YASS QUEEN!!!
by Wrongtom
Sometime back in 1988 I was in a cafe with my mum, down a back alley in Kingston Upon Thames. A lanky and bedraggled man lumbered in with his scrappy little dog and settled on the next table. I recognised him instantly, I even recognised his dog. This guy was the face of an advert for milk in which he takes his dog for a dawn run through Battersea Park, soundtracked by Jan Hammer’s woozy synths, before helping himself to the contents of a milk float.
Like the milkman above, I was well aware who he was. Sir Bob had made his mark on our collective conscience a few years prior, first in ’84 with the ‘Feed The World’ single and again in the summer of ’85 with Live Aid. He seemed larger than life and yet completely down to earth with his no-fucks-given dress sense and casual cries of “just give us yer money!”
I don’t actually remember watching Live Aid. I probably did. Most people did. 1.9 billion people apparently but, truth be told, the lineup wasn’t really my bag in ’85, with the exception of Sade, and I might’ve been up for Phil Collins singing his finest work ‘Take Me Home’ but he didn’t perform it, the fool. At the time I was still mesmerised by an album my brother picked up the previous year, Street Sounds UK Electro.
This was our homegrown edition of Morgan Khan’s hallowed compilation series which introduced electro-funk and early hip hop to British shores. What I didn’t know at the time was all but one of the tracks on the UK comp were masterminded by Manchester DJ and re-edit legend Greg Wilson, in an effort to make it look like there was a small but flourishing scene here. Regardless, it’s a fantastic piece of work which I still get lost in regularly.
The Live Aid lineup seemed like dinosaurs after hearing the slinky machine-funk of Zer-O’s ‘Real Time’ or DJ Wiz’s raw cuts on ‘Hip Hop Beat’. Dire Straits? Status Quo? Queen? Move aside guitar-grandads and hand me an 808. I continued in a B-Boy stance for the rest of the summer, haphazardly attempting to break dance to Doug E Fresh and Kraftwerk. Aside from the brief snatch of “Another One Bites The Dust’ on ‘The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel’ no Queen was playing in my house, my house.
Flash forward to 2018 and Bohemian Rhapsody was doing the promotional rounds. The band’s biopic had peaked my interest and I started to hear Queen songs everywhere. The first revelation was ‘You’re My Best Friend’, a song I somehow hadn’t heard until Edgar Wright used it in Shaun Of The Dead. I had no idea it was even by Queen, perhaps the electric piano threw me. Then I kept hearing ‘Hammer To The Fall’ and couldn’t get enough of this slice of slinky cock-rock. Had I been missing out all these years? I fired up Spotify and started listening through their albums. The answer was a resounding YES!
I worked my way through chronologically and put together a Spotify playlist, so if you fancy hearing what a relative new-comer made of Queen’s catalogue, having come from a steady diet of hip hop, reggae, dancehall, jazz and funk, and then onto shoegazer, post-punk, no-wave etc etc, then here you go…
Prior to my musical awakening I’d actually been interested in the mystery surrounding Freddie for a long time. While his sexuality remained a thinly veiled secret, his ethnicity seemed rarely questioned. I’d imagine in the height of Queen’s reign, curtain twitchers and worried mothers would probably have referred to him as swarthy, if at all. He passed as white, and that’s what fascinated me.
When I first heard he was of Indian extraction I figured it was exactly that, not unlike my dad, a man of mixed heritage but I assumed mainly white. I brought it up with die-heard Queen fans. “Oh he wasn’t really Indian, look at him, he wasn’t even from there” they’d gripe. I looked him up: born in Zanzibar to Parsi parents. “You see Tom, he wasn’t Indian!”
They were right — Parsis originate in Persia — but also wrong, Parsis fled almost 1500 years ago, settling in Gujarat, India. Consanguineously, they might not be Indian, much like a lot of English Queen fans might discover they’re not actually English, however most Parsis are Indian by nationality, and they’re an integral part of the diaspora. My “uncle” Feroze* — actually a friend of my grandad’s — was a Parsi and most certainly Indian. He set up the Dhunjibhoy Ice Factory in Mumbai back in the 40s, earning him the nickname the Ice King Of Bombay.
“But Zanzibar was British, Tom!” So was India when Freddie, or should I say Farokh Balsura, was born in 1946. “But he never lived in India!!” the protests got more desperate. It turns out he did, in Bombay, not too far from Feroze’s ice factory. He spent a decade there with relatives and at boarding school where he adopted the name Freddie, and formed his first band, a rock n roll group called The Hectics.
With a repertoire of rock n roll hits from the likes of Chuck Berry, Elvis and Little Richard, The Hectics wowed their classmates and worried teachers, despite raising a few rupees for the school. His bandmates remember Freddie as a shy but gifted pianist. “He was a prodigy, he could play anything” recalled singer Bruce Murray in Scroll, but Bruce “was the lead singer, the guitarist and the star of the show” adds drummer Victory Rama.
They paint a picture of a quiet boy, happiest sitting at a piano, or listening to his music teacher Mrs Jay play jazz. The rest of the band “just made a lot of noise” claims Murray “we started the band mainly to impress girls.”
None of this wound up in the biopic, of course. Aside from the fleeting presence of his family, the only concession to Mercury’s roots is in a scene where someone calls him a paki. “I’m not a Pakistani” he quietly retorts, and I wondered if the ambiguity of him stating where he wasn’t from, rather than where he was, reflected his real life evasiveness in regards to his background and sexuality. Or was it just a rotten script?
The biopic plays fast and loose with the facts. Not a huge shock I guess. Real life doesn’t always lend itself to a great story, but unless I’m mistaken, wasn’t this a band known for their debauched parties? There’s only one in the film, a fairly tame soiree thrown at Freddie’s mansion. The rest of the band skip out early as if it’s not their cup of tea. And let’s not forget the reframing of their Live Aid performance to coincide with Freddie’s HIV diagnoses, and the band’s reacceptance of their singer as a wayward prodigal son who’d turned his back on his boys to record a solo album.
I should take this moment to remind the world that Freddie’s solo LP Mr Bad Guy features a reggae track!
In actual fact they’d only recently finished a tour to promote their 1984 LP The Works, this wasn’t a life affirming comeback concert after all, just a really good example of a band at the peak of their powers doing what they do best. That said, it’s a remarkable recreation, particularly on Rami Malek’s part, and a special mention should go to whoever sourced Deaky’s shirt. The only complaint I have is the real thing is still available to watch and, quite obviously, much better.
Why was it such a struggle to extract a factual story from this band and keep it interesting? I could happily sit through 2 hours simply about the time Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson didn’t record a duet because Freddie objected to Jacko bringing his Llama to the studio. Though perhaps that’s why I’m sitting here writing this for my lunch rather than a biopic for a banquet.
If I somehow did hold the reins to a Queen film I’d end it with the clear pinnacle of their career: the soundtrack to Highlander. And why stop there? Freddie would make a great Kurgan, crying out “IT’S BETTER TO BURN OUT THAN TO FADE AWAY” before launching into ‘Ogre Battle’.
Brian May could be Ramirez, Taylor as Connor — he’d suit a kilt — and Deaky as the guy who gets his head chopped off in the car park. Tim Staffel who ditched their previous band Smile, he’s definitely Angus McLeod, casting his bandmates out into the great unknown, unbeknownst of their immortality. Kenny Everett as old pal Sunda Kastigir, showing up in his ruffles and reminiscing about his and Freddie’s dandy escapades amongst the English gentry. Okay, I know it needs some work.
About a decade after I saw Geldof in that cafe in Kingston I wound up living in the flats upstairs. Bob now owned the whole building. My mate took over the cafe, and the ballroom space above it, I worked behind the bar and sometimes DJ’d. We never saw Bob, in fact the guy who came to pick up our rent was a jovial Italian man simply know as G. He ran a Chinese restaurant somewhere in North London and would show up unannounced every couple of months and accept whatever money we could give him.
Much criticism has been thrown at Geldof in the years which followed Live Aid. It’s easy to wag our fingers at supposed do-gooders and say it’s ego driven. We can tear ‘Feed The World’ to pieces for being a terrible piece of music (I quite like it, and was excited to visit the room where Midge Ure recorded the backing track when my mate Bev was living in his old house). We can accuse Live Aid’s donations of funding insurgent rebels in Ethiopia, but we’d have to make a public apology.
It’s worth noting that Ethiopia’s civil war was one of the contributing factors to the famine in the first place, something which got no coverage at the time, but I’m not here to point fingers. I still think it’s remarkable that Bob managed to rally up so many people and galvanise the world into taking action. He seems like a decent guy. I probably still owe him some rent. As for Morgan Khan and his UK Electro, in 1991, around the time Freddie passed away, he released this!
*On a visit to the UK in the early 80s, Feroze put £10 in a post office account for me. By the late 80s there was enough interest to buy myself a video player. I hold the Dhunjibhoy Ice Factory directly responsible for the years I spent up late watching fuzzy old schlock horrors and trashy teen films on VHS. I also watched Flash Gordon and Highlander… a lot!
