Is This The Real Life? Read Free

on a high. After an earlier number 2 album, Sheer Heart Attack , the final date of their latest tour at a 6,000-seat venue in Barcelona has sold out in twenty-four hours.
    Inside the paper is an interview with Queen, but for one ex-Isleworth Polytechnic student, there is something oddly familiar about the photographs of Freddie Mercury. The photographer has captured Freddie’s popular habit of sucking his lower lip to conceal his top front teeth. Despite the rock-star hair and clothes, it is an immediate giveaway. ‘That was when it clicked that it was Fred Bulsara,’ remembers his old college friend. ‘That nervous tic was even more of a distinct trademark than the maroon blazer.’
    Just a few months before Freddie made his UK stage debut in The Kitchen , his family had arrived in England for the first time. Farrokh Bulsara was born on 5 September 1946 in Zanzibar City on Unguja, the largest of Zanzibar’s two islands. A protectorate of the British Empire since the late nineteenth century, Zanzibar was once the epicentre of the African slave trade; its prime industry had since become the export of spices.
    Freddie’s father Bomi worked as a High Court cashier for the British governor. His wife Jer had joined him in Zanzibar from Gujarat, Western India. Both were Parsee Indians, followers of Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s oldest religions. Many Parsees had fled to the Indian subcontinent centuries before to escape persecution in their original home of Persia. A thriving Parsee community had grown up on Zanzibar. Bulsara’s birth date fell on the Parsee New Year’s Day, and the name Farrokh was especially fashionable in the religious community. As a young boy, the future Freddie Mercury was initiated into the faith with the traditional Naojote ceremony involving the recitation of ancient prayers and a bathing ritual.
    As the family of a senior civil servant the Bulsaras enjoyed a comfortable standard of living in Zanzibar City’s ancient StoneTown district. They employed domestic staff, including an ayah (nanny) for their young son and his baby sister Kashmira, who was born in 1952. ‘By Zanzibar standards, they were upper middle-class,’ recalls a family friend. ‘It was a common thing for folks in that income group to have some additional help. They weren’t rich, but Bomi had the income of a civil servant working for the colonial government, which meant he could afford an Austin Mini as his family car.’
    Freddie himself would claim to have had what he called a ‘sheltered’ upbringing, recalling the splendour of his uncle’s villa in Dar es Salaam in neighbouring Tanganyika: ‘I’d be woken by the servant. Clutching an orange juice, I’d literally step out on to the beach.’ In truth, Freddie’s paternal uncle, Manchershaw Bulsara, worked for the Zanzibar Electrical and Telegraph Company, also in Stone Town. Interviewed in 1974, Mercury would also scotch the notion that he’d enjoyed a privileged childhood, deploying the smoke-and-mirrors approach he liked to use when asked about his personal life: ‘It wasn’t as affluent as people think. But I suppose I give the appearance of being affluent. I love that.’
    At the age of five Freddie began attending the local missionary school, and showed the first glimmer of interest in music, singing for his family and guests at social functions. In early 1955, his life would undergo its first upheaval. Believing that his education on Zanzibar was limited, the Bulsaras enrolled their eight-year-old son at a boarding school in India. ‘I was a precocious child,’ said Mercury. ‘My parents thought boarding school would do me good.’
    Later, when asked by one interviewer why he was ‘so sensitively defensive of his Persian roots and the family ties he has in India’, Mercury snapped, ‘Oh, you sod. Don’t ask me about it. Oh, it’s so mundane.’ During his lifetime then, the finer details of his upbringing remained vague. Contrary to earlier