This Was the Real Life: The Tale of Freddie Mercury by David Evans & David Minns

Author:David Evans & David Minns [Evans, David & Minns, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783016358
Google: NCOuzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Tusitala Press
Published: 2008-11-15T23:30:05.906316+00:00

DAVID EVANS

Incredible although this may sound, it is often hard, being so un-famous oneself, to have famous friends. I’m blessed with many friends, thank God, some of whom are famous and some who aren’t and those of them who are will I trust forgive me when I say that I’m not sure I want them to be any more famous than they already are because I’m not sure I could cope.

I knew I had to stand back from Freddie, keep a respectful distance. Life around him after Bohemian Rhapsody had taken on a November 5th quality. Many of those who knew him, who were involved with him, had seen the blue touch paper of his particular firework being lit and, obeying the instructions on the box, we had retired safely. Others were caught in the blast, spectacular though it was, of his ascent to the dizzying heights of international fame. There was a volcanic, pent-up urgency about the quality of Freddie’s ambition and I refer not only to his professional goals but to his private ones.

Though I may have taken my propensity for worrying about other people too far in my life, I have never been able to manipulate my perspectives to exclude them. To be specific, I was very aware of what Mary Austin was being put through because of Freddie’s insistence on pursuing his friendship with my flatmate David to its ultimate limit. As I had thought, Freddie and David needed their own space and it wasn’t one which included Mary. Mary had proved and was to prove over time, one of the enduring foundations which supported not only Freddie Mercury, star but also Freddie Mercury, man. The two incarnations were very different, by the way. I had to withdraw from being too close to Freddie for to have remained in proximity would have courted disaster for our friendship. I would have had to comment, to criticise and to censure. I didn’t because I knew I didn’t have to. Freddie knew what was happening only too well.

By this time, David had moved out of the flat in Putney, Freddie had moved from 100 Holland Road, he to Stafford Terrace and Mary to her own flat and I had spent a fateful summer in Scotland, in the summer of 1976.

In Edinburgh, my boss John Reid, prompted by an inspiration from the late and sadly missed David Bell, then of Scottish Television, had sponsored the launch of The Playhouse Theatre as a major rock venue. In my naive enthusiasm, I had encouraged and supported the venture. Naive? Yes. I had never run a theatre and certainly could not have envisaged the stress and problems that being responsible for opening one could have entailed. Needless to say all John’s acts played the venue Elton, Queen, Kiki, Kevin Ayers … Whether it was sheer fatigue, disillusionment with the music business, disappointment as to the behaviour of several of my illustrious associates, I can’t say after such a long time but whatever the combination of factors, I decided to jack in my career, such as it was.

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