasn’t the thing in those days, yet here were these guys going out of their way to flaunt it.’3
While it appears Queen went down well with some members of the audience, Freddie, Roger and Brian had already taken the decision that, after just two gigs, Doug wasn’t the bass player they were looking for and, according to Doug, Freddie concocted a discussion to ease him out of the band without a confrontation.
‘I thought we had played two excellent and exciting gigs,’ reflects Doug. ‘However, in the back of the borrowed van after the Yes gig at Kingston Polytechnic, there was one of those “taking everything apart” discussions: “so everything is terrible”, “it’s a waste of time”, and Freddie announces he doesn’t want to continue. So, as the new boy, who knows nothing of their past activities and relationships, I just accept that that is the end of the experiment! A shame, but not unusual with bands with creative members. I assumed a couple of years later, when the first album came out, that Freddie and the guys said all that simply to sack me without being nasty to my face.’4
It has been claimed that Doug was sacked from the band for stealing the limelight. ‘He jumped up and down in a manner most incongruous,’5 says Brian May, and his antics, if they were indeed antics, were probably highlighted by the fact that Doug had enlisted his own friends to be impromptu spotlight operators at the gig. But, to this day, Doug protests that this should not have been the case: ‘Absolute nonsense! I was quite an outgoing guy and, playing bass, well, it’s quite easy to leap about a bit. So I was having great fun, standing beside Roger Taylor – who I admire greatly, drumming and singing. Must have just upset Freddie. It seems Brian was very unimpressed too. Why didn’t they say so? I could happily have adapted. But I loved playing so much. Who wouldn’t jump about? And perhaps they thought my playing was not good enough! It must be said that my experience of most “serious” guitarists is that they can be quite introspective and prone to moodiness. But, hey, I was young. They were, I think, four, five years ahead of me.’6
So, on 21st February 1971, Doug Bogie’s Queen career was over and the band were, once again, looking for a bass player. Somewhat disenchanted, Brian and Roger took themselves off to a disco at the Maria Assumpta Teacher Training College in Kensington. That night, a mutual friend, Christine Farnell, introduced them to a young electronics student. His name was John Deacon. ‘I’d heard they were looking for a bass guitarist so I chatted to them. They’d actually been auditioning for a few weeks before but couldn’t find anybody who seemed to fit,’ John recalls.7
Deacon had moved down to London in 1969 from his native Leicestershire to attend university. Born in Leicester in 1951, he was slightly younger than the other members of Queen but just as musical, playing guitar from an early age, after being bought one by his parents. ‘I remember my first musical instrument,’ he recalls. ‘A little plastic Tommy Steele guitar when I must’ve been about seven. I had it around a lot but I didn’t really play it much, nothing seemed to click, but a few years later some friends up the road started to practise on two bassed-up guitars. I only went along because I had a tape recorder which they could use as an amplifier but after a few weeks I got interested enough to get my mum to buy me a Spanish guitar and that’s when it really started properly.’8
Deacon formed his first band, The Opposition, when he was 14 but saw little prospect of a career in music so he continued with his studies instead and, by the time he left school in June 1969, he had passed eight O-levels and three A-levels, which led to him being accepted onto a degree course in electronics at Chelsea College of Technology. He spent his first year focusing on his studies but it wasn’t long before he realised he was missing music and he began attending gigs around the Queensgate area of London. One of the gigs he is known to have attended is the disastrous Queen show at the College of Estate Management in London on 16th October 1970 when Barry Mitchell was playing bass. ‘They were all dressed in black, and the lights were very dim too, so all I could really see were four shadowy figures,’ Deacon remembers. ‘They didn’t make a lasting impression on me at the time.’9
With his desire for making music returning, Deacon began scouring the music papers to seek out groups wanting bass players, but it was that initial meeting with Brian and Roger that led to him turning up at Imperial College with his bass guitar and homemade amplifier a couple of days later for his audition with Queen. In the regulation lecture theatre, he joined Freddie, Roger and Brian for the first time and played a few original numbers before Brian taught him the chords to ‘Son and Daughter’, which would go on to become the B-side to Queen’s first single ‘Keep Yourself Alive’. Finally, the four of them joined forces in a lengthy blues jam.
It was obvious early on that the final piece of the Queen jigsaw had been found as Roger Taylor remembers: ‘We thought he was great. We were so used to each other, and so over the top we thought that, because he was quiet, he would fit in with us without too much upheaval. He was a great bass