Thank you Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor – how my 1990s teenage self found somebody to love

The Guardian

23-03-2025

I am of a generation that had no name: we slipped down the crack between the spotty cheek of gen X and the well-moisturised buttock of the millennials. We are the last generation that will wow our grandchildren by explaining that we came of age completely without the internet. We wrote letters through secondary school; we replaced these with email when we got to university and wrote 15,000-word screeds to one another, which we still keep in files in our Hotmail accounts. Some of us ended up internet dating, but I have far more friends who settled down with their first or second love. We are neurotic, and depressive, but we didn't know it until recently.
The thing we do share with those who came after is that when it comes to music, we and our parents have no generation gap. The great songwriters of the 1960s soundtracked our childhoods in their best-ofs and their unfashionable 80s incarnations. In my house, the 'frog song' was given as much time as Sgt Pepper. Pop stars rose up like venerated family elders. Music was a communal activity; we were the cassette generation, and many families couldn't afford to fly. We took long car ferry trips to France for our holidays, listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue in the Volvo.
The most alienating part of the traditional teenager narrative, to me, is that which claims that, at a formative age, we want to listen to stuff our parents hate. This idea informs every music documentary ever made, and every pop origin story: it is the only explanation for the power that music holds in the life of the young. I do think this was true of the generations before mine. I have asked my own parents. But it was different when we came along. Our parents were the grooving boomers. It was felt, in your heart, and with your music, that you were always striving to catch up with them. It is entirely possible that we failed to achieve the necessary rebellion against our parents because of the deathless power of their record collection. We are the forerunners of those infants today, dressed in Joy Division Babygros, who live at home for ever.
My family moved from north London to rural Norfolk at the end of the 80s, around the time that Peter Mayle published A Year in Provence and many people were swapping their city houses for old barns in the middle of nowhere. My parents were both self-employed. My mother owned a vintage clothing shop called Arsenic and Old Lace, which she transferred from London to a small Norfolk town, renaming it Past Caring. My father was a journalist and went on to establish the world's leading magazine about potatoes: Potato Review. We left London in a snowdrift in February 1988 and drove our own removal van. If you look at our village, Guestwick, on Wikipedia today it says simply: 'Guestwick lies far from any high roads.' At our small primary in a neighbouring village – just 53 pupils – I was champion of a game called crab football, where players scuttled about, chest to the sky, on hands and feet, slamming a sponge ball into the wall.
The strange possessiveness over music, in the lives of the young, is complex and rooted in a sense of the emerging self. Even without a generation gap, you will still try to find your own. By 1991, things had changed for me: I was attending a girls' private secondary school 20 miles away in Norwich, on one of those assisted places that Tony Blair would go on to abolish. High on exam results, and low on the kind of jollity that generally surrounds girls' schools in the popular imagination – school musicals, tuck shops, hockey – Norwich high school was a dour place. I was a tall, rather fat child with a single, thin plait that I did on Tuesdays and slept in the rest of the week. My individuality was marked out only by non-regulation, cherry-red Dr Martens shoes.
I was very academic, and so tired out by my 6 am start for school, for seven years, that I never once did my homework at home. I completed it all in the library at lunchtime. After-school activities were out of the question, as there was only one bus home at 4pm. My mood was downbeat, but to be fair, so was everyone's.
I came of age in the 90s, and I must say I have a bit of a problem with the 90s, because I hate them. My biggest problem with the decade was something I discovered I shared with the musician Liz Phair, writer of the cult record Exile in Guyville, when I interviewed her 30 years later. When she spoke of it, the room span, and I felt the full force of the past: 90s irony.
No one lucky enough to have come of age in a different decade can truly understand 90s irony, and just how caustic it was. It is a taste, a smell, that cannot be picked up in historical revision of the decade and has been largely erased from social history – an entire way of living that might be summed up in the face of Mark Lamarr. In the 90s, the levels of irony in conversation among the young were exhausting. This was not communication; it was an exchange of taut, self-vetted opinion predicated on the understanding that one was not to express genuine enthusiasm about anything, even if one clearly loved it. In music – in Jarvis Cocker's pursed lips or Damon Albarn's feeling-free delivery – I felt a collective pressure to be joyless, which in retrospect seems so at odds with the flash, brash tone of the dominant musical culture. To create anything requires energy and joy, yet they all seemed so arch, so sneering, so over it. Perhaps it was fin de siècle ennui: after all, the secondhand nature of the music was lost on no one.
While in pop culture, particularly in the work of the Young British Artists, the ironic pose was all part of the art, it was quite another thing to live in this dead-eyed way as an adolescent, to be unable to express pleasure just at the point your own heart and mind were trying to unfold. The irony of the 90s was a cultural straitjacket for me; a kind of spiritual death when I was trying to come alive. It drove me inside myself at a tender age, and – without really knowing it at the time – my heart burned for something else: for middle-aged musicians from the 80s in jackets and jeans, and for the open-hearted, non-cynical pop times that had come before.
My childhood obsession with Queen began in early December 1991, when I had just turned 11, after Freddie Mercury died, and ended when I went to university in October 1999. A BBC documentary was made about it – before Queen's revival but at the start of a cultural interest in fandom – possibly because it was clear to the producer, Mark Cooper, that the obsession veered into deeper (one could say darker) territory than many teenage obsessions, and therefore provided an unsettling, comic extreme against which viewers could measure their own experience.
My own independent musical life began one night when I heard Queen's posthumous single These are the Days of Our Lives, sitting in front of Top of the Pops. I felt something within myself ignite when I looked up to see Freddie Mercury's cheeky, emaciated face in monochrome. While it was clearly the start of something for me – the start of the person I am now – it is entirely probable that the energy was driven by the sense of having just missed the boat, just missed the person. This is an energy, full of strange longing, that has driven my whole life.
A modern audience will struggle to understand how unpopular Queen were in the 90s. Through the continued power of the music press, who hated them, and a barely disguised homophobic distaste, they were written out of music history. In my scrapbook, I had a cutting from a broadsheet list of rock star earnings in 1992. It put Brian May at £1m per annum and Roger Taylor at a very modest £500,000 (John Deacon, a good investor, got a cool £2m and Freddie was down for £0 because he was dead). The Ben Elton musical We Will Rock You was the start of a gigantic change in their fortunes and, after the appalling 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen were making £40m a year. But when I was a child, no one spoke of the band. I met Taylor in 2011, for the piece which follows, and the band was not yet at the peak of their revival, still slightly bemused by the change in fortune and suspicious of the sudden critical praise.
In the 90s, Queen were so unfashionable that I ran my obsession with some shame around even my closest friends. God forbid I would have played them a song, or showed them one of my many VHS tapes. This secrecy produced a kind of intensity that makes me rather uncomfortable now.
By the time I was an adult – certainly by the time I was a journalist and sent to interview Taylor by Mark Ellen, in my first job at The Word – Queen felt more like old flames around whom were clustered the shadow, the memory, of all sorts of stronger feelings: shame, neurosis and love. Always meet your heroes, I say: it'll help you get over them.
When I interviewed Taylor, I had years of distance from the raw, painful times of yearning and I was a professional hack, yet the tone of this piece is unlike my others: oddly tender and involved. There is barely disguised eroticism in my descriptions – his wet hair, and my weird inference that he'd just got up – which I wasn't aware of at the time.
I interviewed him for the Guardian years later, in another of his big houses, and it's the only interview I've ever done where I finished my questions 25 minutes early and stared at the clock in panic. I rushed my questions, transported into a place of urgency and tension that may or may not have been outwardly obvious, perhaps because on some level I will always love him, and there will always be something getting in the way.
It was early December 1991, I'd just turned 11 and had no interest whatsoever in the charts. Pop music felt like growing up – it was vaguely embarrassing, to be honest, a bit like body hair. But as I sat in front of Top of the Pops that night, pretending not to be watching, it wasn't 2 Unlimited or Lisa Stansfield that caught my attention, or Simply Red with For Your Babies. It was a black-and-white video of a painfully thin man with big teeth wearing a patchwork waistcoat and singing a song called These are the Days of Our Lives. The thick cake makeup, the bird-like nose – Mercury looked like Joel Grey out of Cabaret. His frailty was at odds with his movement – he kept throwing his arms out in little bursts of energy, as though constrained by his own body. And he was grinning. What struck me about the video was its extraordinary lightness of touch. Here was an extremely sad song, yet the band communicated with little nods and smiles, as though they were having some private joke. I felt my skin prickle.
I recognised Mercury from the front page of the local paper a few days earlier and retrieved it from the bin. I didn't know what Aids was (but I knew all about 'gay' because of our Joe Orton phase). A Freudian analyst might have sensed the two great mysteries of life – sex and death – colliding for an 11-year-old in the figure of Queen's frontman. Whatever, I went into overdrive, collecting newspaper cuttings, charity leaflets, red ribbons; tapes and videos followed, many from a local car boot sale.
I struggled with Queen's image. My cheeks burned at the presence of Mercury's leather-clad crotch and onstage dry-humping, but for every overblown sexual gesture, there was a softer side – Brian May in his high-waisted jeans and too-short jacket, Roger Taylor acting up for the cameras, John Deacon with his bifro, looking painfully uncomfortable. This band was a really, really strange mixture. They were outrageous, yet they were straight; they were famously arrogant, but they spoke with soft, kind voices. The music was full of energy but often strangely unemotional, and I simply couldn't believe – as I worked my way through 20 years of hard rock, Byronesque storytelling, funk, disco, vaudeville, flamenco, pop and various alarming lapses of taste – that it all came out of the same four people.
At first, I didn't pay much attention to Roger Taylor – he always seemed to be flashing his teeth or flicking his sunglasses – but by the age of 15, he had become the throbbing centre of my world. He had a social conscience, which I liked in a man, and he'd do strange, idealistic things, like donate cash to Manchester United in a bid to hold off the planned Murdoch takeover. He wrote a few genuinely decent songs, including, as I later discovered, that first one that pulled me in, These are the Days of Our Lives.
Taylor was also the most 'available' member of the band, with a prolific, if chart-dodging, solo career. Between 1988 and 1998, he completed five solo projects. He was clearly making no money from them, but took himself out on the circuit anyway, playing tiny venues like the Waterfront in Norwich. Surprisingly, there were literally packs of teenagers in the front row of these gigs, most of them screaming girls of 18 or so. Taylor had always been good-looking – I once made a lino-cut of his face – but looking back, I wonder whether those girls had also been touched by the story of a band they'd 'only just missed', and inspired by the idea of wistful, independent discovery.
'I want him to know, even just for a matter of seconds, that I actually exist,' I wrote in my diary at 15. It's an odd experience reading over those journals now (there are seven of them) and recognising certain aspects of oneself but at the same time nothing at all. I wrote three or four letters to Taylor himself, care of the Queen fanclub – awkward, carefully wrought things which fell somewhere between Jane Austen and dull, academic analysis of his music (inexplicably, he never replied).
Eleven am, Saturday 25 June 2011. Roger Taylor's house in Cornwall. The gates open. I pass the indoor swimming pool with a vague sense of children's limbs happily splashing about within (the three members of Queen have 14 kids between them) and the row of wellies lined up at the front door. Standing in Taylor's front room, I study the Japanese lacquered piano (the far east was always big with Queen) and the strange, spherical ship's clock on the coffee table, its numbers magnified by a thick glass face. I hear the familiar 'Rod Stewart after 20 Bensons gone posh' voice in the corridor.
I'd love to say that I fall on the carpet in a swoon when Roger Taylor enters the room, but that's not the way it happens. The fact is, if you really loved your pop star, you'll have used a hell of a lot of intellectual energy building an astonishingly accurate picture of them. Years later, it puts you on an equal footing somehow; I certainly know him better than he knows me. He's got the casual rock-star-at-home look (jeans, white shirt and goatee), his hair is wet (I like to think he's just got up) and he has just the demeanour I pictured (relaxed, unflappable but faintly serious). He too has been fully apprised of my previous Queen obsession. It's taken me four months to pin him down for this interview.
A hand shoots out: 'So lovely to meet you at last!' (We've met before but he doesn't know that. My brother and I followed him into the Plaza Cinema in Truro in 1998 and sat through the whole of Godzilla – a terrible film – just to be near him. We got an autograph afterwards.)
Do you ever have that thing, I find myself saying when we're seated, where you go into a shop and there's a Queen song playing, and even though you know all the music like the back of your hand, you actually can't place which song is it? It's almost too familiar? 'I have that,' he says. 'It takes me a few seconds. I have a flash of 'God, which one is that?' Absolutely – it's almost like you know it too well, and there's so much of it.'
I tell him Brian May's theory on Queen and advertising – that the Beatles should have allowed their music to be used on TV. 'I think he's right. I think it was naive of them. It's great to be part of the wallpaper of life – there's no shame in it. It's like bands who refuse to go on iTunes. Don't stand in front of the train, you're not going to stop it. If the music is in the air around people, it will get to them. What more could you want? There's a whole generation of very young kids that love Queen now.'
Why is that? 'Because they relate to something in Freddie. He really didn't care, did he? He gave every molecule of himself.'
I ask him about Queen's relationship with the press. 'We stopped talking to them in the late 70s because it was counterproductive, like banging your head against a wall. We decided: we don't need to be targets any more, we're already successful, the people like us and that'll do me – and maybe you'll all catch up one day.'
The print media, he says, 'wasn't working as a promotional tool', so they turned to TV and radio. I've lost count of the number of people who've told me the recent acclaimed documentary on the BBC changed their minds about Queen, as though it was some independent exercise in historical revision. In fact, it was produced by superfan and comedian Rhys Thomas (who appeared on Celebrity Mastermind with Queen as his specialist subject) working closely with the band and featured very few talking heads and some rare footage from the Brian May archives. It wasn't drastically different from all the other documentaries Queen have made, but suddenly people were ready to watch it.
'I find it very cheering, the way tastes have changed towards us,' he says. 'People are much more broad-minded than they ever were before. I find it hilarious that one of the most anticipated acts at Glastonbury is the Wombles. People in this country have a great sense of humour and they're much less po-faced than they were in the past. Glastonbury took itself so seriously, it was so politically correct, and then Dame Shirl comes out on Sunday afternoon and that's actually what the people want. There is room for everything. It's only a bloody record!'
Queen's final two albums, The Miracle and Innuendo, were the twin peaks of their achievement. Knowing Mercury was ill, the band decided to share all writing credits, and split all royalties, for the first time in their career. Then they turned into a kind of Fort Knox, decamping to a quiet studio in Switzerland, away from the growing paparazzi interest in his health, and recorded as much as they could against the clock.
In those albums you can hear both the tremendous urgency and the strange, cocoon-like warmth of their final months together. When I listen to these songs now, I still feel like someone's putting a bicycle pump between my ribs and blasting me with air.
The band were in their early 40s when it ended. 'I put my energies into organising that concert,' Taylor tells me, meaning the Freddie Mercury tribute at Wembley. 'Deciding what we would play, and persuading people to take part. It came off OK in the end, I think.'
Personal inquiries are met with genuine surprise. When I ask Taylor how he felt when his musical career was ended in its prime, he goes: 'I suppose you're right, I was quite young …' Oddly enough, their fondest memories from the entire 20-year life of the band are those final weeks, tucked away working on the last album. 'We became very enclosed,' says Taylor, 'very focused, and we were in our own little world.'
Our time is up. 'I've got to go and unveil a statue,' Taylor says, standing. Of himself? 'God, no. It's a drummer, though – a weird expressionist thing. I thought it would be a laugh. It's about 18ft high …'
With the first band you love as a child, you experience something that adult life will never allow – a prolonged period absorbing one music to the exclusion of all others, the highs and lows, the moments of genius and the terrible errors of judgment. Records, videos and biographies merge until the voices of the band become as familiar as your own. I don't play much Queen at all these days, but it's all still there, especially the humour of it, in an image of Freddie on stage in his tiny, tiny shorts, a column of steam riding from his head.
What I've taken away is the joy of recognising, and indulging, the start of these full-on musical love affairs whenever they decide to seize you. What happened on hearing that first Queen track, These Are the Days of Our Lives, nearly 20 years ago, has happened half a dozen times since, with songs by other artists – the gut recognition, familiarity and excitement rolled into one, the twang of your heartstring and the fierce desire to find out more. It's the musical equivalent of eyes meeting across a crowded room. Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell, Jesus Was a Cross Maker by Judee Sill – it will keep on happening, and the best thing is you never know when it's going to strike next.
I take myself down to Lemon Street in Truro. In the centre of the town square, next to Marks & Spencer, a black tarpaulin is stretched over a strangely shaped, angular structure, with a growing crowd around it.
Fifty drummers appear from nowhere, dressed like morris dancers and beating up a storm. In true English folk tradition, someone in the middle of the throng is holding a horse's skull on a stick and snapping its jaws. Taylor stands on a scaffold, next to a man from the Eden Project. The latter makes a speech about how drumming is appropriate to Cornwall, 'battered as it is by the sea and storms', adding that Roger Taylor is the perfect person to unveil this piece of art, 'a local boy who went out into the world and marched to his own beat'.
Taylor steps down, pulls the tarpaulin back slowly and reveals … a naked man, cast in tin, poised atop a model of the world and beating a drum. Someone in the crowd wolf-whistles. The Queen drummer is supplied with a long stick, which he uses to beat the statue's tin drum solemnly, three times. The crowd cheers.
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