WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS
Some bands are born lucky. Even before they embarked on the dizzying ascent of the decade ahead, Queen’s birth in London, in the summer of 1970, was a flash of serendipity, a triumph of time and place. Warmed up by The Who, Zeppelin, Purple and Pink Floyd at the fag-end of the 60s, the rock scene was ready for bigger, louder, more; grandiosity, pomp, pageantry. In this new era, all of these qualities would be championed, just as they would have been ridiculed if Queen had been just a few years earlier or later out of the blocks. Of course, the band’s good fortune would stutter – and ultimately run out, in tragic fashion. But when Freddie Bulsara offered his services to the disintegrating London rock band Smile, he could not have been better placed.
It was February 1970. For a failing rock star, Bulsara, as Freddie Mercury was then known, had some strident opinions about the magic formula for success. As a hanger-on and associate of Smile since the late 60s – and singer with fellow long shots Ibex – the Zanzibar-born art student had watched Brian May and Roger Taylor labour to capitalise on their obvious talents, and was always ready with a critique of their shoe-staring, denimclad modus operandi. “I remember Freddie very much dressed like a rock star,” observed Brian May. “He was flicking a pompom around and being very flippant, saying: ‘Why don’t you present it like this?’ ‘Why don’t you dress like this?’”
Smile had come close (the band had signed to Mercury Records), but settled into inertia (the resulting EP had been shelved), and when singer Tim Staffell left the band that month, Bulsara suddenly had the opportunity to put his money where his motormouth was. “Freddie was there, saying: ‘I’ll sing and I’d do that’, May recalled. “And we gradually went: ‘Okay.’”
Smile’s new frontman, his bandmates later admitted, talked a better game than he sang. Taylor recalling his “strange vibrato, which some people found distressing”. But that June, as the new line-up debuted at a Red Cross charity gig in Truro, Bulsara had already changed the dynamic. “Smile was fairly self-indulgent,” May told NME. “Freddie was the one who was first aware of playing to an audience rather than playing to yourself.”
Perhaps anticipating his name in lights, Bulsara now recast himself as Freddie Mercury, a change that May recalled transformed him into “this god”. The Smile moniker would have to go, too. The threesome (and.
