Free Freddie Mercury by Peter Freestone Page A

play the huge Milton Keynes Bowl. Freddie’s lover at that point was a stolid and solid American from New Jersey by the name of Bill Reid. Not the tallestman in the world, Freddie had met him in a bar in New York. In all of Freddie’s relationships in the time I knew him, his affair with Bill Reid was by far the most tempestuous and at times frighteningly violent. The day before the show, at home at Stafford Terrace in London, an argument developed from a cause that no one now remembers. While people were used to hearing shouting and screaming from the couple, they were aware that something was going on but raised voices were standard. Someone was around to jump in should it seem that the situation between Freddie and Bill was getting out of control.
    This time, before anybody realised what was going on, Bill Reid had bitten Freddie’s hand between the thumb and forefinger. Freddie was in absolute agony and blood flowed from the teethmarks of the wound but he refused to have anything done about it. The Milton Keynes show was one of the biggest British shows Queen had ever done and so, in hindsight, I suppose it was only natural that some great emotional eruption would happen. As has been seen, and will be seen again, Freddie needed the catalyst of conflict to bring out his best performance. He hid to sing angry. The bigger the concert, the bigger the pain, though not always, thank heavens, physical. Paul Prenter and I did the best we could with the wound, cleaning it with TCP and any other antiseptic we could lay our hands on. I suppose the show was in the back of Freddie’s mind all the time but at this point, we were all worried as to whether the show would happen at all.
    To get to the venue, we took off in a helicopter from Westland heliport. This was my first trip in a helicopter and this model seated about ten. The party included the four members of the band, Bill Reid, Paul Prenter, myself and some security. The others had gone on ahead by road. The helicopter was used because it was the only way to guarantee the band getting to Milton Keynes at all. They had been informed that traffic problems were enormous and there was no certainty that they would get there at all going by car.
    The most noticeable difference between the helicopter and a plane of a similar size is the noise. Everybody’s asked to wear ear-mufflers to cut out some of the noise and it wasn’t being impolite as hearing people talk is just about impossible.
    While in the car on the way to the heliport the frosty silence between Freddie and Bill was apparent, it somehow faded into insignificance during the flight which lasted no longer than half-an-hour, ifthat. As we flew over the site, it was like looking down on an army of ants and in saying that I’m not being disrespectful to the crowd. You could feel the excitement building in the confined space of the helicopter both because of the journey itself – which, unless you are a helicopter pilot, isn’t a regular feature of anyone’s life – and also the band seeing all those people below them.
    This was another of those ‘take-the-money-and-run’ shows. Literally, as the band were led off the stage with dressing gowns or towels round their shoulders, they were taken the two hundred or more yards straight into the helicopter which then started its engine and took off, whisking us away from the deafening applause and the blinding lights. There was, beneath us, this island of light in a sea of darkness. It’s a memory which has stuck with me.
    The shorts’n’suspenders party after the show, back in London at the Embassy Club in Bond Street, was strange in that very few people who had been to the concert were there because of the distance of the show from London and the massive traffic jam which was caused on the M1 and A1 highways by the huge crowd leaving the Bowl at the same time.
    We had to land at Heathrow due to a curfew on helicopter flights over London in the dark. This gave us