Freddie Mercury by Freestone Peter

Author:Freestone, Peter [Freestone, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Music Sales
Published: 2010-01-06T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

I am suddenly reminded that one of my purposes in writing this book has been to attempt to dispel some of the more outlandish rumours which have become associated with the life of this sometimes very ordinary man whose own life unintentionally touched the lives of millions. I could have written a whole book merely by dissecting all the other books which have been written and refuting the incorrect assertions and the falsehoods, whether intentional or not. Rather than be so schoolmasterly, I have decided that one of the ways to best achieve my aim is to go into some detail about Freddie’s everyday life as he lived it. In thinking about this final section, I am primarily reminded about Freddie’s contradictory attraction to conflict. I don’t mean confrontation but the sort of conflict which only he instigated. It seemed to be a need which permeated almost every aspect of his life. It was almost as though he needed a fight to jump-start his motor so that he could get to grips with living. Like Don Quixote, another legend, Freddie was quite capable of dreaming up windmills to tilt at. I suppose, therefore, I was his Sancho. As he always said to me, “You can never say that life with me is boring.”

That much is true but, as you will now see, life with Freddie could at times be very predictable. As much as he disliked being so, he was inevitably wrapped up in a cocoon by his mere circumstances and required a confrontation of one sort or another to start the day and connect him to a real world.

Luckily, most days, all that was required was a quick flick through the newspapers. We regularly used to get the Sun, the Mirror, the Mail, the Express and the Guardian, the broadsheet which the house glanced at, although Joe, to give him his due, was the one who would study its columns in depth.

One of the first jobs we had in the morning was to go through the papers on the off-chance that something had slipped through without Roxy Meade from Queen’s PR company – Scott Riseman Lipsey Meade – notifying us. When something unauthorised was found, Freddie would come out with some remark like, “Not that old chestnut!”

By the mid-Eighties there was little about Queen or Freddie that hadn’t already been published in one format or another. On the subject of the press and its organs, Freddie never wasted too much emotional time. The papers were just something that appeared everyday. He didn’t particularly follow anything that happened on the news, either in the press or on television. Very rarely did he specifically ask for the television to be tuned in for the news. I think in his opinion, if a news story was important enough, television programmes would be interrupted so that the public could be kept abreast.

As far as representatives of the press were concerned, Freddie knew that if he spoke to any of them off the

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