Despite being good at sports, Freddie was increasingly attracted to subjects such as art and literature and, of course, music. He had already been introduced to music – predominantly opera – by his parents in Zanzibar but he had also developed a taste for Western pop, especially the piano-based rock’n’roll sounds of artists such as Little Richard and Fats Domino. While at St Peter’s, during which time he joined the school choir and took part in a number of theatrical productions, Freddie also encountered the recordings of Lata Mangeshkar, one of India’s best-known and most respected playback singers. Playback singers recorded songs for movie soundtracks for the actors and actress to lip-sync to and Freddie became fascinated with Mangeshkar, attending one of her concerts in Bombay in November 1959. Two years later, she visited St Peter’s School and performed at the summer fête in front of Freddie and the other pupils.
In terms of Freddie’s own singing, it was his maternal aunt, Sheroo Khory, who first became properly aware of his natural musical gift. ‘Once, when I think he was nine years old,’ she remembered, ‘Freddie used to come running up for breakfast and the radio was on and then, when the music was finished, he went to the [piano] stool and played the tune. I [thought I] must get him some music lessons. He’s got an ear for music.’18 She persuaded his parents to pay for private musical tuition and he subsequently managed to pass his Grade 5 exams in practical and theory, being presented with his Certificate on 7th November 1958 at St Peter’s School annual speech day and prize giving. ‘I took piano lessons at school,’ Freddie would later recall, ‘And really enjoyed it. That was my mother’s doing. She made sure I stuck at it.’19
In 1958, Freddie formed his first band. By then he had developed a close friendship with four other pupils at St Peter’s: Bruce Murray, Farang Irani, Derrick Branche and Victory Rana. All fans of Elvis Presley, the five of them decided to form a band and used the art room at St Peter’s as a rehearsal studio. Under the name of The Hectics they began thumping out their own rudimentary version of rock’n’roll. For someone who was later to become one of music’s most expressive and flamboyant performers, Freddie’s role in the fledging band was very much in the background, playing his style of boogie-woogie piano and providing backing vocals while Bruce Murray took on the role of lead singer.
‘All we really wanted to do was to impress the girls in the neighbouring girls’ school,’ Murray recalled. ‘We sang hits like “Tutti Frutti”, “Yakkety Yak” and “Whole Lotta Lovin”. Freddie was an amazing musician. He could play just about anything. And he had the knack of listening to a song on the radio once and being able to play it. The rest of us just made a godawful racket, with cheap guitars, a drum and an old tea chest that we’d converted into a bass with one string. But the band served its intended purpose: the girls really loved us.’20
The Hectics, dressed in their rock’n’roll uniform of white shirt, black tie, pleated trousers and perfectly greased hair, soon became star attractions at any school function and also became popular with Panchgani’s inhabitants, where they were known as ‘The Heretics’ because they were so different and so extreme for the time. But when Freddie left Panchgani and St Peter’s School on 25th February 1963, having failed his Class 10 examinations, The Hectics were no more and instead he returned to Zanzibar and an uncertain future.
4
Back in Zanzibar and living with his parents, Freddie enrolled at school in Stone Town in an attempt to finish off his education while constantly trying to gather anything connected with pop culture that might somehow find its way onto the island. The Western world, with its music and fashion, was a constant attraction to the teenage Freddie Bulsara, a fact his mother, Jer, was all too aware of: ‘He really wanted to come to England. Being a teenager he was aware of these things in Western countries and it attracted him.’1 Living at home and still in full-time education in the early 1960s, there seemed little prospect of him following his dreams and travelling to England. But significant events were about to cause a massive upheaval in Zanzibar and would ultimately lead to the entire Bulsara family, with their very lives in peril, upping sticks and fleeing to the UK.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Zanzibar had a tremendously varied cultural heritage based upon the extensive ethnic diversity of its population. Over the centuries, trade from Africa, Asia and the Middle East had converged upon Zanzibar, bringing a multitude of influences. Now, in the early part of the decade, tension between ethnic groups was beginning to rise as a result of the Arab population, despite being less than 20 per cent of Zanzibar’s population, being dominant both economically and politically. In 1963, when Britain granted Zanzibar independence an election followed which pitted the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) against Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah’s Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP). The ZNP were victorious in the election with 54 per cent of the vote, but this only increased feelings of resentment within the black population and a coup led by self-appointed Field Marshal John Okello soon followed. Okello believed he was divinely chosen by God to remove Arabs from power and, on 12th January 1964, with popular support from Zanzibar’s oppressed African majority, the revolutionaries fought their way towards Stone Town.
The Bulsaras were still living in their apartment in Stone Town at the time and were all too aware of Okello and his revolutionaries murdering and plundering their way across Zanzibar. It appeared no Arab or Asian was safe. Jer Bulsara remembers this period: ‘It was really frightening. And everybody was rushing around and didn’t know what to do exactly. And because we had young children, we had to decide too, we had to leave the country.’2
Fitting whatever possessions they could carry in two suitcases, the family fled Zanzibar. They could have travelled to India but, owing to the fact that Freddie’s father, Bomi Bulsara, had a British passport and that he had worked for the British government in Zanzibar, they chose to fly to England. In May 1964, Bomi, Jer, Freddie and his younger sister Kashmira arrived at Heathrow Airport.
They settled into a four-bedroom house at 22 Gladstone Avenue, Feltham – a suburban town in the west London Borough of Hounslow, directly beneath the Heathrow flight path. Freddie was extremely excited to have finally made it to London, but for his parents, life was tough. They were used to a privileged life in Zanzibar with domestic servants, not to mention the tropical weather. Now they existed under the drab grey London skies with the incessant din of aircraft flying overhead. And Britain itself was not the most welcoming of places towards immigrants in the early 1960s.
Since the late 1940s onwards, the Black and Asian population in Britain had increased through migration from the Caribbean as well as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A tide of resentment was beginning to grow and race and immigration had become major domestic political issues. In the summer of 1958 there had been a vicious outbreak of antiblack rioting in London’s Notting Hill during which a young black man, 32-year-old Kelso Cochrane, was murdered, and in 1964, the year of the Bulsaras’ arrival in the UK, that year’s General Election featured the notorious Smethwick by-election in which race became a divisive issue, so much so that a British branch of the Ku Klux Klan was formed later in the year. Against such a tense background, Bomi and Jer Bulsara opted to keep their heads down and simply provide for their family as best they could while they created new lives for themselves in the UK. Finding the cost of living much higher than they had been used to, both parents had to take a job. Bomi found employment as an accountant for a local catering company, while Jer went to work in the local Marks & Spencer store.
For Freddie Bulsara, approaching his 18th birthday, the excitement of finally being in England was tempered by the fact that his life was at something of a crossroads. His education in India and Zanzibar had been a failure but he was keen to revive his studies in London at a local art school. But it wasn’t what his parents wanted for him – they were keen he should follow a more established and watertight career. ‘He knew we wanted him to be a lawyer or an accountant or something like that, because most of his cousins were,’ Jer Bulsara explains. ‘But he’d say, “I’m not that clever, Mum. I’m not that clever.”