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recall any group coming together from the auditions.
    Freddie graduated from Isleworth Polytechnic with the precious A-level he needed for art school. But it was not easily acquired. His coursework painting of a crucifixion scene had been finished with a little help from his friend. ‘I ended up doing some of the figures for him,’ admits Patrick Connolly. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that.’
    By Easter of 1966 Dusty Springfield’s ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’ was blasting out of the pub jukebox where ‘Fred, Ade and Bri’ had once held their lunchtime music critique sessions. Three months later, British blues singer John Mayall would release his Bluesbreakers album, showcasing the prodigious talents of guitarist Eric Clapton. On 10 December 1966, Freddie and friends attended Isleworth Polytechnic’s Christmas College Dance. The group booked to play were Clapton’s new outfit Cream. They were paid £600 and had to be dragged out of the nearby pub during the interval to complete the second half of their set.
    Before they both left to take up their places at art school, Freddie and Alan Hill accompanied two female friends to a college party. Once there, fuelled by loud music and booze, Freddie’s attention was increasingly drawn to another female guest. His date for the night was not best pleased. Freddie’s ardour, not to mention his carefully teased hair-do, was dampened when she emptied a pint ofbeer over his head. ‘The extrovert butterfly’ was starting to emerge from his cocoon.
    On 16 December another influence crashed into Freddie Bulsara’s life in the form of black American guitarist Jimi Hendrix, who made his UK TV debut on the pop show Ready Steady Go . It offered suburban England its first sighting of a musical force of nature. Just three days after arriving in the capital, Hendrix, then a complete unknown, had jammed with the house band at the Speakeasy club. Here, he’d torn into a version of The Troggs’ pop hit ‘Wild Thing’ and a cover of the folk-rock standard ‘Hey Joe’, splattering both songs with wild solos and howling feedback.
    Within weeks, word of Hendrix’s revelatory appearance had spread among the capital’s musicians. In London, Hendrix recruited an English drummer and bassist to form the The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Paul McCartney and John Lennon were among the musicians crowding London night spots such as Blaises and the Bag o’ Nails that summer watching Hendrix make, to quote one eyewitness, ‘everyone’s fillings fall out’. In October, Hendrix joined Cream onstage at London’s Regent Street Polytechnic. Earlier in the year, the words ‘Clapton is God’ had been spray-painted on a wall near a North London train station. That night, though, in Clapton’s words, ‘Hendrix beat me, hands down!’
    Freddie’s attraction to Jimi Hendrix was instant: his playing, his clothes, his hair, his colour, his music … everything about Jimi was fascinating. ‘He really had everything any rock ’n’ roll star should have – style, presence …’ said Mercury later. ‘He’d just make an entrance and the whole place would be on fire. He was living out everything I wanted to be.’
         
    Brian May’s house isn’t the most ostentatious in the country lane. That accolade goes to his next-door neighbour, an Arab sheik, whose property is flanked by forbidding gates and a state-of-the-art security camera. May’s own nineteenth-century country retreat, in the same Surrey village of Wyndlesham that Sarah Ferguson,Duchess of York calls home, is less imposing. But then as the guitarist often says, ‘I’m not very good at being a rock star.’
    It is June 1998, May has a solo album to promote, but will patiently submit to the usual round of questions about Queen and, especially, their late singer Freddie Mercury. Today, he will admit that, yes, he does still have dreams about Freddie, and will pinpoint the exact seat on