Freddie Mercury: The Biography by Laura Jackson Read Free Book Online Page A

I was certainly aware of the gay connotations.’ This was presumably satisfactory for Mercury, who, as Geoff
     Higgins puts it, had been ‘poncing about’ for a long time now, but the other band members had to decide whether they wanted
     to promote themselves with an image like that. Rock was, after all, a very macho, male-dominated world.
    Brian May ran the idea past Ken Reay, his tutor at Imperial College, who, acquainted with Mercury, had no need to ask who
     was behind the suggestion. ‘I wouldn’t say Brian had much trouble with it though,’ admits Reay. ‘Certainly he recognised it
     would be risqué, but that seemed to amuse him more than anything. The bottom line was, he saw it as being a very good move
     to call themselves Queen.’ In no time the vote was unanimous, and once again Mercury had got what he wanted without anyone
     else noticing that they had been steamrollered into it.
    Watching all this debate over the band’s name at the time, with hindsight Mike Grose feels that it ought to have told him
     something: ‘Freddie was a super guy. We went out drinking together a lot, and I didn’t have a clue that he was gay.’ It wasn’t
     that Mercury obviously enjoyed the company of women and, unlike some gay men, liked them around him in his life, nor that
     he had a steady girlfriend. As others would later attest, Mercury’s homosexuality was not something he generally flaunted
     when out socialising.
    With Grose as their new bassist, the band looked forward totheir first gig. It was again in Truro, this time at the City Hall on 27 June 1970, but after all Mercury’s efforts to adopt
     the name Queen, they were billed as Smile. ‘It was a long-standing booking,’ explains Mike Grose. ‘I suppose we could’ve notified
     them that the band was different, but we didn’t bother.’
    The gig was a charity performance, organised by the Cornish branch of the British Red Cross, and although the hall held 800
     people, only a fraction turned up, which, according to Grose, was a stroke of luck. ‘We were a bit rough at the edges that
     night,’ he admits. ‘We had practised, but playing live is different to rehearsing in a college classroom. We also got a bit
     lost with one of us remembering a different arrangement on a song to the rest. We did our best to hide the gaffes but, let’s
     put it this way, we didn’t expect to be asked back.’
    Collective gaffes aside, Mercury was unhappy with his personal performance. Not even the generous £50 fee, which they were
     relieved to receive at the end of the night, eradicated his self-recriminations – how unpolished he’d been – and for days
     he dissected the gig, analysing precisely where he had gone wrong. There was a plus side, however, for they had undoubtedly
     left a strong visual impression. The statutory stage wear of current bands such as Free and Black Sabbath was faded denims
     and T-shirts, but Mercury’s vision for Queen from the outset was to stand out from the crowd. When they took the stage at
     Truro’s City Hall, they were dressed stylishly in black silk, and weighed down with gaudy junk jewellery.
    The strength of their visual impact was some consolation to Mercury, but he was still frustrated that the band had not yet
     performed officially as Queen. Keen for them to start promoting themselves properly, he would insist this never happened again.
     And he was equally adamant about the decision he had now reached to change his own name. Countless performers had done this
     as a matter of course, but Mercury’s reasons seem fairly deep-rooted.
    The name Bulsara tied him too firmly to his Persian ancestry, and as Queen’s first PR man, Tony Brainsby, confirms, Mercury
     was always careful during interviews to avoid any reference to his Asian background. His parents’ religion and culture represented
     a world from which he had been distancing himself for some time. Although his name change was not intended as a slight to
     his