Love story made in Heaven
On the 25th anniversary of Freddie Mercury’s death, Jonathan deBurca Butler looks back on the exotic life of the Queen frontman, and on how he met and loved his Irish partner
TO celebrate his 39th birthday, Freddie Mercury hosted a fancy dress party in Munich. Hundreds of guests attended dressed as bikers and harlequins, sailors and harlots. Copious amounts of cocaine were consumed as partygoers tried to outdo each other’s uninhibited outrageousness. They quaffed from bottles of Bollinger served by men dressed in bare-buttocked briefs and danced themselves into near oblivion. Freddie himself roamed the decadent feast dressed like a Napoleonic figure in a navy blue military jacket. By his side was his latest beau and the man with whom he would spend the last seven years of his life, Jim Hutton from Co Carlow.
Everything about Freddie Mercury seemed exotic. His surname, his dress, his flamboyant onstage caper. Even his place of birth — he was born in Zanzibar in 1946 — seemed otherworldly. And yet according to those closest to him, Queen’s lead singer was a quiet and softly spoken gent who liked nothing more than spending time in his garden with a cup of coffee and his cats.
“He loved his cats,” recalled his now deceased boyfriend Hutton in a 2006 interview with then Sunday Times journalist Tim Teeman. “I’d get in from work. We’d lie together on the sofa. He would massage my feet and ask about my day.”
Hutton and Mercury met in a gay nightclub named Heaven. It was March, 1985 and Mercury was at the peak of his powers. Just one year beforehand, he had released Queen’s eleventh studio album which included hits Radio Ga-Ga and I Want to Break Free. According to Hutton, Mercury approached him at the bar, offered him a drink and asked him if “he had a big cock”, a standard greeting by all accounts. The same evening Mercury got his answer.
Shortly thereafter the couple embarked on a relationship that would last until Mercury’s untimely death 25 years ago this week. The burgeoning relationship was sometimes a little turbulent. “I saw him with another guy in Heaven [on another occasion] and we had a huge row,” recalled Hutton. “He told me he did it to make me jealous. Then one day I saw him leaving his Kensington flat with another guy and we had an argument. I told him he had to make his mind up. And he said, ‘OK’, he wanted to be with me. Deep down I think that he wanted to be secure with someone who was down to earth and not impressed by who he was.”
Hutton was brought up in a family of 10 children in Carlow. His father was a baker. After a brief period with an order of brothers, he became an apprentice hairdresser. When he met Mercury on that fateful night he was working at the Savoy Hotel. It was not long before he moved into the star’s Georgian mansion, Garden Lodge, in south London where his was given a job as a gardener and handyman for a weekly wage of £600. That summer, Hutton was backstage as Queen blew the socks off a global audience at Live Aid.
“I was gobsmacked,” he recalled. “You could feel the effect his stage presence had on the crowd. Afterwards, Elton [John] came out and said, ‘Bastard, you’ve stolen it’.”
But then Mercury had a habit of stealing the show. The singer’s path to stardom started when he was a child.
Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara. His father, Bomi (died, 2003), was Indian but of Persian heritage, hence Mercury’s attachment to the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism. Along with his wife Jer (who died, aged 94, on November 13), Bomi moved to Africa to work as a registrar for the colonial government.
Freddie, and his younger sister Kashmira, were raised in Zanzibar but at the age of eight Mercury was sent to St Peter’s boarding school in Bombay. It was here that he first made inroads into playing the piano; an instrument he would come to master.
Schoolmates later recalled how he could pluck a tune from the radio and copy its melody almost instantly. It was also at school that he became known as Freddie. The new surname would come later.
Almost immediately after his return to Zanzibar he was forced to flee. Independence in 1963 was followed by a revolution. Wealthy Indians were targeted by the largely poor African population in riots that swept the country. The Bulsaras moved to London in 1964 and settled in Feltham, not far from Heathrow Airport. Mercury enrolled at Isleworth Polytechnic where he studied graphic design, but he spent most of his time on music and was involved in several relatively unsuccessful bands.
“He would write songs from an early age,” his mother recalled in a 2011 interview with The Telegraph. “Once when I went into his bedroom at our home in Feltham, I told him
‘I stopped a clock Freddie had given to me: the time was 12 minutes to 7’
I was going to clear up all the rubbish, including the papers under his pillow. But he said ‘Don’t you dare’. He was writing little songs and lyrics then and putting them under his pillow before he slept. It was more music than studying and my husband said he didn’t understand what this boy was going to do. I made him type some letters for jobs and when he posted the applications he said ‘I hope I don’t get these jobs’. The applications were for graphic design. Had he got one of those jobs, things would have been quite different. In the end, he thought it was too much because he was in his bedroom most of the time and the elderly neighbours were complaining about the noise and he decided to leave home.”
Fortunately, those job applications were unsuccessful. In early 1970, Mercury was introduced to guitarist Brian May and drummer Peter Taylor who at that point were members of a band called Smile. Mercury soon joined the pair and convinced them to change their name to Queen.
“It’s very regal obviously,” he said later, “and it sounds splendid. It’s