Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury by Lesley-Ann Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

wild animals around me, or go up onto mountaintops or things like that. No, I can get inspiration just sitting in the bath.”
    Whatever else, Rhye proved to be a recurring theme. Other early Queen songs also featured the fantasy land, such as “Lily of the Valley,” “The March of the Black Queen,” and “My Fairy King.” Its allure was to prove ever further-reaching and enduring. In Queen’s futuristic jukebox stage musical We Will Rock You , which debuted in London in 2002, the Seven Seas of Rhye is a place to which the rebel Bohemians are transported after being brain-wiped by Khashoggi, commander of the Globalsoft police.
    As the final bars of “Seven Seas of Rhye” fade, an old English bucket-and-spade ditty crooned by a raucous saloon bar crowd echoes fleetingly: “Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside.” Further allusion to Freddie’s once carefree beach life, to the palm-fringed, pristine coral reefs of youth?
    We can’t know. What we know is that there could never have been a welcome in the hillside for the man who fractured the code of his family’s faith.

3
PANCHGANI
    I was . . . a precocious child, and my parents thought boarding school would do me good. So when I was about seven, I was put in one in India for a while. It was an upheaval of an upbringing, which seems to have worked, I guess.
    Freddie Mercury
     
    Freddie’s parents sent him away to school in India, and it saddened me greatly to see him go. But here in Zanzibar at that time, the standard of education for boys was not so good. Also, I believe it was about the same time as his parents were transferred for work to the island of Pemba, and there was certainly nothing of a high enough educational standard there. They felt that the best solution was to send him to Bomi’s sister, also called Fer—my auntie, in Bombay—where he could study properly.
    Perviz Darunkhanawala, Freddie’s first cousin
     
    I n November 1996 I was invited to a cocktail party and private preview of the Freddie Mercury Photographic Exhibition at London’s Royal Albert Hall. It was to commemorate the fifth anniversary of his death. Everyone in the room that night had a direct link to Freddie and Queen—from Marje, Freddie’s cleaning lady, and Ken Testi, the band’sfirst-ever manager, to Denis O’Regan, a regular Queen photographer. Freddie’s frail old parents were also there. When I introduced myself, they greeted me warmly. His father Bomi Bulsara held my hand.
    “It is wonderful to see all these photographs displayed, and to see all these people here in honor of our dear son. We feel very proud,” he said.
    The exhibition would tour the world, visiting numerous relevant cities including Paris, Montreux, and Mumbai. After the London opening, a number of fellow journalists chose to “out” the Great Pretender for having “hidden his Indian roots.” Under headlines such as “Bombay Rhapsody” and “Star of India,” Freddie was “exposed” as Britain’s first Asian pop star. Despite the fact that there was less than a sentence of truth in it, the yarn made several sensational page leads. Freddie’s Persian origins were thus disputed. Widespread discussion ensued. This caused offense within London’s Persian Parsee community. Not that Fleet Street’s finest gave a toss about that.
    “Just because our people have not lived in Persia since the ninth century, that does not make us any less Persian,” declared a spokesman for the Parsee community in London.
    “While Parsees are described as ‘Indian Zoroastrians,’ we descend from the Persian Zoroastrians who fled to India in the seventh and eighth centuries to escape Muslim persecution. The fact that we migrated to India does not make us Indian. If you are a Jew, but your family have not lived in Palestine for the past two thousand years, does that make you less Jewish? There is a great deal of difference between race and nationality. Between roots and citizenship. The Persian Parsee may