It was inevitable our paths would cross: Freddie Mercury was one of the most prolific rock stars of the Eighties and my job was to write about them. We met in Queen’s Notting Hill production offices, in the company of the guitarist Brian May, who did most of the talking. Freddie sat silently on a small sofa, hugging his legs.
He didn’t seem inclined to contribute much. Not that he was rude; on the contrary. Once or twice he laughed, unable to contain his mirth at some droll remark. Freddie’s hand flew instinctively to his face to cover his protruding teeth. He flapped and exclaimed how tickled he was in a camp, exaggerated manner reminiscent of Ken Dodd. I confess to having been nervous at the thought of meeting him; but it was he who seemed anxious.
By the end of the session he was chuckling in front of me. Shortly after our interview, I was invited to accompany the band on tour. A friendship of sorts was struck.
Those were simpler days, when singers and musicians and journalists were allowed to get to know each other without too much interference from managers, agents, publicists and record company people. If you joined a band on the road, you were part of it. You would fly in their plane, ride in their limo, hang out in the same bars and compare hangovers the next day. There were lines you didn’t cross, times when you knew when to pause the mental tape recorder. What happened on tour stayed right there.
I saw him again, a couple of years later in 1986 and this time it was a very different sort of conversation. I was in Switzerland for a TV festival and in the same pub as Freddie: the White Horse in Montreux. Freddie, who was there with a couple of young French or Swiss WBE (“wet behind the ears”) hangers-on, was asking around for cigarettes.
A bit later, I heard him mutter something in a childlike tone, and one of his party toddled him off to the gents. That was it, I fell for Freddie completely. I wanted to take him home, stick him in a hot bath, ask my mum to cook him a roast.
I was with a colleague from a rival newspaper that evening. Eventually, Freddie approached us and helped himself to cigarettes. We found ourselves deep in conversation and at his instigation. It was baffling. We knew he didn’t care for journalists. He knew who we were, of course. Having been ridiculed and misquoted in the past, he trusted few of us. But he seemed inclined to talk.
“I’ve created a monster,” he said. “The monster is me. I can’t blame anyone else. I’ve worked for this since I was a kid. I would have killed for this ... it’s what I wanted ... success, fame, 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 from it. I’m starting to worry I can’t control it as much as it controls me.”
This was a side to Freddie I had not expected. He seemed vulnerable and edgy, a shadow of the dynamic performer adored by millions.
“That’s why I’m here”, he said, referring to Montreux. “This is only two hours from London, but I can breathe here, and I can think and write and record, and go for a walk, and I think I’m going to need it these next few years.”
Only with hindsight did we understand what he was talking about. Freddie knew that his wild lifestyle was closing in on him. But what did he mean by “the monster” controlling him?
“I change when I walk out on stage,” he continued. “I transform into this ’ultimate showman’... I can’t be second best, I would rather give up. I know I have to strut. 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 was a pretty shy guy offstage. Maybe he suffered by trying to live up to expectations, of being the wild man he wasn’t really. It becomes an out-of-body experience for me: it’s like I’m looking down on myself. I do worry about where it ends up.”
He said being part of one of the biggest bands in the world brought its own problems. “It means I can’t just wander about and have an afternoon bun in a lovely tea shop in Kent. I’ve always got to weigh that up. It’s a heck of a journey, and I’m enjoying the ride, I assure you. But there are times ...”
A few of us drifted off to a casino up the road. We drank vodka until we couldn’t say it. We went back to the Montreux Palace Hotel, where we were staying, and nicked furniture from bassist John Deacon’s room. As hellraising went, it was mild.
Freddie wasn’t into all that. He insisted instead that we go with him down to the lake. He wanted to show us “his swans”, he said - despite the fact that the moon was not up, so the lake was invisible. “Dare you for a dip,” someone ventured.
“Oh, you don’t want to go doing that, darlings,” tutted Freddie. “Duck fleas, m’dears. The worst kind of rash. Listen to your Uncle Freddie, darlings, she knows best. Let’s tell Nazi stories, I’ve got some good ones.”
And he did - tales of lost treasures sunk in the lake or stashed in the Alps.
A few weeks later, we were at a reception for Queen, ahead of their historic Hungarian gigs, in the British Embassy in Budapest. The mansion glittered with crystal chandeliers and gilt mirrors.
“Tart’s boudoir,” muttered Freddie, attempting a little tap dance on the tiled hallway and almost colliding with a vast mahogany armoire. “I imagine,” he offered, “that this lot are accustomed to welcoming a somewhat different kind of Queen.”
The guest list was an incongruous blend of English expats, Eastern Bloc musicians, Western rock stars, the press and the usual bunch of liggers. Diplomats tussled for autographs. Freddie’s tide went out. He receded into a corner, rolling his eyes. “I’d rather have gone shopping,” he groaned, “than be standing here listening to these people boring the pants off each other with the ins and outs of Eastern European history. Even trying on gloves or bartering for tablecloths would be better than this.”
He could assess mood, overtone and atmosphere in a matter of seconds, meaning that he grew bored much faster than everyone else.
He gave a small party a few days later in his hotel’s lavish presidential suite. “Presidential” was an understatement, despite his assertion that “all suites are equal”.
“Well this one’s a f****** sight more equal than mine,” retorted drummer Roger Taylor.
Sliding glass doors gave access to a balcony as wide as the room. Silhouettes of the cityÕs monuments loomed in the indigo distance. Freddie’s former girlfriend Mary Austin stood chatting with Queen manager Jim Beach. Freddie played the perfect, gracious host. Muscular and fit-looking, with only a hint of middle-age belly, he was dressed in a floral shirt and tight, pale denim jeans. His hair was impeccably groomed, with a tiny threadbare patch just beginning to appear at the back. He was less than two months short of his 40th birthday and had five more years to live. I wonder if he knew.
Handing us crystal goblets of champagne that he topped up personally, he waved us towards a sumptuous buffet of lobsters, prawns and caviar followed by rainbows of exotic fruit and ice creams.
What sticks in the mind was how Freddie conducted himself. Given that he was one of the world’s biggest stars - certainly as high-profile as his close friend Michael Jackson - he was behaving like an ordinary person. You couldn’t help but fall in love with him, even after an absurd obligatory game played with glasses and tequila, the details of which I know better than to repeat.
Freddie was partial to games. So brilliant was he at Scrabble that he would challenge all who fancied their chances to a game of it in reverse: you start with a full board of completed words and take letters away, leaving proper words. He had no time for pretence. When Freddie arrived at Wembley Stadium for Live Aid in July 1985, he came with his new partner - an amenable Irish barber called Jim Hutton, who confided that this was the first time he’d ever been to a rock gig.
And what a gig! It was here, of course, that Queen, a band in decline, would seize the day and go stratospheric once again. I met them both backstage.
“Talk about throwing me in at the deep end!” Jim whispered.
Freddie could be waspish to the point of bitchy when the mood took him. More than once he ridiculed my clothes, in the days when we all worked the “skinny rock-chick” look a bit too hard - and this from a guy who favoured ballet pumps and boxer boots.
On one trip to Los Angeles, I sported a pair of bright yellow Lycra leggings which he told me made me look like a “constipated canary”. My Jackie Collins moment also fell flat.
“Don’t do leopard, not in any variation of the theme,” he advised. “Mutt dressed as ham, dear.” When my make-up became a bit Alice Cooper, he prescribed a “good scrub, dear, with a corner of carbolic. Try Red Lifebuoy”, he said.
He wasn’t patronising or spiteful. The man I came to know, if only a little, was genuine, generous, huge-hearted and kind.
My favourite member of the entourage was always Peter Freestone - ‘Phoebe’ - who did everything for Freddie for the last 12 years of his life. Peter had been a wardrobe assistant at the Royal Opera House. The pair had met when Freddie danced with the Royal Ballet for a charity gala and had hit it off. They were never lovers, more like brothers.
Peter would be the first to admit he was a glorified valet. He packed for Freddie. He looked after his money, cards, passports, tickets, and got him on and off the plane. It was like caring for a child.
“The way I look at it,” Peter told me, “I’ve had one of the luckiest lives going. I lived Freddie’s life without having had the responsibility of having to earn it. I never had to create the music - or face it.
“But I travelled by Concorde, stayed in the best suites in the finest hotels, went shopping for Freddie at the top auction houses, and paid with his signed blank cheques. I lived, laughed and spent, at his level. How on earth could I have felt like a servant?”
Peter was there until the end, as the AIDS took hold, and in 1991 he watched Freddie die - doing everything he could do to alleviate his pain. It was Peter who phoned Freddie’s parents to break the news of his death, Peter who signed the death register, made Freddie’s funeral arrangements, organised the music for the ceremony and catered the wake.
The person Peter misses is the soul behind the superstar: a man who felt trapped, at times, by the contradictions that shaped him, but whose extraordinary legacy means he was always going to have the last laugh.
Freddie Mercury: The Definitive Biography, by Lesley-Ann Jones, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. - Daily Mail