Freddie Mercury Makes His Debut With Pre-Queen Band
In 1969, 22-year-old Freddie Bulsara was nonetheless a couple of years away from changing into Freddie Mercury, frontman for Queen. But he was nicely on his strategy to stardom.
After graduating from London’s Ealing Art College in 1969, Mercury held a couple of miscellaneous jobs — at one level he labored as a baggage handler at Heathrow Airport, at one other he bought garments and scarves in Kensington Market together with his future bandmate Roger Taylor.
“I used to run it with this bloke, Freddie, who I knew because he regularly came to see Smile, the band Brian [May] and I were in at the time,” Taylor recalled to Reader’s Digest in 2020. “Back then, I didn’t really know him as a singer—he was just my mate. My crazy mate! If there was fun to be had, Freddie and I were usually involved.”
But Mercury had his sights set far past the market stalls. On Aug. 13 of 1969, he met Ibex, a component progressive, half heavy blues band from Liverpool who had solely simply performed their first present ever a couple of months prior in May. At that point, Ibex was made up of Mike Bersin on guitar, John Taylor on bass and Mick Smith on drums. Most importantly, they had been open to the thought of a brand new singer.
10 Days Later…
Just 10 days later, Mercury had realized the band’s set, plus provide you with a couple of concepts of his personal, and traveled as much as Bolton, Lancashire, the place he made his debut public efficiency.
“As a three-piece, we’d thought it was sufficient to play fairly basic music and not worry too much about stagecraft. Freddie was much better at putting on a show and entertaining people,” Bersin would later recall to Queen historian John S. Stuart. “That was pretty radical for us. I thought that’s what the liquid light show was for, you know. We make the music and the audience can watch the pretty-colored bubbles behind us. But Freddie was different. He was always a star. People used to pull his leg about it when he had no money, one pair of trousers, one T-shirt and one pair of boots. He’d look after them all really well and people would say, ‘Here comes Freddie, the star.'”
READ MORE: Is Freddie Mercury Rock’s Greatest Frontman?: Roundtable
It additionally helped that Mercury was, as Bersin put it, the “most musical” out of all of the band’s members.
“He was trained on the piano, and he could write on the black notes,” Bersin defined. “He said, ‘We’re never going to get anywhere playing all this three-chord blues crap, we’ll have to write some songs.’ A couple of things came out of it, but they’ve all vanished now.”
Just a few weeks later, Ibex performed their third and final present on Sept. 9 in Liverpool. Mercury moved on to a different band, Sour Milk Sea, named after the George Harrison tune, although this group additionally break up up inside a couple of months. It would all work out in the long run, after all, as Mercury would be part of Taylor and May in Smile, later to change into Queen.
Listen to Freddie Mercury Sing With Ibex in 1969
“Freddie knew where he wanted to go,” Bersin stated. “That’s why he was an international star. It wasn’t an accident. It happened because that’s what he wanted to be from the moment I first met him. He was a man with a goal and a drive.”
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A thread runs via all of it: a hard-won sense of individuality. Queen had been a band like no different.
Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso
