Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994

by David Hepworth

  For the bulk of the twenty years of his fame there was a wall between the gay and the straight world, even within show business. Gay people in the world of rock, which likes to congratulate itself on being an outrider for new ways of living, were no quicker to announce their sexuality than their counterparts in Parliament, business, sport or the movies. The nearest they traditionally got was to declare themselves bisexual, as if this were no more than another manifestation of their all-round liberal-mindedness. This never quite seemed convincing.

  For twenty years Freddie Mercury had met any questions about his sexuality with camp jokes and sentences that ended with the word ‘darling’. There was no coming out, no tell-all autobiography, no going to the sofas. In the gay clubs of Munich and the discreet hotels of Brazil he behaved like one of the less savoury Roman emperors. In the straight world he kept himself on a very tight leash. The life he lived outside Queen was a closed book even to the members of Queen. The band had only known how bad his health was for the previous two years. Before that it had remained a secret shared between Freddie, his doctors, the close friends who tended to him and the band’s manager.

  Once he’d finally told the band that he didn’t have much time left they had busied themselves in the studio in Montreux, Switzerland. This had the double benefit of giving him something to do while also stockpiling material the band could release after his death. Although he had lost weight, was on painkillers and had to have the lesions on his face covered by make-up, he continued to chain-smoke Silk Cut and chug Stolichnaya even in the studio. This was Freddie’s way. When the AIDS epidemic had hit in the mid-eighties and he had been asked whether he intended to let this in any way inhibit his sex life he’d snorted at the very idea and said that he would continue to do ‘everything with everybody’. History doesn’t record whether he added the word ‘darling’.

  There was a time, not so long ago, when forms of behaviour now taken as a formal announcement of certain forms of sexuality were simply accepted as amusing displays. When just a boy, Freddie, then known as Farrokh Bulsara, would go into raptures about things his schoolmates scarcely saw fit to comment on. His friends, while intuiting there was something about Farrokh that was different, didn’t discuss the possibility of his being gay. This was not merely because the use of that adjective to describe sexual orientation was not much known in the sixties beyond the more bohemian quarters of London. It was also because baby boomers growing up at that time, whether in London or in Bombay, did not connect what they knew about homosexuality with the life they themselves lived. Not only did they not discuss him being gay, neither did they entertain the idea in their own minds. It’s entirely possible that young Farrokh didn’t either.

  He was born in Zanzibar in 1946 to the young wife of a government clerk. They were Parsis, which, according to the elaborate taxonomy of Empire, meant they were descended from Persian stock and followed the prophet Zoroaster. When the blood-letting that accompanied the partition of the Indian subcontinent was over, Farrokh was sent to a boarding school in India run along lines familiar to readers of English school stories. Here he won the school’s prize for Best All Rounder, junior section. Noting that four extra teeth at the back of his mouth had given him a pronounced overbite, his classmates called him ‘Bucky’. When his teachers, possibly wishing to head off this unkindness, began to call him Freddie he seized on this more palatable alternative. Although he was shy in class he grasped any opportunity to perform. It was at school that Freddie formed his first band, the Hectics, who did their versions of hits by Elvis Presley and Little Richard.

  In 1964, when a rising against the Arab-dominated government made life hazardous for anyone in Zanzibar whose skin colour was lighter than black, the Bulsaras decided to get out. Because Freddie’s father had worked for the Raj he had a British passport and therefore they decided to escape to England rather than India. They settled in Feltham, directly under the Heathrow flight path. This was certainly a life less privileged than the one they had known in Zanzibar. For eighteen-year-old Freddie it was all he had ever wanted.

  When he arrived he was immediately aware the Beatles’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was about to be released. He was presumably less aware that legislation was being prepared in Parliament that would lead in the next three years to the legalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults in private. He was probably not aware of his own sexuality. He was certainly not aware that on the day of his death his sexuality would vie with his celebrity for prominence on the front pages and the news bulletins.

  In 1966 Freddie was supposed to be studying Fashion Design at Ealing College of Art. His main interest was rock stardom. After seeing Jimi Hendrix on TV he went to watch the guitarist nine nights in a row, studying how he was able to galvanize a room by the simple act of wandering on and playing. Although he played some piano, Freddie’s entry into music was via the gestural arts. When he first befriended the three members of a group who called themselves Smile he confined his input to suggestions about how they might put themselves over more winningly. The members of Smile, like most young men trying to get a start in 1969, didn’t even realize they were in show business. In fact they were so myopic they failed to realize that Freddie was aching to be asked to join the band but was too shy to put himself forward. It wasn’t until they saw him sing in front of another band that they appreciated how good he was at it. Because bands spend so much of their energies on their equipment they are inclined to overlook the person who brings the least equipment with him – the singer. They think that singing is something you can do in addition to other duties. For the audience, however, the singer is the human link between them and the musicians on stage.

  All performers suffer from nerves, but to stand up in front of a rock band and sing takes special qualities. Laurence Olivier said that if you aren’t sick with nerves you aren’t trying. But Olivier, even at his lowliest rung on the ladder, had the support system provided by a company of actors, a script, scenery, lights, and the agreement between the audience and the people on the stage that underpins theatre. Singers in rock bands have none of this. Instead they need the belief that if they act like they have the right to be the frontman then they have won the right to be that frontman. Freddie had a further challenge. He knew that he looked odd. In fact he looked more like Dame Edith Evans than Elvis Presley. To stand up in front of an unknown rock band and behave like a star when you know that you don’t look like one requires belief in the transfiguring power of performance.

  People in rock bands can’t afford to allow themselves to glimpse the preposterousness of what they do. While Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon were all positioned behind their instruments with a protective wall of equipment between the audience and their genitalia, the traditional seat of all feelings of insecurity in the male, Freddie was out there, often with shirt slashed down to the navel, often arrayed in an all-white outfit that had been designed purely to catch the eye, and as such he was utterly exposed. But Freddie didn’t mind. That was his strength, to be able to do something that no other member of the band could imagine themselves doing. On stage, Freddie was fearless. While most musicians avoid catching the audience’s eye, for fear of how that gaze might be returned, Freddie’s eyes sought them out as he worked to consume the space between him and the crowd. That was his area of operation, his workspace. His job, every night, was simple: to reach across that gulf to the people out there and win them over. It’s what he loved doing.

  He could never have been a star in any other field. Success in theatre or film would have depended on him being picked out from the crowd. That was never going to happen. Only in a field as untouched by professionalism as rock, only in a moment as low-budget as glam rock, only within the context of a group that was young, ambitious and didn’t have a better idea could Freddie Bulsara have turned himself into Freddie Mercury and Smile have turned themselves into a band with the preposterous name Queen and in one mad holding-hands moment jump off the cliff and
take flight. One day in 1975 Farrokh Bulsara woke up to find he was the star he had always dreamed of being.

  When Queen became successful, Freddie had a girlfriend. He was as devoted to her as he was to anyone in his life. They lived together as a standard young couple. When Queen went big time and started coming up against big-time temptations and Freddie didn’t come home quite so regularly she worried there might be another woman, which is a measure of how unworldly even the young sophisticates of the seventies could be. Freddie didn’t come out partly because he feared it might affect the group’s popularity, but also because he wasn’t sure he wished to be categorical about the matter.

  When Freddie finally went all-out full-time gay he more than made up for it. In the eighties he adopted the moustachioed gym bunny look favoured by clones all over the world. That look didn’t mean the same to the people watching him on TV as it did to the people in the gay clubs where he spent much of his spare time. Marc Almond, an eighties pop star every bit as slight, unlikely and gay as Freddie had been when he came along ten years earlier, was effusively hailed as ‘Marcia’ in a London club and whisked on to the dance floor and was taken aback by how G-A-Y Freddie was. Furthermore, even by the standards of famous rock stars, Freddie was promiscuous. ‘He was the good time who was being had by all,’ said Almond.

  A few months after Queen’s appearance at Live Aid the Hollywood actor Rock Hudson died. Hudson’s celebrity meant his was the first case of an AIDS-related death making its way into the public arena. All sexually active gay men suddenly had something very specific to be concerned about. Freddie had more to be concerned about than most. He had cut a vodka-fuelled and cocaine-laced swathe through the gay nightlife of Munich for much of the last decade and knew full well what that was likely to mean. When he was eventually diagnosed as HIV positive in the spring of 1987 it came as no surprise.

  He made his last public appearance at the 1990 BRIT Awards in London where Queen were given an Outstanding Contribution award. All four of them came on stage to receive the prize. Freddie stood at the back while Brian May made the speech, which seemed unusual. As they left the stage he couldn’t resist being the last to go. He leaned into the microphone and said, ‘Thank you, good night.’ It must have broken his heart.

  Twenty-one months later, on 23 November 1991, he made the most uncharacteristic move of putting out a press release. It confirmed that he had AIDS. He wished his friends and fans to know this from him rather than from some tabloid. The following day he died in his home in Kensington. Tottenham’s Dave Clark, who had been a big pop star ten years earlier than Freddie, was with the son of Zanzibar when he breathed his last.

  His parents, who knew he was ill but not why, were the first to be informed. The woman who told them was the woman who had been his girlfriend back in the days before fame. His parents still lived in the same house in Feltham they had moved into in 1964. They never knew he was gay.

  1991 PLAYLIST

  Queen, Innuendo

  REM, ‘Losing My Religion’

  Bryan Adams, ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’

  Sting, The Soul Cages

  De La Soul, De La Soul Is Dead

  Ice-T, O.G. Original Gangster

  Crowded House, Woodface

  Massive Attack, Blue Lines

  Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magik

  Nirvana, Nevermind

  7 MAY 1992

  TOKYO, JAPAN

  Man overboard

  BEFORE LEAVING LOS Angeles to tour Japan, Australia and New Zealand in April 1992, the four members of the LA group Red Hot Chili Peppers had gathered at the studio of Rolling Stone’s chief photographer Mark Seliger to have their picture taken for the cover of the magazine. It was the first time for them and they were very excited. Blood Sugar Sex Magik, their first album for their new record company Warner Brothers, had already sold over a million copies, thanks to the radio popularity of its uncharacteristic ballad ‘Under The Bridge’. Now it finally looked as though this hyperactive, heavily tattooed quartet, whose look reflected Los Angeles’ skating sub-culture and whose sound owed as much to Funkadelic as it did to the Clash, were finally breaking through.

  The early nineties were a golden time for the music magazines. Bands relied on them to reflect and magnify their prestige and to confirm that they merited their place in the hierarchy. Magazine covers were a key index of success. There was politics involved at every stage. Once an act had got over the excitement of being featured in print the next thing they demanded was the cover. Being considered big enough to ‘get the cover’ was a powerful indicator that you had made it, a handy lever when it came to raising your asking price and a reminder to your rivals that your tanks were on their lawn. (Rock stars are not interested in sharing the limelight. Rock bands are only interested in domination. Rock bands don’t just want to win, they want to be assured that their rivals lose as a consequence of them winning. When Q magazine moved from a multi-image to a single-image cover, the bands were suddenly very keen to get on it. When they’d had to share it they were not so bothered.)

  In 1992 the stakes were being raised in the visuals department. The emergent rock bands who were shot for the cover of Rolling Stone that year – Def Leppard, Nirvana and REM – were suddenly in danger of appearing slightly dull and prosaic when set alongside Ice-T in the uniform of an officer of the LAPD, Sharon Stone in a ripped bathing costume and the pert, pretty cast of Beverly Hills 90210. Rock’s rebel glamour no longer punched through on its own. The youth had choices.

  What made the Red Hot Chili Peppers popular was their music. What made them famous was the sock stunt. This had its origin in an incident when singer Anthony Kiedis had sought to turn down the overtures of a young woman by greeting her at his door stark naked except for a tube sock enveloping his penis. This coup de théâtre had grown and developed until it became an occasional and much-anticipated feature of the band’s set. All four members – Kiedis, bassist Flea, drummer Chad Smith and guitarist John Frusciante – would resume the stage for an encore wearing nothing but four socks over their four members. They first tried this at a Hollywood strip bar called the Kit Kat Club. Although the stunt had been cleared in advance the club’s manager was nonetheless somewhat exercised by the magnificent brazenness of the reality, rushing backstage protesting, ‘No pubes! I told you no pubes!’ Local police, alerted to the possibility that the Red Hot Chili Peppers might repeat the trick while playing in their jurisdiction, were reassured that the socks were held in place by wires. This was not true. The only things keeping those socks in place were friction and the venue’s central heating.

  It was clear that the Rolling Stone cover would have to make reference to the stunt that had made them famous. The Red Hot Chili Peppers weren’t the kind of band to shrink from the obvious. However, a straight repeat of the sock trick might have been too much for Rolling Stone’s distributors. Instead, Seliger shot them with their hands clasped over their privates.

  The band approved the pictures and set off on their tour of Japan. They played five gigs and were in Tokyo on 7 May preparing to play their sixth. Kiedis was on the phone to a journalist in New Zealand, prior to their upcoming dates in that country, when Flea appeared in his room to tell him that John Frusciante had decided he was leaving the band. He wasn’t handing in his notice prior to leaving at the end of the tour; he needed to get out immediately. That night’s show would have to be cancelled and the rest of the tour was off until they could find a replacement. Kiedis went to see his guitarist. One look in his eyes was enough to convince him that John had made up his mind. There was no attempt to remonstrate with him or draw attention to the terms of his employment. What Kiedis was facing was one of those situations which happens in a rock band and doesn’t happen in any other professional unit.

  Frusciante was just twenty-two years old, which placed him in a different generation from the rest. He had been a fan of the band since the age of fifteen and had joined them following the death of
their previous guitarist. His need to leave the tour immediately and the other three’s willingness to accommodate him underlined what a curious bunch of individuals the Red Hot Chili Peppers were. This wasn’t just because, like so many bands breaking through at the time, they thought of themselves as having derived from punk rock and therefore their one non-negotiable was independence. They were also Hollywood kids, which made them naturally inclined to look down on everywhere else. However, like most Hollywood kids they hadn’t begun there.

  During Anthony Kiedis’s upbringing he was shuttled between his mother in Michigan and his father in Hollywood. The most generous thing to be said about his father is that he hung out on the scene. He also supplied drugs to Led Zeppelin, Keith Moon and other patrons of the Rainbow Bar and Grill. He liked to dress his son up in scaled-down versions of the clothes he favoured himself and would take him out on the town with him. The pair would make a bizarre couple, turning up together at X-certificate Hollywood parties, the father looking too old for the scene and the boy looking too young. Like a French parent giving his children watered-down wine at the family meal, he would allow his boy ‘a little bit of acid’. Like a Victorian aristocrat he felt the need to supervise his son’s introduction to sex, arranging for the hospitable Kimberly from the Rainbow Bar and Grill to relieve him of the burden of his virginity while still under the age of consent. He had a simple policy about parenthood: ‘I would let him do anything he wanted to.’

  The notion that a little liberality early on avoids a grand crisis later was dented somewhat by the way things turned out for young Anthony. He lived in Hollywood full-time as a teenager. His father was so all over the place that the boy eventually found some stability in the unlikely form of Sonny Bono, who was a friend of one of his father’s girlfriends. He befriended Bono’s daughter Chastity. Tensions with his father meant he moved out while still a teenager and lived on friends’ couches and even in unoccupied buildings. During this time he developed a heroin addiction for which he didn’t seek help until his friend and fellow band member Hillel Slovak died of an overdose in 1988. The members of the band had originally bonded over music and drugs but, as is customary in bands, they avoided getting to know how serious each other’s drug use was. Being traditional units of male bonding, bands prefer not to probe too deep. As the members of Joy Division had said after Ian Curtis’s suicide, ‘We didn’t realize he meant it.’ The drug use within the Red Hot Chili Peppers was the secret they kept from each other. Before his death, Slovak and Kiedis had last seen each other at the airport in LA after returning from a European tour. They’d embraced and promised each other they would be good. ‘Then we both made a bee-line for our individual dealers,’ remembered Kiedis later.