Freddie Mercury: An intimate memoir by the man who knew him best Read online

  Going into the dolls’ house was where I first noticed the tangible excitement which had developed, hearing the crowd who are almost psychically aware that the band are just about to emerge on stage. The PA system would stop playing the pre-concert tapes and the band’s intro tape would start. The crowd roared. This was the point of no return. There was no going back.

  Jobby would be outside the entrance with Brian’s guitar and Brian, Roger and John would then go on stage which was of course smokebound. For some reason, Queen and excess stage smoke seemed to go together. At this point, Freddie’s perfect sense of timing came into play. The split second that the tape ends and Brian thrashes out his first chord, Freddie runs on stage and is picked out immediately by the spotlight.

  So. Showtime.

  This next is the hardest part for me to recount for it is impossible to find sufficiently accurate words to describe the feeling that everyone concerned with the band experienced at this moment when all the work – the lights, sound, all the backstage effort as well as the musicianship – come together. It is indeed the proof of the pudding.

  For most of the duration of the show, I would remain on stage. Just in case. Just maybe a seam might rip and I’d have to dash to find another pair of trousers but this never happened once to me. When any of them came off stage for a while – like in the guitar solo – Roger would often change his shirt at the same time Freddie was changing and drying his hair. Brian would change his costume during Roger’s drum solo. As soon as these changes had happened, I knew I had to go back to the dressing room to pick up the four different coloured luxury towelling dressing gowns for each of the band to put on at the end of the show. Freddie’s was always yellow, although the others had no colour preference and these dressing gowns would be taken home at the end of each tour as new ones were purchased by wardrobe for each Queen outing.

  The encores never changed, so stage security always knew when the band were about to leave the stage. As soon as the ‘God Save The Queen’ tape started, the four of us would take up our positions by the dolls’ house ready to throw the dressing gowns around our specific charges. Each of us held torches in one hand and our band member in the other as they came off stage blinded by the lighting rig into what was pitch black.

  The dressing room was as close to the stage as was practicable in any of the venues and the only people in the dressing room for at least the first half-hour after the show were the four band members, Paul Prenter and myself. Band security remained outside the door refusing anyone access until permission was given, which was usually by me putting my head round the door and tipping the wink. Paul and I would generally know what to expect of the band’s post-show behaviour by the progress of the show itself. Only rarely did matters become so fraught that any of the band members smashed either dressing room mirrors or furniture but I cannot say that it never happened. It was occasionally the only way they could relieve their intense frustration at something not having gone quite right.

  While they were ‘discussing’ their performance, I would be struggling to unlace Freddie’s boots as quickly as possible and generally assisting in undressing the band while Paul would be pouring out the champagne and the drinks. If there had been a technical hitch not necessarily within the control of any of the technical crew, Gerry Stickells would come round as soon as possible to explain what had happened. Post mortems were absolutely necessary though not always helpful because the next show would be in a different venue where another, entirely different set of problems would have to be overcome.

  Those costumes which could just be hung back in the wardrobe trunk I collected and sorted for delivery to the next venue. Socks and shirts which would have to be laundered I collected and took back to the hotel with me. I had already checked out the hotel facilities to ensure that they could provide the cleaning services in the time I required. I did have enough clothes to keep the band happy should we be scheduled to do three shows back to back where cleaning facilities were unavailable. It was quite a job, although I had been trained well at the Royal Ballet where tights were handwashed after each performance, sometimes having to be dry once again for an evening show.

  So. Show over. Back to the hotel.

  The hotel where we stayed in Dublin went to great pains to keep Freddie happy. As per usual, the request had been put in for him to have the best suite which on this occasion was on a long-term booking for the celebrated British actor Peter Bowles who was filming a series in the city. He obliged the hotel upon its, presumably, unrefusable request and vacated the suite for the neighbouring one. I believe Mr Bowles was not amused.

  The other reason that Mr Bowles was not impressed was that we managed to keep him up most of the night with an impromptu party organised by Queen’s very Irish everyday manager, Paul Prenter, as Dublin was the nearest he and the band were getting to his home town of Belfast. There was much coming and going and I must admit quite a lot of noise.

  The tour returned to the mainland and played the very new NEC in Birmingham, then the Apollo in Manchester and also in Glasgow. It was the first time I’d ever been to Glasgow and I loved the city. I suppose I was prepared for the worst because of the reputation the city had acquired. Remember, it was 1979, still a year or two before it became the European City of Culture. But the feeling of friendliness and warmth in the city was wonderful. On to Newcastle City Hall and then to the famous Empire in Liverpool and the Bristol Hippodrome – where coincidentally I had already worked with the Royal Ballet – before finally getting to Brighton.

  A limousine was sent to pick me up at my flat in the Lisson Green Estate for this memorable concert. I didn’t know quite what to think as I saw the car pull up. Paul had just told me that a hire car would come to collect me to bring me to a restaurant to meet him and Freddie and take us down to Brighton. The car turned out to be a stretch Mercedes, blue. Back then, it was the limousine to have and it drew quite a few surprised glances from neighbours. It took me down to the Meridiana restaurant on the Fulham Road in Chelsea. As I walked in I heard boisterous laughter from one corner and there was Freddie, Paul Prenter and Peter Straker.

  Peter had been very close to Freddie since 1975 and for many years to come was one of Freddie’s closest friends. That day, his hair had been fashioned by their hairdresser friend Douglas Trout in golden ringlets, as many people will remember. He really did look rather extraordinary. One of the things that has never changed since I have known Peter is his general extrovert joie de vivre which was more than in evidence at the luncheon table. Peter always had the knack of making Freddie laugh when Freddie needed to.

  The trip down to Brighton was one long laugh from beginning to end. Between Peter and Paul there was a never-ending stream of banter and even though Freddie had a gig coming up, he appeared very relaxed. It was in Brighton that I acquired my nickname. Following the long theatrical tradition of which I was aware anyway from the opera house, everybody had been given a name by Freddie. If you didn’t like it and made it known, that was even more reason for it to stick. It was on the trip back from Brighton that I first heard the name Phoebe. He said that he’d decided that I looked like a Phoebe and it fitted nicely with my surname. I decided not to object. Who knows what I could have been called?

  It was on this night of the Crazy Tour in Brighton that Freddie met Tony Bastin. Tony was about five foot eleven with fair hair. Of average build, he had a very winning smile. I have to say that with hindsight, Freddie was not Tony’s type at all, although he was to be the first person with whom Freddie had a long-term relationship while I was working for him. They met at one of Brighton’s nightspots of which there are many and which constituted the reason for staying down there after the show.

  The partying continued back in Freddie’s suite at the Grand Hotel on the seafront until the small hours with a group of people rounded up by Paul Prenter. It was hardly anyone’s idea of a rock’n’roll party, just a group of about ten people drinking and laughing. It had been an experience for
me to see what Freddie went through during the show and how hyped up he became on the exchange of adrenalin with his audience.

  As I was to find out, Freddie needed these three or four hours after the show to go out and let himself wind down because while the performance he gave always looked spontaneous and wild, he knew he had to control himself up to a point so that he appeared as fresh at the end of the show as he had been at the beginning. The nights out in the bars and the parties in hotels which were to follow were a necessary part of his life. For me, it was still part of my work. Although I was only free to go to bed after Freddie was in bed, I still had to be up to do mundane organisational things in the morning while he remained asleep, as indeed he had to do in order to be fresh enough to perform again that night.

  But at this early stage, I was still working for all four members of the band. The twenty-hour days were still to come and we had as yet not heeded the call of America’s wild frontier.

  The Crazy Tour ended up with six London gigs, The Lyceum in the Strand, The Rainbow in Finsbury Park, which was where the extra day’s booking provided was needed to film the sequence with the dove in the ‘Save Me’ video and also where the director, David Mallet, fell backwards off the stage into the orchestra pit, happily not suffering too much damage.

  Damage? Heavens above! Inconceivable! It might have even delayed some filming…

  Then Tiffany’s nightclub in Purley. Tiffany’s in Purley! I think at this point, the only Tiffany’s Freddie knew about was on Fifth Avenue in New York. Due to a slight reduction in size, even from the previous somewhat smaller venues, Queen’s lighting rig would not fit. The crew ended by putting up a few lights around the support for the huge gong that Roger was using at this point and, I believe, the mirror ball was also in use. I do remember Freddie had fun on this gig. I think the most difficult thing for him was trying to scale down his own performance for a venue of that size. The little black outfit was worn that night, true to the Queen costume credo.

  Then on to the Mayfair in Tottenham, the Odeon, Lewisham and, finally Alexandra Palace in Hornsey, North London, three days before Christmas, where the other bits of live footage used in ‘Save Me’ were filmed.

  And that was it.

  Well, not quite. On Boxing Day, December 26, Queen played the Odeon Hammersmith in a benefit concert for Kampuchea which Harvey Goldsmith, the tour’s promoter, arranged as an add-on date.

  Then that really was it. At the end of the Crazy Tour of England, my six weeks’ stint with Queen was up. What was I to do now? Strange, I hadn’t thought that far ahead when I’d accepted the work with Queen although I now had a taste of the spice that my life needed. Also, leaving the tour felt quite a wrench, because in those six weeks I had got on with all four of the band very well.

  Looking back at this early point in our relationship, I realise that I had learned two essentially important aspects about Freddie. The first was that although he needed the emotional stability to record, it seemed that Freddie needed conflict and confrontation as a vital catalyst to performing. The second revelation was his perfectionism.

  Freddie knew in his mind exactly what he wanted and was prepared to throw a tantrum to make sure everything went the way he desired, and this underlying trait of character was to appear throughout my association with him.

  Freddie knew the value of the tantrum. To throw one to greatest effect, it had to be done to either the band or business associates.

  Freddie realised that if he could make people worried that he was going to walk out on a project, that it probably wouldn’t get off the ground. He also knew that the other people involved knew that he knew that he was indispensable.

  He was actually quite modest concerning his knowledge and understanding of many things but people who knew him found that he would never enter into something where he wasn’t one hundred per cent sure of the end result. He had this almost uncanny knack of foreseeing events and on many occasions he even went as far as saying, “I told you so”. The tantrum was always the signal that the discussion had to stop and it was time for action.

  One other marked trait that everybody who knew Freddie observed was his extreme generosity. One of the greatest thrills of his life was to buy a present for someone just to see the look on their face when they opened up the wrapping. He was in a position to buy anything for anyone and it really gave him a great deal of joy. My own first experience of this was my first Christmas present from him. When he had known me for only four weeks, Santa turned up with what was to become, for me, a familiarly wrapped parcel, the scarlet leather trademark box containing, on this occasion, a beautiful desk clock from the Bond Street jeweller, Cartier.

  Christmas time in the Mercury house was for all of Freddie’s friends who were told that as they had nowhere else to go then they were to come over, make themselves at home and be fed and boozed over the festive season, although I’ll save the description of a typical Mercury Christmas for a later part of the story.

  It had been quite reasonably explained to me that my first stint with Queen would have a beginning and an end. However, it was also made clear that when future work came up, I would be asked to do it if I was free and also if the band wanted me.

  Meanwhile, money still had to be found to pay my bills. I ‘signed on’ at the Job Centre (Social Security Office) and in those days we had the luxury of earnings-related unemployment benefit which meant you had the basic allowance plus a percentage of what you had earned in your last main job. However, I’ve never been one to sit around doing nothing even on such comparatively generous terms. And what would I have been waiting for? I had no idea and no guarantee of when Queen would next require my services. If ever.

  Thus, a friend of mine who had started work for the GPO telephone service recommended that I also apply. I therefore applied for a job and had an interview and was finally accepted as a telephone operator.

  “Operator services. Can I help you?”

  As I mentioned earlier, on the night I first saw Freddie at the Coliseum, it was at the party afterwards that I first really spoke to Paul Prenter. He had the ability to get on with anybody, more often than not, total strangers. He was Queen’s personal manager, coordinating the day-to-day activities of the band – arranging interviews, transport, being in attendance as the band went about their business. But Paul had a closer affinity to Freddie than the others because they were both gay. I was soon to find out that although they were never lovers, they spent most nights together out in the clubs and the bars. I’d never been a club person as my working hours, often fourteen a day, had precluded this. I had never realised how many bars and clubs there were in the world!

  Paul was always the centre of attention in any room, being naturally vivacious and the eternal Clown Prince. I suppose that was part of his job to keep Freddie and his guests entertained and those guests were people like Sarah Harrison from Browns, Peter Straker, Kenny Everett, Annie Challis and her travelling dog and Trevor Clarke.

  Paul Prenter remained in touch throughout the time I was answering telephones, be that contact only a call from Paul maybe once or twice a week. I started with the GPO on Monday, May 5, and continued with the telephone operating for six weeks before I received that call from Paul, the one I’d been waiting for: “Peter? Would you be able to go on the American tour?”

  Would I? No contest.

  I had been to America before, twice with the Royal Ballet, but I knew even from my comparatively short experience with the band that this tour would be something else. I jumped at the chance, said,

  “Yes!”

  Only then did I think about handing in my notice to the GPO. I left on Saturday, June 14.

  I think for Freddie the United States was his Mount Everest. It was something that he had to climb to the peak of and conquer. By the time I started in late 1979, early 1980, he had just about completed that task. On the British Crazy Tour I had seen Freddie playing to two and three thousand people at a time. I don’t think I was really
prepared to see 15,000 screaming and cheering fans in the arena venues Queen were playing in America. Only a handful of British bands – the Stones, The Who and Led Zeppelin among them – could play that size of venue in those days with no support act.

  Freddie loved the warmth and outgoing personality traits that seemed to be the trademark of most Americans. He felt so much less on show when he was in public in America because in America there are so many stars on the streets of Los Angeles and New York that one more doesn’t make that much difference. In those days, London wasn’t the cosmopolitan city it has now become. Pubs closed at eleven and clubs at two whereas in America, with a little advance planning, a person could keep themselves entertained twenty-four hours a day and Freddie was always one for entertainment.

  America in those days lived up to the old adage, “Everything there is bigger and better” and Freddie genuinely believed that. You only had to look around at the cars, at the buildings, the cities and the vastness of the country itself when compared to Great Britain. He liked the music which was coming out of America at that time. It was the disco-diva variety which he loved and which was so influential in the recording of Queen’s Hot Space album. He did, after all, spend a great deal of time in discos and bars … merely researching the music, of course.

  On Sunday, June 22, 1980, we arrived in Los Angeles. The American tour itinerary had begun…

  June 22-26: Los Angeles

  Freddie, Paul Prenter and I were staying at L’Ermitage on Burton Way, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. It was a luxury hotel apartment building with the ubiquitous swimming pool, this time situated on the roof. Freddie had his own duplex suite while I was in a smaller one on a lower floor.