Google and Queen Release a VR App: The Bohemian Rhapsody Experience

Google and Queen Release a VR App: The Bohemian Rhapsody ExperienceBy Priya Trivedi -September 15, 2016  https://www.droidmen.com/google-queen-release-vr-app-bohemian-rhapsody-experience/

One of the most intense musical experiences in the world is listening to Freddie Mercury sing. To listen to him live in performance was a treat, and is something that will never happen again. The man was a sheer genius, and even forty years past the release of perhaps their most famous song, Bohemian Rhapsody, the song remains one of the most popular tracks of all times. What truly makes Freddie Mercury special is the fact that the man thought on a whole different level. Google now takes us inside the subconscious mind of Freddie Mercury with the release of The Bohemian Rhapsody Experience, a VR app.



The app takes you into a whole different world, and is perhaps the best way to enjoy this song. While many might that when they wear their VR headsets and start off this app, it will take them to a Freddie Mercury concert. However, the Bohemian Rhapsody Experience is not about that. The app does not transport you to a concert, but it does something else – it shows a 360 degree animation featuring various elements of the song.

The Bohemian Rhapsody Experience has been developed in cooperation of Brian May and Roger Taylor, the original members of Queen. They helped give the developers at Google a better insight inside the mind of Freddie Mercury. The users could now see the inspiration of the song, and the intense feelings that Freddie went through while he composed and sang the song.

Over the years, this song has been used in various pop cultural references, most recently in the Suicide Squad promos. Google, in association with Queen is all set to take the legacy of this song to a whole new level. The Bohemian Rhapsody Experience is indeed a very unique app, and we are pretty sure all the fans of Queen would enjoy this experience.

Queen’s Brian May on Adam Lambert and story behind Bohemian Rhapsody

Queen’s Brian May on Adam Lambert and story behind Bohemian Rhapsody

Ahead of their Hong Kong and China debuts, band’s guitarist and founding member talks about how Queen came to be, and the thinking behind bringing American Idol runner-up on board as lead singer
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 14 September, 2016, 8:18am UPDATED : Thursday, 15 September, 2016, 3:53pm http://www.scmp.com/culture/music/article/2018950/queens-brian-may-adam-lambert-and-story-behind-bohemian-rhapsody



Over the course of their career, rock legends Queen have sold more than 150 million albums – one of them, Greatest Hits (1981), the biggest-selling album in UK history.

They have had 18 number-one albums and 18 number-one singles – several of them fixed in rock’s firmament, such as Bohemian Rhapsody, We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions.

And they’ve earned a reputation as the most incendiary live band in history, responsible for arguably the most memorable live performance ever when they upstaged the whole of musical royalty at 1985’s Live Aid.

But one thing they’ve never done is play in Hong Kong – a tiny gap in their accomplished CV that will finally be filled in on September 28, when they perform at AsiaWorld-Expo, Lantau, as part of an Asian tour that also includes Singapore, Taipei, Tokyo, Bangkok and Shanghai. That last gig will also be their first in China.

“It’s extraordinary that we never could make direct contact with China all these years, and we have fans there and we never really knew,” says the band’s guitarist, Brian May. “It wasn’t possible in the old days. We wanted to come, but I think culturally we were unacceptable at that time. It’s amazing that we can actually come now. At the age of 69, it’s just extraordinary.”

The band on stage at the AsiaWorld-Expo, of course, won’t be all of Queen; singer Freddie Mercury died in 1991, while bassist John Deacon retired in 1997, leaving guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor to carry the torch. It is particularly tough to have been robbed of one of rock’s greatest frontmen, whose astonishingly versatile voice, blistering charisma and warm, humorous personality made him one of the most compulsively watchable performers ever to take to a stage.

We wanted to come [to China], but I think culturally we were unacceptable at that time. It’s amazing that we can actually come now-BRIAN MAY

The daunting task of trying to fill his shoes falls to American singer Adam Lambert. May has said he wanted to get away from Queen after Mercury’s death; his decision to breathe new life into the band came only because he found a new singer in 2005. It wasn’t Lambert, though; it was Paul Rodgers, formerly of Free and Bad Company, of whom the band were already fans.

“I just bumped into Paul Rodgers, who I’ve known for a while, and I found myself playing with him at a show, just a one-off, playing [Free classic] All Right Now,” says May. “There was obviously good chemistry, we felt good about it, and then he and myself and the lady who was to be his wife were in the dressing room, and she said, ‘You guys really have something; all you need is a drummer.’ And I said, ‘Well, I think I know a drummer.’

“So very organically we started to do a couple of things. And then we just thought, well, is this Queen or not? Without Freddie it’s never the original Queen; of course it’s not. So, the question was: can me and Roger and this man who influenced us be Queen?”

May says the collaboration with Rodgers “went organically”. Following that, he wasn’t sure he wanted to “continue to try to be Queen without Freddie”, but then “out of the sky came this boy Adam Lambert”.

May and Taylor first performed with Lambert during the 2009 season finale ofAmerican Idol, in which he finished runner-up, and he started to perform with them regularly in 2011. While they weren’t looking for a singer, May says, Lambert’s performances of Queen songs on American Idol made them realise that his soaring, versatile voice and theatrical stage presence made him the ideal candidate.

“I must have had 1,000 people e-mailing me saying: you have to see this guy; he’s the guy you need to be singing for you. When it came to the final, I think immediately there was some chemistry and I remember thinking, ‘Hmm, this could work’.”



“A couple of years later we had the opportunity to play an awards show, and the response was just phenomenal. Soon we found ourselves playing in front of 400,000 people in eastern Europe; it was the first fully fledged Queen show for years.”

Tellingly, the band refers to itself as Queen + Adam Lambert, suggesting that no one is trying to replace Mercury. “The thing is, he’s not Freddie,” says May. “He doesn’t need to be. But he has an extraordinary instrument, and he’s a natural with crowds. He also has humility, which is nice, and that delightful kind of lightness which makes people warm to him, and it really fits so well with us because we’d spent those years with Freddie, who also had that lightness.”
I think the toughest part is finding the balance between making it my own and honouring the original recording

ADAM LAMBERT
Lambert says the challenge of filling a Mercury-shaped hole might have receded over time, but the eclecticism of Queen’s oeuvre remains as challenging as ever.

“I think the toughest part is finding the balance between making it my own and honouring the original recording. But I think over the years it has become much easier to do that because I think now the music is sort of in my body,” Lambert says.

Queen are perhaps the most eclectic mainstream rock band in history, taking in elements of opera, music hall, funk, folk, heavy metal, disco, prog rock, R&B, symphonic rock, Dixieland jazz, gospel and rockabilly. In addition to Mercury’s unique voice and presence, the British band (Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar and mostly raised in India, but was a British citizen throughout his life) are instantly recognisable for their tight vocal harmonies; their densely textured, multilayered, repeatedly overdubbed, wall-of-sound production; and of course May’s virtuoso orchestral guitar solos, played on the guitar he made himself in the early 1960s, known as the Red Special.

Queen formed in 1970 while they were students in London. May, then a physics student, has since completed his PhD and become a respected astrophysicist; he’s also a renowned animal rights activist and also an expert in stereoscopics, a sort of 19th-century experiment in 3D imaging, and will be meeting the Hong Kong company that produces stereoscopic views he designs for the first time when he plays in the city.

The band hit the big time with their third album, Sheer Heart Attack (1974), featuring debut hit single Killer Queen, and then went stellar with the follow-up, A Night at the Opera (1975), which included their biggest hit, Bohemian Rhapsody, a six-minute ballad/opera/hard rock opus that ripped up the rule book when it came to commercial pop, spent a record nine weeks at number one and pretty much invented the music video. It was Lambert’s startlingly ambitious choice to perform onAmerican Idol.

“Obviously that was such a big turning point for me,” he says. “I am glad I picked that one. Maybe if I hadn’t sung that song I might not be part of the band now.”



The album it appeared on, says May, “was life-changing for us. We were on the edge of disaster ’cause the whole operation was so much in debt. So if we hadn’t made that album, which was successful around the world, we probably wouldn’t be speaking at the moment. And artistically it was great because we finally had the freedom that we needed to get in there and do anything we wanted. We had full use of studios, state-of-the-art equipment and enough time to experiment very deeply with both music and the technical side.

“I think all these ideas which had been lurking in our brains but didn’t come out suddenly were able to come out. It was a period of high activity, high hopes and inspiration; it was a very good time, becoming ourselves.”

Not that there weren’t creative clashes. Each member wrote songs and contributed to each other’s songs, creating tensions about whose songs made the grade, and who was credited for writing them. The solution, says May, was the band’s eventual decision to all take joint credit for every song.

“It was a constantly evolving relationship. We were trying to paint on the same canvas and we really had very different ideas as to what the finished canvas should look like. Most groups split up after a while, usually because of the writing situation. Somebody in the band feels like they are not represented. When you bring a song into a group situation in the studio it’s like your baby. You care passionately about it. If that baby doesn’t get to grow up and be something in the world you feel frustrated. So we had to learn to accommodate each other and make sure there was room for somebody else to breathe.

“You get the situation where everybody will work very hard on somebody’s baby and then they get no credit on it. Eventually we thought: let’s change this. What we did was we share the authorship of everything, so no matter who brought the baby in, it would be everybody’s baby.”

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as:
Queen for a day

Freddie Mercury's Panchgani school bandmates remember 'Bucky'

Freddie Mercury's Panchgani school bandmates remember 'Bucky' - On the Queen frontman's 70th birth anniversary, members of the Hectics recount their early steps in music.

Anvar Alikhan
http://scroll.in/article/815380/freddie-bucky-mercury-the-12-year-old-rockstar-from-panchgani

A few years ago, I went to a little restaurant in Pune for lunch. I was waiting for a table when the proprietor and I got talking. Then suddenly, changing the subject, he asked me if I was a Freddie Mercury fan.

“Yes”, I said, slightly surprised by the question.

“I used to play the bass for Freddie Mercury,” he told me, with a small, proud smile.

I looked at this middle-aged Parsi gentleman with an old-fashioned bush shirt, greying hair, and slight Gujarati accent, and I thought I must have heard wrong.

“I used to play the bass for Freddie Mercury,” he repeated, “We played in a band together”.

My first thought was that he must be an eccentric. My confusion must have shown.

“We had a band called the Hectics,” he explained, “It was a long time ago. We were teenagers at the time, in school in Panchgani.”

His name, he said, was Farang Irani. He then proceeded to tell me the extraordinary story of Freddie’s very first band, formed 10 years before Queen.

Since then, I have managed to track down other members of the Hectics, as well as other members of Freddie’s old school gang, and put together their memories of what he was like when he was just a shy 12-year-old prodigy, starting his musical career in the little hill station of Panchgani in Maharashtra, where he was a student at St Peter’s school. At that time, he was known as Farrokh Bulsara.

So this is the story of Freddie Mercury’s talent, how it was born, and how it grew in those early, adolescent years. It’s a story that not many people know of, at least partly because of Freddie’s reluctance to talk about his past.

So tell me about the Hectics. What’s the story behind the band?
Victory Rana: Everybody now assumes that the band was started by Freddie. But it was actually Bruce Murray’s idea. He [Freddie] was the lead singer, guitarist, and the star of the show. The other members were Derrick Branche, who played the guitar; Freddie, who played the piano; Farang Irani, who played the bass; and I was the drummer. We were about 12 years old at the time.

Bruce Murray: Actually, we started the band mainly to impress the girls. We certainly were not musicians. Yes, Freddie was a great musician, but the rest of us just made a lot of noise. I had a guitar, which my mum had bought me. We had a drum that our music teacher helped us buy. We took an old tea chest and added a string to it and turned it into a bass. And we had the ancient school piano, which Freddie used to play. That was it. But I guess we achieved our objective, because the girls really loved us!

Gita Choksi: Yes, the girls absolutely adored the Hectics. For us they were like the Rolling Stones and Beatles and Aerosmith, all rolled into one.

Farang Irani: The Hectics became quite famous in Panchgani. All the school kids in town used to flock to our concerts, especially the girls. But the main reason for our success was Freddie. He was the only real musician among us.

Jer Bulsara with her son Farrokh, who the world knows as Freddie Mercury.

What kind of music did the Hectics play? Who were the musicians that inspired you?
Bruce Murray: We were into Elvis Presley, Cliff Richards and Little Richard. Also, other popular musicians of the ’50s, like Fats Domino, Ricky Nelson and Fabian. We did numbers like Yakkety Yak, Ramona, Girl of My Best Friend, Rock Around the Clock, and Tutti Frutti. We wore tight trousers, thin string ties, pointy shoes and Brylcreemed hair with big ‘puffs’, like our idols, Elvis and Cliff Richards. We really thought we were hot stuff.

Victory Rana: By the way, I’ve heard stories that Freddie was inspired by Bollywood music, and Lata Mangeshkar, but that is a lot of rubbish. The only music he listened to, and played, was Western pop music.

Freddie Mercury is considered to be one of the greatest rock musicians of all time. But how good a musician was he back then?
Bruce Murray: He was a prodigy. He could play anything! He had the unique ability to listen to a song on the radio, just once, and be able to play it perfectly. Our favourite programme was the Binaca Hit Parade, which was broadcast every Wednesday, if I remember correctly. If we heard a new song and liked it, Freddie would quickly learn the chords, and I would scribble down the words. And it would be the Hectics’ next hit number. Simple!

Victory Rana: Freddie was hugely talented. He was a natural musician. And he had an amazing voice. He could sing anything – from rock ’n’ roll to classical music. For example, apart from the Hectics, he was also part of a Western classical music group at school, where three boys would sing in three different keys. And that is probably one of the reasons for the eclectic sound he created for Queen in later years. By the way, his voice never changed over the years. If you listen to a Freddie Mercury CD, it sounds just like the young Freddie did back then, singing for the Hectics in Panchgani.

Farang Irani: He was born with the gift. Even as a toddler I believe he loved to sing at family get-togethers and parties – and he loved all the attention it got him. That is something that never changed as he grew up.

I believe his nickname as a kid was Bucky, because of his buck teeth. Was he very sensitive about that?
Farang Irani: Yes, you know how cruel school kids can be. He was very conscious of his protruding teeth. He used to keep trying to cover them with his upper lip, and when he laughed he had the habit of covering his mouth with his hand. Later on in life he grew a moustache, probably to try and cover his teeth. His real name, of course, was Farrokh. But when we first started calling him Bucky, I remember he started calling himself Freddie to try and divert us. But the name Bucky stuck – at least as long as he was in school.

Subash Shah: Yes, looking back, I’m sure he must have been very sensitive about it. But he took it in his stride. He never made an issue of it, or fought back.

Gita Choksi: You know, we old friends still call him Bucky after all these years. For us it’s just a term of affection.

Tell me more about Freddie Mercury, what sticks in your memory about him as a kid?
Victory Rana: He was very much of a loner. Happiest when he was playing the piano, or in the art school. But he was also a good sportsman – hockey, athletics, boxing….

Bruce Murray: I remember a boxing match where Freddie was really getting hammered in the ring, and we all kept telling him to concede the fight. But, no. Freddie insisted on fighting on till the end, with blood all over his face. He could be very tenacious.

Gita Choksi: When Freddie was small he was a very good all-round student. In fact, when he was about 12, he won the school’s best all-rounder prize, and got a double promotion. But after that, unfortunately, his studies went completely downhill.

Farang Irani: He was an introvert, but he could also be quite a clown when he wanted to, like Jerry Lewis, the famous comedian of those days. He used to collect stamps, and had a very rare collection. It would probably be quite priceless today. He was also very fond of cycling and we used to cycle from Panchgani to Mahableshwar and back – about 20 km – just for fun.

Was there any music teacher who played an important role in developing his talent as a child?
Farang Irani: Freddie started out by singing in the school choir. One of the teachers spotted his talent and suggested to his parents that he should take special music classes to develop that talent.

Victory Rana: We had various music teachers over the years, but the one Freddie really admired was a lady called Mrs Jay, who played wonderful jazz. Freddie used to love to sit and listen to her play.

Gita Choksi: Yes, there were various music teachers. But the one who taught Freddie the piano was an Irish lady called Mrs O’Shea. She understood his very special talent, and tried to nurture it. He was the apple of her eye.

Bruce Murray: Yes, she doted on Freddie, and tried to encourage him to play classical music. But Freddie just wanted to play rock ’n’ roll. Finally she gave up and let him do what he wanted. Freddie was born with that very special gift and, boy did he make use of it!

So the school encouraged the Hectics in their musical aspirations?
Victory Rana: No, no. Quite the opposite! The school was very strict, and traditional. They hated the kind of music we played, and the kind of look that we had to go with it – our Elvis Presley hairstyles and tight trousers. They used to refer to the band as “the Heretics”. They discouraged us from even listening to that kind of music, let alone playing it. We didn’t even have a radio to listen to pop music, for example, so we used to sneak into the teachers’ common room and listen to Radio Ceylon. And we used to play in secret, stealing time out from our very tight school schedule. But when we started playing at school fetes and things, and the staff saw how popular we were, they relented, rather grudgingly. Also, I think the fact that we helped raise money for the school with our concerts may have helped!

Tell me more about the Hectics’ concerts….
Farang Irani: We played mainly at school functions, socials and fetes. We had quite a fan following, especially among the girls. They used to come to our shows and scream hysterically, as if we were the Beatles or something.

Gita Choksi: I remember the time they took their little guitars and turned them into electric guitars with the help of a school teacher and an enterprising electrician. We were thrilled at their whole new sound at the next concert.

Bruce Murray: We were lucky that the school let us play our music. From the racket we made we should have probably been sent to prison.

Freddie Mercury is considered to have been one of the most flamboyant showmen in rock ’n’ roll history. Were there any early signs of that in his performances with the Hectics?
Victory Rana: Freddie was very shy, but once he started playing his piano, he became a completely different person. But I don’t remember him as being any kind of showman – not at that age, anyway.

Gita Choksi: The real showman of the Hectics was actually Bruce Murray. Freddie was a great musician, but he was very much of an introvert.

Subash Shah: Yes, Freddie was very shy. But he was also “a born show-off”, and his entire personality would transform once he was performing. To give you one example: one evening, as teenagers, we were walking on a beach in Zanzibar. Music was playing and Freddie spontaneously started to do the twist, the popular dance move of the time. It was such a mesmerising performance that the next thing we knew was that a group of conservative local girls, wearing burqas, had formed a circle around Freddie and began to twist with him. That was the power of his showmanship, even back then.

Farang Irani: From what I’ve heard, that’s how Freddie remained all his life: a great showman on stage, but very shy in real life. A kind of dual personality.

Freddie Mercury was considered not just a great musician, but also a great songwriter. Did he write any songs in school? Or poetry?
Farang Irani: No, but he was very good at art. He was the great favourite of our art teacher, Mrs Blossom Smith. If he hadn’t become a rock musician, I think he would have grown up to be a successful artist or fashion designer.

Bruce Murray: Yes, he was always very artistic. When he first came to England he went to art school and, boy, he could really paint. I still remember the wonderful sketches he used to show me. In those days he seemed to be more proud of his art exam certificate than his music.

Did he display any signs of future greatness back then? Any indications of the shape of things to come?
Victory Rana: To be quite frank, no. Yes, Freddie had a lot of talent, and he was very passionate about his piano playing. But who could say, based on that, that he’d grow up to be the megastar that he became?

Farang Irani: His parents were good solid middle-class Parsis with middle-class values. His father was an accountant in Zanzibar, and he wanted Freddie to become an accountant or a lawyer.

Bruce Murray: If only I knew how big he would become, I would have applied for the post of his manager.

Subash Shah: Our teachers would have summed up Freddie by saying he had potential but should try harder. How wrong they would have been!

By the way, there’s a legend floating around that after St Peters, Freddie Mercury was put into Cathedral School in Mumbai (then Bombay) – which is interesting because it means he’d have been a classmate of Salman Rushdie, whose novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, features an Indian rock idol named Ormuz Cama, obviously based on Freddie. Is this legend true?
Gita Choksi: That’s a great story, but it’s definitely not true.

Subash Shah: After Panchgani, Freddie went to school in Zanzibar for a couple of years. And then there was a revolution in Zanzibar, and Freddie’s family migrated to England.

So what did the other members of the Hectics go on to do in life?
Victory Rana: I did something very different from Freddie: I joined the Nepalese Army, trained at Sandhurst, and finally retired as a Major General. I was posted with the UN Peacekeeping Force in Lebanon and Cyprus at various points in my career. My last assignment was as the Nepalese ambassador to Myanmar.

Farang Irani: My family ran a well-known Irani restaurant in Bombay called Ideal, in the Fort area, so after school I joined the family business. I later moved to Pune and started a restaurant called Bounty Sizzlers, which I currently run. [Note: Farang Irani has since passed away.]

Bruce Murray: After school, I came to England and worked at various dead-end jobs, but I also played in various bands part-time. Then I got married, and that put an end to any ambitions of becoming a famous rock star – though I still continued to play in various bands. About 30 years ago I opened a music store called The Music Centre in Bedford. My son now has a band of his own called the Quireboys, which has had a couple of hits over the years, and I help manage the band.

And what about the fifth member of the Hectics, Derrick Branche? What did he go on to do?
Bruce Murray: Derrick also migrated to England in the mid-’60s, and became an actor. He acted in lots of popular TV serials, including The Jewel in the Crown, and also in films like My Beautiful Laundrette. He now lives in Goa, but he’s become a recluse. We’ve tried to get in touch with him, but that’s like trying to fly to the moon.Freddie Mercury with Mary Austin, his one-time girlfriend and long-time close friend.

Did you ever meet up with Freddie Mercury in later years? Had he changed a lot? Or was he still the same Freddie inside, despite everything?
Bruce Murray: I used to meet up with Freddie quite often in London, even after he had become famous. I remember, he once asked me for dinner with Elton John. But then he was a busy guy, touring the world and all that, and I didn’t want to impose myself, so we drifted apart. The last time I saw Freddie was in Las Vegas, in the late ’70s. I heard him playing at one of the casinos, and I went backstage to see him. He said, “Hey, what the f**k are you doing here?" and he seemed genuinely pleased to see me. So we chatted for a while, and then he was gone. Our lives had changed. I never saw him again.The rockstar Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the rock group Queen, during a concert in Paris, France, in September 1984. (Photo credit: AFP/Jean-Claude Coutausse).

Gita Choksi: Well, Derrick Branche had a rather different experience. He went to see one of Freddie’s concerts in England, and after the show he went backstage to say hello. But Freddie apparently looked right through him. Maybe that was part of his thing of not wanting to let out the fact of his Indian origins, because he thought it would hurt his career.

Subash Shah: It’s strange, I had heard about the famous Freddie Mercury, but I had absolutely no idea that he was my childhood buddy, Freddie Bulsara. I didn’t find out about that until long after he was dead. And that’s the case with many of our school friends. We had absolutely no idea that he was Freddy Mercury!

Victory Rana: Yes, that’s true. After school I lost track of Freddie. And given the very different kind of life that I led in the army, I’d never even heard of Freddie Mercury. It was only after he died, in 1991, that someone sent me a magazine cutting about Freddie, which happened to mention my name as one of the Hectics. It was only then that I learned his whole story. I went out and bought a couple of Freddie Mercury CDs, I remember. I could hardly recognise the face on the cover, but the voice sounded exactly like the Freddie I knew from our Hectics days.

We now know that Freddie Mercury was gay – something that he himself apparently didn’t know for sure till he was in his 30s. But did anyone have any inkling of it back then?
Gita Choksi: His old art teacher, Mrs Blossom Smith – who was especially fond of him, by the way – always thought he was slightly effeminate. But she thought it was part and parcel of his artistic temperament.

Farang Irani: You might say he seemed a bit of a sissy, and in school plays he often played the women’s roles. He also had a habit of calling the boys darling, which was slightly shocking back then. But those were very different times, and there were many things we didn’t understand back then.

Note: I finally managed to track down the fifth, reclusive, member of the Hectics, Derek Branche, who now lives quietly in Goa. When I sent him a message through mutual friends, saying I wanted very much to meet him, I got a cryptic message back, saying: “Freddie was a lovely man. Highly talented, fun-loving and a good friend. But I don’t like to talk about anybody, dead or alive.”

Freddie Bulsara left St Peter’s (and the Hectics) in 1962. Two years later, he migrated with his family to England, where he did a diploma in graphic design. Then, after having played with bands like Ibex and Sour Milk Sea, he finally joined a band called Smile, and persuaded them to change their name to Queen, and give themselves a makeover. By then he had already officially changed his last name to Mercury – after his ruling planet.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Freddie Mercury's modest London home gets blue plaque

Freddie Mercury's modest London home gets blue plaque


Neighbours in suburb of Feltham remember noisy neighbour who became flamboyant Queen star
Brian May and Kashmira Cooke, Freddie Mercury’s sister, at the unveiling. 

Photograph: Stuart C Wilson/Getty ImagesMaev Kennedy Thursday 1 September 2016 15.15

The present occupier of Freddie Mercury’s bedroom in the London suburb of Feltham, nine-year-old Daria Mihailuka, was playing it cool amid the hordes of media camped on her narrow street of brick and pebble-dash terraced houses. “I’m not like his greatest fan,” she said of the late Queen singer. “I’m more into modern music – I like Justin Bieber.”

But Daria said Mercury’s trajectory, from the springboard of the small suburban bedroom to one of the biggest pop stars in the world, was an inspiration. “I want to be a singer-actor-dancer, and I am a good achiever – my vocal skills can get better – and he shows me that you can start out just right here and become a huge star.”
The house in Feltham. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex/Shutterstock

The house’s owner, family friend Ray Edwards, shook his head in amazement at the coterie assembled on his small front garden: Mercury’s sister Kashmira Cooke; the new culture secretary, Karen Bradley; former arts council chair and English Heritage blue plaque panel member Sir Peter Bazalgette; and, towering over them and the garden wall lined with cameras, Queen guitarist Brian May and his silver mop of curls.

Fortunately Edwards is a serious fan. When Bohemian Rhapsody is blasting out too loud, Daria shouts down from her room: “Turn it down Ray!” He thought the estate agent was winding him up when he was told the Bulsara family – Freddie’s birth name was Farrokh Bulsara – had previously owned the house.

Although a paradise for plane spotters due to its proximity to Heathrow, even Feltham’s most loyal residents would hardly describe the west London suburb – where Mercury once had a holiday job washing dishes – as glamorous. On Thursday however, there was nearly as much excitement on Gladstone Avenue as when Mercury used to arrive in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce to visit his mother.

Mercury, the embodiment of flamboyance and effervescence, died in 1991 of an Aids-related lung condition, aged 45. Outside the Feltham home, Mercury’s immaculately dressed cousin Pouras Dastur remembered the neighbourhood’s reaction to the teenaged Mercury’s homemade, hand-embroidered velvet flared trousers: “Heads turned.” His sister remembers competing for the only bathroom with a brother whose hair was high maintenance even then.

Freddie Mercury. Photograph: Courtesy of Universal

Many neighbours well remember the family, and their occasionally noisy son. Carole and Derick Burgess bought their house in 1964, a month before the Bulsaras – still family friends – moved in two doors up, fleeing the revolution that had gripped their home island of Zanzibar.

On summer evenings they remember Mercury practising guitar in the back garden, or in his room with the windows wide open. Burgess is more of a modern jazz man, and remembers snapping to his wife: “Does he only know one chord? When is that boy going to learn to play that guitar?”

May also remembers the small back bedroom. He was another local boy, at one point living only a few hundred yards away, when he was introduced to the Ealing Tech art student through the singer of his first band, Smile. Mercury insisted they listen to a Jimi Hendrix track on his Dansette record player – the posh model with the autochanger. “Yeah, Jimi Hendrix, great,” May said, but Mercury forced them to listen to it again and again, bouncing around the place in excitement, analysing the sound and the production technique bar by bar. “That’s what we’re going to do. We’re gonna be a group,” Mercury assured him. “I was thinking, well … can you even sing?” May recalled.

As it turned out he could, with one of the most spectacular vocal ranges in pop music. “I won’t be a rock star, I will be a legend,” May remembered him saying. And that turned out to be true too.


Bazalgette, as a member of the blue plaques panel, pushed hard for the honour for the modest house and the immodest man, but he was pushing an open door: many of the others agreed that Queen’s music was “the soundtrack of our lives”.

The culture secretary nodded in agreement: the first number Bradley can remember watching on Top of the Pops was Bohemian Rhapsody, and the jukebox in her parents’ pub, the appropriately named Queen’s Head in Buxton, took more money from it than from all the other records together.

“This is a very happy occasion,” May said, “with a tinge of sadness – because he should be here.”