'He says, 'This is really good-it's great how.you're aware of building up atmospheres and bringing them down. In early 1969, Staffell introduced his new friend to the band. 'At that stage, he's just kind of an enthusiast,' May told Mojo in 1999.

It didn't happen.'Īfter transferring to Ealing Art College, where he earned his diploma in Art and Graphic Design, he met fellow student Tim Staffell, then the bassist in a band called Smile alongside guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor.

'My husband and I thought it was a phase he would grow out of and expected he would soon come back to his senses and return to proper studies. 'Most of our family are lawyers or accountants, but Freddie insisted he wasn't clever enough and wanted to play music and sing,' his mother told The Telegraph in 2012, laughing. But he was soon caught up in the era of Swinging London. Having left Farrokh behind in Mumbai, though still using Bulsara as his last name, Mercury enrolled at Isleworth Polytechnic in West London, studying graphic design. As a result, the Bulsara family fled to London, eventually settling in nearby Feltham, Middlesex. Mercury returned to Zanzibar in 1963, the same year that British colonial rule ended, leading to a revolution on the island the following year, with poor Africans targeting the wealthier Indian population. Normally it would have been 'Oh, God, you know, it's just ghastly.' But with Freddie somehow it wasn't. 'It was accepted that Freddie was homosexual when he was here. 'It simply wasn't something boys did in those days,' she said in Lesley-Ann Jones' Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury. Another student, Janet Smith, now a teacher at the girls school, remembered him as 'an extremely thin, intense boy, who had this habit of calling one 'darling,' which I must say seemed a little fey.' Peter's where questions over Mercury's sexuality began to form.

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