Victim became a highly sociologically significant film as it played an influential role in liberalising attitudes (as well as the laws in Britain). Four years later, Lord Arran proposed the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts, which ultimately led, in 1965, to MP Leo Abse introducing the Sexual Offences Bill. When passed two years later as the Sexual Offences Act, homosexual acts between two men over the age of 21 in private in England and Wales were finally decriminalised. And, if that wasn’t enough, 1965 also saw theatre critic Kenneth Tynan spark outrage by uttering the word ‘fuck’ on BBC1 TV.
Studying at Isleworth Polytechnic and living in London during the Swinging Sixties proved vital to the transition of Freddie Bulsara into Freddie Mercury. He had arrived at just the right time. Bulsara observed and absorbed what was going on around him and, like a magpie, stole that which shone from music, film, dance and fashion. Storing these elements up for future use, he would adapt them into his own music, style and look in the decades that followed. Of course he wasn’t the only one doing so, but he was unique in that while others were stealing or borrowing from the blues or skiffle or rock’n’roll, Freddie was stealing from Puccini, Porter and Presley. It was this culturally cluttered mix that would combine in his compositions to create something extraordinary.
But that was all in the future. For now, in 1965, it was taking a while for him to adapt and find his feet. One of his closest friends at Isleworth Polytechnic, Adrian Morrish, recalls how Freddie stood out from early on: ‘He dressed weirdly in drainpipe trousers that weren’t quite long enough and middle-aged jackets that were slightly too small. I suppose he’d brought those clothes with him from Zanzibar or India. He seemed very gauche, but he desperately wanted to fit in.’1 His sister, Kashmira, also remembers Freddie’s early – and distinct – lack of style: ‘Freddie stood out against other boys of his age because at that time the fashion for hairstyles was [the] long and shaggy look, but when we arrived Freddie had that very old-fashioned Cliff Richard look, very shiny, the hair going backwards, standing up, that kind of look, so wherever we would go out together, or come home from a bus stop or something, I’d like to walk behind him because I didn’t want people to think I was with him.’2
Freddie’s determination to ‘fit in’ led him to join the Polytechnic’s youth choir and theatre group and he appeared in a couple of productions, The Kitchen and Spectrum. But music was still his main passion and he grew restless trying to find an outlet for his musical creativity.
During evenings and weekends he would sometimes join his friends at local pubs, where they’d watch bands and singers such as Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry and occasionally go on to parties afterwards, although Freddie drank little and frequently left early. There appeared little sign of the man who, decades later, would host some of the most outrageous parties in the history of rock’n’roll and though none of his Polytechnic friends recall Freddie having girlfriends during his time at Isleworth, neither do they remember any explicit indication of him being gay. He simply attended his classes, fooled around a little with his friends, earned a bit of extra cash in menial jobs such as washing pots at Heathrow Airport or stacking crates on a nearby industrial estate, and was even paid £5 per session as a nude life model.
By the time he left Isleworth Polytechnic in 1966 Freddie had grown in confidence and he felt more at home in England. Furthermore, his dress sense had improved considerably and he had swapped the outdated clothes he had brought with him from Zanzibar and begun dressing in the more bohemian look of 1960s London. Finally, Freddie Bulsara was beginning to fit in.
In September 1966, enrolling at Ealing School of Art to study a course in fashion design was everything Freddie had dreamed about: the chance to study art and to follow in the footsteps of rock musicians and pop stars who had done the same thing. What’s more, he was in London at the height of its cultural power and relevance. What more could he want?
After a while the daily commute from Feltham to Ealing proved to be a drag to Freddie, so he started crashing on the floor of Chris Smith’s flat, a college friend who rented a property at 42b Addison Gardens, Kensington. Despite following his dream, it wasn’t long before he became disenchanted with the course at Ealing, where he spent his time studying fabric printing and textile design, and he was already looking at alternatives. But, most of all, Freddie was desperate to follow his musical ambitions. This only intensified on 16th December 1966 when the BBC TV show, Ready Steady Go! transmitted the first British television performance by American guitarist Jimi Hendrix. Performing ‘Hey Joe’, Hendrix announced himself spectacularly with his virtuoso playing style and energetic and wild stage persona. Freddie found himself captivated by everything about Hendrix’s performance: the music, the fashion, the hair, and, above all, his command of the stage as an artist.
So captivated was he by Hendrix that Freddie went to see him perform 14 times, including nine nights in a row at pubs all around London. ‘I would scour the country to see him whenever he played because he really had everything any rock’n’roll star should have: all the style and the presence,’ Freddie would later say. ‘He didn’t have to force anything. He’d just make an entrance and the whole place would be on fire. He was living out everything I wanted to be.’3
Hendrix was less than four years older than Freddie and provided him with the spark to follow his dream. Determined to be a star, Freddie had already started writing songs at home as his mother, Jer, recalls: ‘He would write songs from an early age. I kept on saying, as all mothers do, carry on with your studies and clean up your bedroom. Once when I went into his bedroom at our home in Feltham. I told him I was going to clear up all the rubbish including the papers under his pillow. But he said “Don’t you dare.” He was writing little songs and lyrics then and putting them under his pillow before he slept. It was more music than studying and my husband said he didn’t understand what this boy was going to do.’4
Freddie knew exactly what he wanted to do, but he needed like-minded musicians around him and, unable to find anyone who shared his passion, ambition and raw talent, he consoled himself by using his time in class to draw images of his idol that he would plaster over his bedroom walls. ‘He was a great artist, you know, line drawing, pencil. He had this whole catalogue of stuff. Hendrix, he did a lot of pictures of Hendrix that were brilliant,’ remembers one of his college friends at the time, John Taylor.5
Sometime between 1967 and 1968, Freddie was asked to leave the fashion design course at Ealing by its principal, James Drew, owing primarily to the fact that he was spending too much time away from college (in part watching Jimi Hendrix) rather than undertaking his studies. Incredibly, he managed to persuade the principal to let him switch courses rather than kick him out and consequently Freddie found himself on the graphics course. It was on this course that he encountered three students who shared his interest in music; as well as Chris Smith – who Freddie already knew – there was Nigel Foster and, perhaps most importantly, Tim Staffell.
Staffell was a more than able musician. He had taken up the harmonica in the early 1960s before moving on to the guitar and then finally settling on the bass guitar as his instrument of choice. One evening in 1964, he was playing harmonica in the wings for a band called Chris & The Whirlwinds at Murray Park in Whitton. In the audience that night was young bass player and a young guitarist who also happened to attend Hampton Grammar School and who had just formed their own band called 1984. The bass player was Dave Dilloway; the young guitarist was the boy from Feltham who had built his own guitar with the help of his father in a workshop. His name was Brian May.
Following the concert, Dilloway and May tracked down Staffell and persuaded him to join their new band as singer and harmonica player and, on 28th October 1964, with Tim Staffell