FREDDIE LIVES - PART 1
With his white satin pantsuits, black nail polish and outrageous campery, Freddie Mercury personified '70s excesses. In death he stands larger than life - and three stories high - as a new musical taps into the enduring appeal of Queen.By bBoY//yøΰηs//ThE BlAcK SAINT There he stands: that most endearing and endring of rock stars, Farrokh Bulsara, three storeys high and dominating the streetscape as you emerge from London's Tottenham Court Road tube station. Bulsara - Freddie Mercury - is now as big in death as he was in life, thanks to a new musical and the statue recently erected in his honour in London's West End.
Twelve years after he died from an AIDS-realated illness in 1991, Freddie - the only rock star born in Zanzibar - is big business again. Like Princess Diana, his flame grows brighter as his reality retreats.
Freddie - and his seminal band, Queen - will be remembered for many things: glam, camp, nail polish and mascara, humungorock and tighter-than-tight, slashed to the-navel satin pantsuits. They were excess in all areas.
"Freddie, obviously went completely AWOL, which is why he got that terrible disease," the band's guitarist Brian May told Mojo magazine in a retrospective of their Britannic Majesties.
"He wasn't a bad person, but he was utterly out of control for a while. In a way, all of us were out of control and... it scewed us up. I think the excess leaked out of the music into life and became a need. We were always tying to get to a place that has never been reached before."With their limos, huge entourages and rapacious appetities for pleasure, even their long-time publicist, Phil Symes, concedes his boys wre hard to handle.
"They were so confident that it often came across as being extremely arrogant. There were these four guys who played up the androgynous look with lots of make-up and black nail varnish. A lot of people couldn't handle them. The 'look' in the rock scene was tattered denims and long hair, then here comes Queen dressed in Zandra Rhodes satin threads. It was unheard of."
"Freddie had his own personal manager, assistants and a whole entourage of friends with him wherever he went. He was an extremely generous man, and he always loved to stage interesting parties."When quizzed about the infamous Queen party said to have featured dwarfs with bowls of cocaine strapped to their heads, Symes' eyes twinkle.
"The standard line we all say is: 'It might have happened, but I never saw it.' I can tell you of another party, though, where naked girls in painted-on suits served champagne and all the naked statues in the garden were alive."The flamboyant frontman himself loved the mystique that surrounded the group, the stories that became larger than life.
"You'd be surprised how much of it is exaggraged and blown up by the press just to make good copy," Freddie told Tony Parsons of New Musical Express in 1975.
"I would give them a bit of spice and they would add all the trimmings."It is 30 years since Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon released their first album, Queen, and for 28 years the quartet's mock aria, Bohemian Rhapsody, has bothered the top of magazine polls as an all-time favourite. But as long a Queen has been a rock 'n' roll colossus, they/it has been clawed at by the critics, especially the British music press, and it seems age has not wearied them. The latest Queen venture has not been spared.
Brian May and Roger Taylor's rock 'n' roll musical, We Will Rock You, written in collaboration with the humorist Ben Elton, was savaged by English theatre cirtics when it opened in London earlier this year. [Ed: Last year.] May insists he is not bothered.
"The critics always hated us," he says.
"Queen always pushed the boundaries just as we have done with this new production."Initially, however, May needed convincing to agree to a musical featuring Queen's songs.
"I hate most musicals, apart from West Side Story," he says.
"I just don't think they work. But I always thought our back catalogue contained songs that would be ideal for a show."Symes says We Will Rock You - which features 37 Queen songs - has
"opened up a whole new audience to the sounds of Queen"."Without a doubt the spirit of Freddie is alive in this show," he says.
We Will Rock You opens at Melbourne's
Regent Theatre on Thursday.