Free Is This The Real Life? by Mark Blake

time in nineteen years. Except Queen is now just Taylor and Brian May, with Freddie Mercury’s place taken by Paul Rodgers, once the lead singer of sturdy blues-rockers Bad Company and, before them, Free. Rodgers is telling critics that, unlike his predecessor, he will ‘not be wearing tights’. It is fair to say that Queen fans and critics are eyeing the planned union with varying degrees of concern. Taylor is, just as he was at the beginning of Queen’s career, utterly gung-ho about the tour and eager to shout down any naysayers. ‘To be the darling of the critics is the kiss of death,’ he offers. ‘Which is probably why we are still alive.’
    In early 1967, while Jimi Hendrix was wowing Freddie Bulsara and Brian May in London, eighteen-year-old Roger Meddows Taylor was planning a sighting of his own. Living in Truro, Cornwall, Taylor drove 160 miles to Bristol, the nearest stop on Jimi’s UK jaunt. Taylor became an instant convert, going on to see Hendrix play live a total of three times. Back in Truro, his own group The Reaction would begin radicalising their sound, stripping out the Motown and pop covers, and striving to ape the thrilling new music that was prompting Brian May to do the same with 1984. But in the summer of 1967, Taylor left Truro to begin a dentistry course at the London School of Medicine. The Reaction would continue, but Roger’s move to the capital would ultimately mark the beginning of the end for a band once billed as ‘The Champion Group of Cornwall’.
    Roger Taylor (‘Meddows’ was a family name) was born on 26 June 1949 in West Norfolk and King’s Lynn Hospital to parents Michael and Winifred. Michael was a civil servant at the Ministry of Food (working as an inspector for the potato marketing board), while Winifred may have had the musical gene, playing the accordion as a child. Following the birth of a daughter, Clare, in 1953, the family moved from King’s Lynn to Truro, a beautiful market town and the self-appointed ‘capital’ of Cornwall.
    Roger began attending Bosvigo School, where, at the age of eight, he began playing the ukelele. Just months later, he formed a skiffle group, The Bubblingover Boys, playing the ukelele alongsidea couple of wannabe guitarists and another pupil on the inevitable tea-chest bass. They played a school dance but were, in Taylor’s words, ‘terrible, really terrible’. In May 1960, aged eleven, he landed a choral scholarship to Truro Cathedral School; a proviso of which was singing at all functions and in the school choir several times on a Sunday. But just four months later, he moved on after being awarded a place at the prestigious Truro School. Meanwhile, an older cousin with a Dansette record player introduced Roger to Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. Before long, a cheap acoustic guitar had replaced the ukelele in his affections. Roger learned the rudiments of playing the guitar, but was soon drawn to another, noisier instrument.
    ‘I remember banging on my mother’s saucepans with her knitting needles,’ said Roger. ‘Then my father found this ancient snare drum in the storage bin where he worked. I started with that.’ For Christmas 1961, Michael Taylor bought a new snare drum and a cymbal for his son. Before long, he had acquired a set of old Ajax drums: ‘It consisted of one tom-tom, one bass drum, one snare and one minute cymbal.’ It was enough to get him started.
    In 1964, after his parents separated, Roger, his sister Clare and their mother left the family home in Falmouth Road to a new house in Hurland Road, where at least one neighbour still recalls the ‘bloody noisy kid who always played drums with the garage doors open’. The thirteen-year-old Roger’s curiosity was piqued again by the 1963 hit ‘Diamonds’ by former Shadows, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, a wildly rhythmic instrumental that struck a chord with the young drummer. Before the year he was out, he was playing drums in a trio with two fellow Truro