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fashions he had only read about from thousands of miles away. There were eight other students on Freddie’s arts foundation course, including Adrian Morrish, Brian Fanning and Patrick Connolly. ‘We all met at induction and were put into a class together,’ recalls Adrian Morrish now. ‘Freddie, Brian Fanning and I all became close friends. My first impression of Fred was that he was charmingly shy, but also very engaging.’
    Initially, Freddie stood out from his fellow students on account of his clothes and hair. ‘He dressed weirdly in drainpipe trousers that weren’t quite long enough and middle-aged jackets that were slightly too small,’ remembers Adrian. ‘I suppose he’d brought those clothes with him from Zanzibar or India. He seemed very gauche, but he desperately wanted to fit in.’
    ‘He struck me as quite lonely at first,’ offers Patrick Connolly. ‘But I liked him because he was sensitive and caring and not quite so jack-the-lad as some of the others. You could tell he’d come from a cultured background, and was just seeking a way for himself to develop.’ What soon became apparent to his college mates was their new friend’s musical ability. ‘During break-time we would drift into the assembly hall,’ recalls another ex-Isleworth student Geoff Latter. ‘Fred was always playing this upright piano. He’d never sit at it. He would always stand. He could play our favourite pop songs by ear. I was into surf music, especially The Beach Boys. So he’d do “I Get Around” for me. He could just play it, off pat.’
    ‘He’d hear a pop song on the radio in the morning before college,then come in and play it on the piano,’ adds Patrick Connolly. ‘Then he’d go, “But we can do this or we can do that?” and start improvising, to try and make it sound better.’
    Intriguingly, the issue of the name change comes up again. Brian Fanning insists that the name Fred (rather than Freddie) was given to him at Isleworth: ‘His name was Farrokh, but he felt that an Anglofied name would help his integration. I recall it seemed to be an important issue for him. So he was christened collectively by us as “Fred”.’
    Lectures at the Polytechnic were broken up by trips to the local cafe and pub (‘Fred and I would run a critique on the latest jukebox offerings,’ remembers Fanning, ‘things like Otis Redding’s “My Girl”’). Though in Adrian Morrish’s case, lectures were sometime skipped altogether. ‘There was one occasion when I was so engrossed in a young lady’s charms that I decided to miss Liberal Studies. Freddie burst into the student common room, mob-handed, and he and a couple of others physically lifted me up and carried me into the lecture room. Freddie was always telling me off. His favourite phrase was always this rather effeminate, exasperated “Oh, Adrian !”’
    By Christmas 1964 Freddie had joined the Polytechnic’s youth choir (Brian Fanning had a tape of the choir’s performance, sadly lost) and appeared in the role of Dimitri in The Kitchen . ‘He was rather nervous and unsure, but, at the same time, you could tell he loved doing it,’ says Morrish. ‘He liked the attention and he liked being onstage because he was also quite full of himself. That was the first indication we had that he could also be an exhibitionist.’
    Alan Hill appeared alongside Freddie in The Kitchen and again in a later college production Spectrum , ‘a theatrical review,’ as Hill remembers: ‘It was made up of all different pieces. In one, we were supposed to be punting along a river in a boat. In another, we were doing a mime of undying love for this woman.’
    Morrish and Connolly both spent time at the Bulsaras’ house in Gladstone Avenue. ‘We’d sit in his room and play records and talk about the things teenagers talk about,’ says Morrish. ‘I recall him showing me his father’s stamp collection, which had these stamps with printing errors that made them very valuable.