START READING NOW!
An Intimate Intimate Biogra Biograph phyy of Freddie Mercury
LesLeyy-Ann Jones LesLe
Touchstone A Division Divi sion of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Copyright © 2011 by Lesley-Ann Jones Originally Origi nally published in Great Britain in 2011 2011 by Hodder & Stoughton Stoughton Published by arrangement ar rangement with Hodder & Stought Stoughton on Al l rights All rig hts reserved, reserved , includi incl uding ng the right rig ht to reproduce this thi s book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. First Touchstone hardcover edition July 2012 TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, purcha ses, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or
[email protected]. The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. Designed by Ruth Lee-Mui L ee-Mui Manufactured in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Cataloging-in-Publ ication Data Jones, Lesley-Ann. Lesley-An n. Mercury : an intimate i ntimate biography biography of Freddie Mercury Mercury / Lesley-Ann Jones.—1st Touchstone hardcover ed.
Introduction
MonTreux
W
e didn’t write it at the time. We took notes, as journalists did
in those days, by committing quotes to memory, then making our excuses and heading or the bathroom, where we’d scribble into
our notebooks beore the booze set in. We had tape recorders, sure, but you couldn’t couldn’t use us e them. They were conversation k il illers, lers, especial esp ecially ly i you ound yoursel somewhere compromising. Where it wasn’t cool to be up-ront about about being a hack. So we—a couple o scribes and a snapper—had broken rank rom the media-est raging up the road at the conerence center, and had slipped out or a quiet pint at the only pub on Montreux’s main drag. In-
InTroDuCTIon
This was not the rst time I’d met Freddie. We’d been in each other’s company several times beore. A rock an since childhood—I’d met Bowie when I was eleven, and Hendrix died on my birthday in 1970 (had to be a “sign”; wasn’t everything?)—I was introduced to the thrilling, complex music o Queen the summer I let school by sisters Jan and a nd Maureen Day Day,, ans a ns rom Alders Aldershot. hot. This Th is was wa s when I ound mysel traveling alongside them on a wheezing coach bound or Barcelona and the beaches o the Costa Brava. When everyone had a guitar, and a plectrum that had belonged to George Harrison. No amount o nger stretches was going to get the instr i nstrument ument to weep weep or me. Never destined to be a Chrissie Hynde or a Joan Jett, rom the early eighties until unti l around 1992 I reported on rock and pop or the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, its supplement You magazine, and The Sun. It was as a rookie journalist at Associated Newspapers that I rst encountered Queen. I was sent to interview Freddie and Brian at Queen’s Notting Hilll oces one day in 1984, Hil 1984, and a lopsided lopsided acquaintanceship was struck: str uck: they called, you came. The years that ensued now seem surreal. The businesss was simpler then. Ar busines Arti tists sts and journa journali lists sts routi routinely nely ew together, limo’d together, stayed in the same hotels, ate at the same tables, painted ar-ung cities c ities the colors colors o hell. A precious ew o those riendsh riendships ips got to last. last . Things hardly ever happen that way today. Too many managers, agents, promoters, publicists, label olk, and hangers-on, all on points. I they’re not, they pretend. It’s in their best interests to keep the likes o me behind the barrier. Back then, we cheeked our way in everywhere— with or without the laminate or an Access All Areas pass. We sometimes
InTroDuCTIon
ever. I like to think I blended in: just another skinny twenty-something reckle-ace who loved rock ’n’ roll. What always surprised sur prised me was how much much slighter Freddie was than you remembered hi him. m. Perhaps it was the diet o nicotine, n icotine, vodk vodka, a, wine, w ine, cocaine, little appetite or ood, and being hyped up as a perormer. He was so larger-than-lie up there on stage that you expected him to be imposing in real lie. He wasn’t. On the contrary, he seemed quite small, and endearingly boyish. You You wanted to mother mother him, all al l the girls gi rls did. He aroused the same instincts as Culture Club’s androgynous Boy George, who became the housewives’ avorite ater “conessing,” i disingenuously, that he preerred a nice cup o tea to sex. In the White Horse, Freddie was looking around, eyebrows raised, murmuring “ciggie” in that distinctively clipped and aintly camp voice o his. It struck me that night what a tangle o contradictions he was. That he could be as humble and unassuming away rom the stage as he could be arrogant on it. Later on, I heard him mutter “pi-pi” in a childlike tone tone,, and watched, ascinated, as one o his number toddled him of to the gents’. That was it, I ell or him completely. I wanted to take him home, stick him home, hi m in a hot bath, bath, get my mum to cook him a roast. ThinkThi nking about it now, it couldn’t have been that the big-shot rock star was so helpless that he was unable to go to the john alone. Freddie would have been the most vul v ulnerable nerable o targets in i n a toilet. Roger Tavener, the Express guy, ofered him a Marlboro Red. Freddie Fredd ie wavered beore accepting—he’d have preerred Silk Cut. He watched us rom his pitch with vague interest as we sparred with the baries. Perhaps because we didn’t pay him too much attention, he came back or
InTroDuCTIon
we were there or. A ew vodka tonics earlier, he might have gured our names. Dispatched by newspaper editors to attend the annual entertainment TV estival and Golden Rose Awards (the Rose d’Or was at its peak in Montreux in May 1986), we also covered its sidekick, a widely televised rock gala that was a thinly disguised excuse or the media to misbehave. We thought he wouldn’t want to be bothered, but he was the one who seemed keen to talk. He didn’t care or hacks as a rule. Having been rid ridiculed iculed and mi misquoted squoted in the past, he tr trusted usted ew o us. David Wigg—at that time the Daily Express show business editor, and also in town—was a good riend o Freddie’s. More oten than not it was he who got the scoop. We were getting too close. Throwing away, we knew, the chance o an ocial interview. Come morning, Freddie would have sussed us. More to the point, his management and the publicists would have, too. Having overstepped the mark, as they’d perceive it, we’d probably never get near him again. This was his bar, his territory. Even so, he seemed vulnerable and edgy, ar removed rom the star we thought we knew. “That’s why I’m here,” he said. “This is only two hours rom London, but I can breathe here, and I can think and write and record, and go or a walk, and I think I’m going to need it these next ew years.” We sympathized. We joined in about the pain o ame: his problem, not ours. We were keeping a lid on it. Trying to be cool. Willing the killer instinct to subside, the one that would have had us ying at the phone to call our news editors with the scoop o the year, that we had rock’s most sought-ater showman cornered in a oreign boozer; we
InTroDuCTIon
He squinted into his vodka, swishing the glass. “Do you know, that’s exactly the thing that keeps me awake at night,” he mused. “I’ve created a monster. The monster is me. I can’t blame anyone else. It’ It’ss what I’ I’ve ve worked or since I was a kid. I would have killed or this. Whatever happens to me is all my ault. It’s what I wanted. It’s what we all strive or. Success, ame, money, sex, drugs— whatever you want. I can have it. But now I’m beginning to see that as much as I created it, I want to escape rom it. I’m starting to worry that I can’t control it, as much as it controls me. “I change when I walk out on stage,” he admitted. “I totally transorm into this ‘ultimate showman.’ I say that because that’s what I must be. I can’ ca n’tt be second best, best , I would rather give up. I k now I have to strut. st rut. I know I have to hold the mic stand a certain way. And I love it. Like I loved watching Jimi Hendrix milk his audience. He got it, and so did the ans. But he was a pretty shy guy of stage. Maybe he sufered by trying tr ying to live up to expectations, o being the t he wild man ma n he wasn’t wasn’t really real ly,, away rom the lights. It becomes an out-o-body experience or me up there. It’s like I’m looking down on mysel and thinking, “Fuck me, that’s hot.” Then I realize it is me: better go to work. “O course it’s a drug,” he said, “a stimulant. But it gets tough when people spot me in the street, and want him up there. The big Freddie. I’m not him, I’m quieter than that. You try to separate your private lie rom the public perormer, because it’s a schizophrenic existence. I guess that’s the price I pay. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no poor little rich guy. The music is what gets me up in the morning. I’m truly blessed.” What could he do about it?
InTroDuCTIon
have an aternoon bun in a lovely tea shoppe in Kent. I’ve always got to weigh that up. It’s a heck o a journey, and I’m enjoying the ride, I assure you. But there are times t imes . . .” Through the casino and out the other side, we were nowhere near dawn. Freddie and a couple couple o pals, bunked bun ked down in some villa vi lla beneath the jagged Alps, which Freddie said guarded ancient mysteries and lost treasure, some o it stashed by Nazis during the war. The chilled night air was spiked with pine. Moonlit mountains cast shapes across the yawni ng lake. yawning lak e. What was evident was how much Freddie adored this retreat: a chocolate-box picture on the Vaud Riviera, amed or its annual jazz estival, its vineyards, or Nabokov and Chaplin, or “Smoke on the Water”—the inimitably rifed track penned by Deep Purple in Decem ber 19 1971 71,, a ater ter a an mis misred red a are at a Fran Frank k Zappa gig. The whole casino burned down, the umes billowing out across Lake Geneva as Roger Glover watched rom a hotel window, bass guitar in hand. “Just throw my remains in the lake when I go,” Freddie jested. He repeated repeate d this th is at least twice. t wice. Talk turned to the importance o enjoying the simple things in lie. The elephant in the room, as we call it now, was that rock-star wealth could buy buy him the t he kind o antasy lie l ie here that the likes o us could visit only in dreams. What did we do with this “exclusive”? We did nothing. Wrote nothing. Only we knew. Freddie and his crew were good people. It had been a un night. He’d been honest. He probably didn’t trust us as ar as he could have
InTroDuCTIon
he was by ame. Because we knew he was expecting the worst rom us, Tavener and I agreed to commit a sackable ofense. We would not sell Freddie’ss condence or a cheap Freddie’ c heap page lead. Dawn began to shimmer over the snow-mantled mountains. True colors ecked the water as we aded back to our hotel. No one spoke. Nothing let to say. Tavener smoked his last ag. “Rock music is vastly important,” declares Cosmo Hallstrom, a renowned consultant psychiatrist who has done our decades with the great and good. “It represents culture as it is now. It’s big money, which makes it a desirable pursuit. It’s a phenomenon that can’t be ignored. It unies, it creates a common bond. “Rock ’n’ roll has immediacy. It’s about raw, unchanneled, early emotions and simple concepts, driven hard. It’s so compelling, you cannot ignore it. You cannot ail to be roused by it. You’d have to be dea— and perhaps not even then. It speaks to a generation. It validates it, in a way that nothing else can.” “Being an artist is a cry or help,” insists Simon Napier-Bell, the industry’s most inamous rock and pop manager, who should know: he wrote hits or Dusty Dust y Springeld, Spring eld, made househo household ld names o Marc Bolan, the Yardbirds, and Japan, invented Wham!, and transormed George Michael into a solo superstar. Simon never never minces mi nces his words, especially especial ly not on this subje subject. ct. “All artists are terribly insecure people. They are desperate to be noticed. They are constantly seeking an audience. They are orced to
InTroDuCTIon
least in terms ter ms o emotional deprivation. So they have this desperation to succeed, to get love and attention. All the others just drop out eventually al ly.. Because I’m telling tell ing you: it’s it’s absolutely horrible being a star. It’s It’s nice to get a good table in a restaurant, but then you have people coming up to you every every thir th irty ty seconds throughout th roughout the meal. It’s It’s a nightmare. night mare. Yet Yet stars are perectly happy to put up with that kind o thing. It comes with the territory. “They are usually utterly charming with new people,” he goes on. “But there’s a dark side. When they’ve taken everything they possibly can rom you, they have no urther use or you and they spit you out. I’ve been spat out, but I couldn’t give a toss. I understand these people, I know what makes them tick. It’s no use getting upset or angry about being treated un unk k ind indly ly or cruel c ruelly ly by some star. s tar. They are what wh at they are. There is a certain psychological damage which runs through every one o them. I guarantee that i you look through their childhoods, you will nd it. What else makes you so desperate to win applause and adulation? So desperate that you’ll lead a lousy lie you can never really call your own? No normal norma l person pers on would ever want to be a star. st ar. Not or any a ny money.” “Freddie Mercury did the most important thing o all,” counters Dr. Hallstrom. “He died young. Instead o becoming a at, bloated, selimportant old queen, queen, he was cut of in his prime and is preserved at that age or eternity. It’s not a bad way to go.” This is his story.
