Queen's Mercury Rising

Those who knew Freddie Mercury in the days before Queen, when he was known as Freddie Bulsara, describe a figure at once friendly and aloof. A flamboyant dresser even then, he had a superior air about him which antagonized a lot of people but at the same time was an unmistakable sign that Bulsara would someday be something special...

Having returned to England from India in his early teens, Bulsara spent four years at a London art college studying graphic design, at the same time singing in small, semiprofessional bands. For a while he sold antique clothes and his own paintings, among them pictures depicting Jimi Hendrix as a guitar-toting spaceman. Hendrix was his idol; Bulsara found the guitarist's electrifying and highly visual stage presence especially impressive. "I scoured the countryside to see him. He really had everything a rock & roll star should have — style, presence; 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."

Meeting up with guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor — students playing part time with a Cream-styled power quartet called Smile — crystallized Bulsara's ambitions. "Freddie would come to our gigs," recalls Brian May. "He was very into visual presentation even then, telling us to wear different clothes, to set fire to our guitars. We thought he was a total idiot." Nevertheless, when Smile disbanded, Bulsara persuaded May and Taylor to join him, recruited bassist John Deacon and changed his name to Mercury.

The more cautious members of the band continued their studies, though. Taylor graduated in biology; Deacon gained a first-class honors degree in electronics and May a B.Sc. in physics. Most of the musical direction at that time came from May: he originally visualized Queen as a "heavy-rock-with-harmonies" band; he arranged rehearsals and most of the group's songs and he set up their first demo recording session. But it was Mercury's drive and enthusiasm which really kicked the band into shape and gave them some sense of their commercial possibilities.

The original concept for the band had been Mercury's, anyway. "I'd had the idea of calling a group Queen for a long time. It was a strong name, very universal and very immediate; it had a lot of visual potential and was open to all sorts of interpretations. I was certainly aware of the gay connotations, but that was just one facet of it."

In keeping with their cautious strategy, the group peddled their demo around English record companies, holding out for maximum backing and security. They eventually signed with Trident Productions, which in turn signed the band to EMI. Founded in 1968 by brothers Norman and Barry Sheffield, Trident had rapidly grown into one of Britain's leading recording studios, used by acts like Elton John, Carly Simon and Bowie. Queen was Trident's first management venture, and at the time the deal seemed promising. Four years later, the view is different: "The long and short of it," says Mercury bitterly, "is that they were a load of shit."