My childhood spent rubbing shoulders with rock stars
While most kids make do with imaginary friends, Tiffany Murray shared her early years with Bowie and Queen. She takes us on a trip down memory lane
Many of us grew up with posters of rock stars on our bedroom wall. But Tiffany Murray grew up with rock stars in her back garden.
During her formative years in the early 1970s, Tiffany lived in music studio complexes and rehearsal rooms where her mother Joan worked as a Cordon Bleu chef, feeding stars from Queen and David Bowie to Ozzy Osbourne and Simple Minds.
Now 56, and living in Gloucestershire, writer Tiffany was five when, in the early 1970s, her mother Joan found herself struggling to make ends meet and turned their Herefordshire vicarage into a rehearsal space. Their first booking came from an up-and-coming band by the name of Queen.
“Queen weren’t particularly famous then. But Freddie Mercury looked so striking, you couldn’t keep your eyes off him and what he wore,” says Tiffany.
“He had that aura. I remember Brian May being so tall and beautiful as well.”
Tiffany would sneak into the house – she and Joan had vacated to sleep in the adjacent pottery – and hide halfway up the stairs to watch Freddie play the piano and sing. On another occasion, she took ‘show and tell’ to the next level, looking on with her classmates as Freddie ate an egg.
Queen, she says, were polite, quiet and appreciative of Joan’s culinary skills. Ozzy Osbourne, however, wreaked havoc.
“I woke in the night to this terrible noise,” says Tiffany. “My bedroom looked out over the graveyard and I could see a naked man in the moonlight, dancing on the graves and yelling. My initial reaction was fear. But then I thought he was so joyous, dancing around, off his head. He was just really enjoying himself.”
However, Joan wouldn’t stand for Ozzy causing chaos – and the curtaint-witching neighbours had already voiced their disapproval at bands coming and going – so she demanded that his entourage get him under control. Afterwards, Ozzy was so contrite that he arranged an apology that was every child’s dream.
“This huge Harrods van arrived. Because they’d freaked out about a child crying, I had this van full of child’s toys which my mum was actually more angry about than the dancing in the graveyard – because it was spoiling me. I still have the green hippos.”
A beloved dog puppet took centre stage when little Tiffany had an almighty meltdown in front of Queen.
In 1974, when Tiffany was seven, Joan was offered a job as in-house chef at the legendary Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire. Since the owners had five children between them, and a sprawling outdoor space, these were halcyon days for Tiff.
One evening at Rockfield, where Freddie had been singing “Galileo” for days on end, Tiffany helped her mother to prepare Queen’s starter, a king prawn cocktail in a wine glass. Then she sneaked into the forbidden territory of their studio while their backs were turned, in search of a missing Great Dane called Cleo. Upset by her failure to find Cleo, she ran back to her mother and had an ear-splitting tantrum in the dining room where Queen were trying to eat in peace.
“Queen were staring at their plates and looking away while I was doing one of those really hysterical frozen-bodied howls,” she says. Joan’s boyfriend, music producer Fritz Fryer, scooped Tiffany up and took her away.
At this stage, Tiffany was too young to understand who these musicians were. “They were just adults to me, it meant very little.”
She wasn’t excited by a band’s appearance at Rockfield until the thrilling day when chart stars Showaddywaddy showed up.
It was the first time she ever approached a band for an autograph – and she found the experience so nerve-racking it was also the last.
“But then when I was 11 or 12, I had this realisation of who these people were,” she says. So the appearance of David Bowie was a source of enormous excitement.
“I remember this girlhood hysteria. We would be there knowing he was maybe five steps away, or 50 metres, depending on what studio he was in. Simple Minds were there as well and David would pop into their studio. We asked our parents, ‘Can we go and see him?’ and were told no. We obeyed. But I did serve him in the dining room. All he wanted was milk.
“My mum would have these big buffets on a Saturday and everyone from the record company would come down and he’d just be sitting on the end with all this food piled up on the table and not touching anything. Just sipping his milk. It was the milk that kept him alive in the 70s.”
Bowie wasn’t the only star with no interest in food. Motorhead’s manager offered Joan more money if she could convince the band to eat.
Though legendary hellraiser and Motorhead bass player Lemmy dismissed her suggestion of boeuf bourguignon or a roast as ridiculous – they all hated any kind of sauce – he agreed to eat her food if she downed half a pint of Jack Daniel’s.
The redoubtable Joan was not the kind of woman to decline a challenge. But halfway through, she had to spit the whiskey out, so she negotiated a compromise.
Lemmy agreed to eat bacon sandwiches in Mother’s Pride bread with the crusts cut off. And Joan incorporated Jack Daniel’s into any dish she could. “She did a zabaglione that was a bit runny and brown but Lemmy seemed to like it.”
On another occasion, Tiffany and the Rockfield children watched Top Of The Pops with Julian Cope, lead singer of The Teardrop Explodes.
“I remember Julian wandering around the fields in a white sheet singing The Sound Of Music. One day, he came back from Top Of The Pops filming with a tape of the band’s performance which he watched in our living room.
“He was just sitting on the carpet like a little kid, watching himself on Top Of The Pops. And we were all watching him.”
This month saw the launch of Tiffany’s memoir, My Family And Other Rock Stars, which details her childhood and lifts the lid on some of the world’s most iconic musicians.
“It was normal for me at the time, but looking back it was extraordinary,” she says.
I had a screaming tantrum and Queen just stared at their plates
■ My Family And Other Rock Stars by Tiffany Murray (Fleet, £22) is out now