Once he had switched courses at Ealing, Freddie quickly fell in with Staffell and the other musically inspired students. ‘My first impressions of Freddie were that he was quite straight culturally. That’s to say, conservative – I didn’t even think about his sexuality. You wouldn’t have described him as being at all “in your face”. He had a fair degree of humility. Freddie didn’t particularly shine. Having said that, though, he was intuitively a performer and his persona was, even then, rapidly developing. As far as being a star was concerned, I personally think he was already in the ascendant. People responded to him,’ Staffell remembers.6
During the winter of 1967, Staffell’s friends were introduced to the band he was fronting, 1984, and Freddie and Chris Smith became regulars in the audience whenever and wherever they played across London. According to Smith, it was fairly obvious that Staffell and May were clearly head and shoulders above the rest of the band in terms of talent. It was to be a prophetic observation as, early in 1968, Brian May abruptly left the band because he wanted to be in a group that performed their own material rather than cover versions and also because he had to devote more time to his studies – he had enrolled at Imperial College in 1965 to study physics and infra-red astronomy, having left Hampton Grammar School with ten O-levels and four A-levels. However, May kept in touch with Staffell after 1984 had split and a few months later they were to join forces again.
In the meantime, when he wasn’t living like a gypsy on the floor of Chris Smith’s Kensington flat, Freddie continued to compose basic songs or lyrics in the bedroom of his parents’ home in Feltham, study at Ealing, and follow Jimi Hendrix around feverishly whenever he could. ‘I think Hendrix represented something to him, a goal that he could achieve himself,’ suggests Tim Staffell.7
But, in 1968, despite the influence of Hendrix, there was still little sign of the flamboyant character Freddie Bulsara would one day become, as classmate John Hibbert remembers: ‘With hindsight, looking back you’d think he must have stood out, he must have been the leader of the gang, and he wasn’t really, because his nature was actually very kind and gentle and actually relatively quiet.’8
Still desperate to get into music somehow, Freddie, for the time being, could only hang onto his friends’ coat-tails, so he was fortunate that one of his closest friends at the time, Tim Staffell, was about to form another band.
Staffell and Brian May remained keen to pursue their own musical ambitions after the demise of their previous group, 1984, and, in the autumn term of 1968, May met up with Staffell, who was still at Ealing School of Art, and they decided to form another band. Staffell would provide vocals and play bass while May would play guitar. They needed a drummer to form the musical trio of bass, guitar and drums that was totally in vogue mid-1968, thanks to the popularity of The Jimi Hendrix Experience. So, with that in mind, they posted an advert on the noticeboard at Imperial College, where May was studying, requesting applications for a ‘Mitch Mitchell/Ginger Baker type drummer’ to join a new band.
The advert was spotted by a number of drummers who all applied; however, none of them were up to the required standard. But fate was to intervene. Passing the noticeboard one day was Imperial College student Les Brown. ‘As I remember, the first day back at Imperial College I went to the Student Union Bar, saw the “Drummer Wanted” ad written in hand by Brian, and brought it straight back to the flat,’ he recalls.9
He wasn’t a drummer himself. But his flatmate, Roger Taylor, was.
7
Roger Taylor had a passion for music from an early age, forming his first skiffle band, The Bubbling-over Boys, while still at primary school. By the age of 12 Taylor had been given his first rudimentary drum kit and would practise diligently in the garage of the family home on the outskirts of Truro, Cornwall. In 1965 he joined a band that was to become known, eventually, as The Reaction, and over the next few years they became well established throughout the Cornish music scene. Despite their provincial success, The Reaction split up in the summer of 1968 and two weeks later, Roger Taylor shared a lift to London in Les Brown’s purple Triumph Herald to begin his studies in dentistry at the Royal London Hospital Medical and Dental School.
‘I came to London to go to college to meet other people, to be in a band and that was my plan and the college was a way of getting to London and meeting like-minded people,’ Taylor recalls.1
Roger and Les lived together in a rented ground-floor flat at 19 Sinclair Gardens in Shepherd’s Bush and it was to this flat that Les returned one evening with Brian May’s advert for a drummer. Roger applied immediately and soon Brian May and Tim Staffell were heading over to his flat with their acoustic guitars for an audition. The three of them struck up an immediate friendship, Roger was hired, and soon afterwards they began rehearsing properly at Imperial College.
‘I remember being flabbergasted when Roger set his kit up at Imperial College,’ recalls May. ‘Just the sound of him tuning his drums was better than I had heard from anyone before. It was amazing.’2
The band needed a name. They settled on Smile, suggested by Staffell, and began rehearsing intensively. Not content with playing cover versions, the band, specifically May and Staffell, began composing their own songs too.
The three of them continued with their studies during the day and spent whatever other spare time they could find rehearsing or discussing music. As a result, Taylor’s flat in Shepherd’s Bush became a frequent meeting place and crash-pad for members of the band and their entourage, which included Freddie Bulsara, who was there by association with his friend and classmate, Staffell. Freddie immediately struck up a friendship with Roger Taylor, which was ignited by their shared passion for Jimi Hendrix, and he became a regular hanger-on at Smile gigs, the first of which was at Imperial College on 26th October 1968 when they supported Pink Floyd.
In February 1969, Smile played their second major gig at Richmond Athletic Club and just a couple of weeks later, played their third major concert (though not the main attraction by any means), which just happened to be at the Royal Albert Hall and was a charity concert for Imperial College. It resulted in Smile’s first ever review in which a Times journalist referred to them as ‘the loudest group in the Western world’.
Following a short tour of Cornwall, Tim Staffell took Freddie along to one of their London rehearsals. ‘He came over with Tim one day,’ recalls Roger Taylor, ‘and he just became one of the circle. He was full of enthusiasm – long, black flowing hair and this great dandy image.’3
Freddie immediately liked their sound and started to regularly attend gigs, even taking it upon himself to offer advice, whether it was needed or not. ‘Freddie was a very big advocate and appreciator of our talents,’ remembers Brian May. ‘He had this thing that we were presenting ourselves all wrong. He was into the show as a show, which was a pretty unusual idea in those days because the fashion was that you had to wear jeans and they had to be split and you had to have your back to the audience, otherwise it was pop. Freddie had the idea that rock should be a show, that it should give you something that was overwhelming in every way.’4
Freddie was desperate to join Smile but the only room found for him was in the van as he accompanied them to gigs around London and, later in the year, on another tour of Cornwall, where they played venues as diverse as Fowey Royal Regatta, Falmouth Art College and St Minver’s Perceval Institute. By now, Roger Taylor had taken a hiatus from his studies to concentrate on his musical career and it appeared his decision might pay off when Smile were offered a one-single deal for the US by Lou Reizner of Mercury Records. In June 1969, Smile decamped to the Trident Recording Studios in London’s Soho, where, with producer John Anthony, the band recorded three songs.
To see Smile in the recording studio with a deal for a US release must have been a bitter pill for Freddie to swallow. His route into the band seemed blocked