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and Pearl planned to take him on a hitchhiking trip to John O’Groats. Whether it was parental intervention or a genuine illness that intervened, Freddie told his friends he had flu and never made the trip.
    Two months later, Brian Fanning bought an 8mm cine camera to college. Over two days he shot around three minutes of silent footage of Freddie, Adrian and others fooling around in the grounds of the Polytechnic. As film was so expensive, Brian saved money by shooting only single-frame sequences at a time. Freddie features in three or four clips, still wearing the ‘middle-aged jacket’ that Adrian Morrish remembers, but with the quiff grown out and teased into a Beatle fringe. In one scene he slips his top lip over histeeth to conceal them; in another he flaps his arms in an almost identical gesture to one used onstage with Queen. What Fred doesn’t look like is a pop star. As Ray Pearl puts it: ‘Where did that extrovert butterfly come from?’
    Neither Adrian Morrish nor Brian Fanning recall Freddie ever having girlfriends of his own while at the Polytechnic. ‘But neither do I recall him giving any impression of being gay,’ insists Brian. ‘But then there was less acceptance in those days.’ However, Alan Hill’s memories differ: ‘Fred was very interested in the opposite sex,’ he says. ‘When I went out with a girl, he used to go out with her afterwards.’
    By 1966, the end of his time at the Polytechnic, Freddie had swapped the outmoded clothes for more fashionable threads. He’d also lost some of the gaucheness he’d had when he’d first enrolled. ‘He’d changed his look by the end of Isleworth,’ remembers Hill. ‘It was all Levi jackets by then. That was the look. I had a white Levi jacket and he was forever borrowing it. I think he wore it more than I did. Before we went out together, he was always preening himself and plumping up his hair in the mirror. We were always saying, “Come on, you look good, Fred, you look good. Now let’s go!”’
    Fred was also showing an interest in making music again. He and another student, would-be sculptor Paul Martin, remembered by Patrick Connolly as a ‘keen guitarist’, had begun meeting at Gladstone Avenue and, as Connolly recalls, trying to write songs together.
    ‘The three of us would sit around his piano and sing,’ says Patrick. ‘A favourite, believe it or not, was “Puff The Magic Dragon” [a 1963 hit for the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary]. Paul could play, I couldn’t sing, but Fred’s enthusiasm brought us together. He’d actually encourage me: “Look, Patrick, you’re singing, you can do it.”’ Years later, Jer Bulsara recounted finding ideas for songs written on scraps of paper, which Fred would put under his pillow before heading off to college in the morning. (‘He’d say, “Don’t throw it away, Mum, it’s very important.”’)
    Also by 1966, the student union was booking bands for dances at the Polytechnic. That year saw the Mike Cotton Sound and the Graham Bond Organisation playing the college hall. With PatrickConnolly and Paul Martin’s help, Freddie decided to audition musicians for a group of his own. ‘I designed a poster and we sent it to all the colleges and schools in the area, anywhere we could think of,’ reveals Connolly. ‘I was interested in marketing rather than the music, but we had quite a response. Thinking back, that was quite something in the days before mobile phones and the internet.’ Patrick can recall as many as forty would-be musicians turning up to be quizzed by Freddie in a room at the Polytechnic. ‘There was this one amazing guitarist that I remember Fred really liked. Yes, of course, years later, I always wondered if it was Brian May …’ Regrettably, any further information on the Isleworth auditions has faded from the memories of those involved. ‘Keen guitarist’ Paul Martin never re-surfaced in the lives of any of Freddie’s classmates, and Patrick Connolly can never