David Evans - FREDDIE MERCURY--What He Left Behind: The Story of What Happened after the death of Freddie Mercury

by

November 2003

Copyright 2003 All rights reserved.

Peter Freestone, Uruguayska 77/21, 120 00 PRAGUE 2

David Evans, 12 Ripplevale Grove, London N1 1HU

First edition published in 2003 by TUSITALA
12 Ripplevale Grove, London N1 1HU

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be re-produced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
Freestone, Evans

What He Left Behind ...

ISBN 0 9533341 1 2
eBook ISBN 9781783016303

Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Eastbourne.
All type and graphic layouts created and produced by Melinda Sandell

Please contact .

The authors moral rights are hereby asserted.

e:book conversion created in 2015.

Cover shows Freddie with Miko, 1989.

The authors would like to thank Nigel Quiney for everything but also for scanning photos for us, the late Ann Christe and the late Margaret Gorman for their invaluable assistance, contribution, encouragement and help, also Pavel Postransky for invaluable editorial and for scanning many of the photographs, to Mike Beare for testing the recipes. Thanks to Roger Bromiley for the photo of Freddies statue in Montreux and to Ann Ortman for the cover photo of Freddie and Miko.

Thanks to David Minns for the permission to reproduce Freddies doodle of the candle.

This book is for my late father, Leslie who finally
retired in 2003. Its the only way he
would ever stop working.
Another part of the Freddie Mercury jigsaw has been
set in place.

Prague. April 2003

On the 8th May, 2002, it was announced in the press that a survey of more than thirty-one thousand people, a survey ratified by the Guinness Book of Records, had revealed that BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY was the favourite British single record of all time. Freddie Mercury would have been thrilled.

At the respective awards ceremony, the honour was collected by Brian May and Roger Taylor although I had to remark that at no point during the telecast of the occasion did the commentator mention that the song had been written not by QUEEN but by Freddie. I know both Brian and Roger would have been mortified at this blatant omission and of course it set me thinking.

Then, in October 2002, the BBC fielded a programme which encouraged the public to vote from a pre-selected list of candidates to nominate The Greatest Briton ... I was astonished to see the name of Freddie Mercury included in fifty-eighth position. If I was astonished, Freddie would have been flabbergasted. Probably infuriated. And then he would have laughed.

These are just two instances of how Freddie refuses to leave the building, let alone the planet. Unable to escape him, I have found myself thinking constructively more and more about what has happened to Freddie since his death. I now live in Prague, the heart of romantic Bohemia and, oddly, I find that Freddie and his world-famous RHAPSODY are even more alive here than before his death. Until 1989 and the fall of the Communist regimes all over Europe, Queen were never heard. Well, not legally. Now, as well as maintaining his established popularity, Freddie seems to be currently appealing to an entirely new set of young people who all over Europe are avidly listening to a new mix of Queen-Vanguards FLASH GORDON.

In my first book, FREDDIE MERCURY, An Intimate Memoir, which was initially printed in a private edition of one thousand copies as MISTER MERCURY, I thought that I had said all I had to say about my experiences working and living with Freddie. Since then, over the past five years, so many people have approached me to ask when the next volume will be available. Until now, I have always told them that there is nothing left to say because the first book was never meant to be such. I always saw it as three years of therapy, talking with David Evans and drawing out my innermost thoughts, many of which, kept private and un-discussed, had confused and troubled me. Then, even talking for too long about Freddie had been upsetting. In the end, I had had to be persuaded to undertake what could have been a painful retrospective. The persuasion centred on the prospect that, faced with the story in black and white and being able to read it and consider it as a whole, that I might make some sort of sense of the possible opportunities which someone elses life and death had afforded me.

I wasnt expecting the life that had happened to me to happen and I certainly could never even have dreamed that it could happen at all. Anyone touched by any close contact with a public and celebrated life is affected, some in good ways, some in bad. The jury was still out on what effect living and working with Freddie had had on me.

After that initial process of sorting through was over, I realised that I could indeed publish my sorted-through experiences not only for my own benefit but hopefully for the edification and enjoyment of tens of thousands of Freddies and Queens fans throughout the world. In fact, it has been proved essential to the fans that I addressed my thoughts in book form. Five years later, I have to acknowledge that there is even more to say, although now I find I am talking about a legend as much as a life.

I have discovered that modern legends do not just happen, they are made and that once made, these legends have to be maintained. Excessive wear and tear has to be kept to an absolute minimum and any peripheral tarnish has to be treated immediately with the most severe restoration.

Control was a byword by which the living Freddie had always run his own life and dealings, in the business, artistic and social arenas and the element of control was still to figure supremely in his afterlife. Although he was no longer present, his presence was still felt. Perhaps I can best explain by drawing a parallel with the twin towers of New Yorks World Trade Centre. The gap on the Manhattan skyline is now as significant as when there was none. In their destruction, the towers became more important than any other buildings either in New York or even the rest of the world, to date, and far more important than they themselves ever were when they were standing.

Caused by a rabid virus as dangerous as the terrorism which brought about 9/11, Freddies physical absence seemed to tower as tall as his physical presence although we, Joe Fanelli, Jim Hutton and I, were deemed to no longer have a part to play even in the shadow of that absence.

More simply put, it appears that Freddie became more famous after his death. Comparing the growth of his own legend to that of Elvis Presley, John Lennon and more recently Kurt Cobain, it seems that death works its own kind of magic, excuse the play on words. There is no mortal source to make any more mistakes. Good and bad are frozen in time, best and worst left adrift. In life where it seems that only the bad matters, in death it would seem that the good ultimately triumphs. After twelve years of afterlife, the Freddie Mercury who exists in the public mind now appears to have transcended even the music for which he was justly and originally famous. So many people now know his name but not necessarily the music which made him famous.

Although, for himself, he thought that eating, sleeping and shaving were the worst wastes of time, the planning of the elaborate menus and bountiful drinks he generously gave at his dinner parties was very important to Freddie, especially when Garden Lodge, his London home and pride and joy, was fully available to him to celebrate the great good fortune he never took for granted. As much as for being a composer, a singer and a performer, I think he would have been just as pleased to have been remembered as a bon viveur. It takes a rare talent to enjoy life as Freddie once did!