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took to wearing white leotards on stage and when exposed under green lights, his lithe body in the skin-tight costume made him look like the Muppet character – especially when he sat on the steps of the stage set. ‘Halfway up the stair?’ (Nobody dared to address him thus, I hasten to add.) After interviewing Fred during this period, the NME music paper ran the headline: ‘IS THIS MAN A PRAT?’ As you can imagine, he was not at all happy – and a long taut relationship with the press followed.
    Usually, he was referred to by the crew simply as Fred, but, if he was being difficult, he could become The GoofyToothed Rascal or, if he was being very difficult, all manner of uncomplimentary names – including ‘Horsey’. Nothing to do with Fred’s teeth, but with his appreciation of Russian-born ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.
    ‘Who?’ the crew asked. Didn’t he win a few horse races?
    Fred used this dancer and his costumes, particularly the black and white patterned leotards, for inspiration in Queen’s live shows. Mary Austin, Fred’s girlfriend of many years, was still living with him in 1977, and had presented Freddie (she never called him Fred) with a glossy coffee-table -size book on Nijinsky as a gift. She had inscribed it to Freddie and added: ‘To the true artist that you are’.
    And typically, like Fred, Nijinsky the racehorse was a thoroughbred and multi-award-winning champion.
    Brian: Percy – after Percy Thrower, the original British TV gardener. Brian was very keen on nature and gardening, and in 1976, when I was delivering some equipment at night to his London house, he answered the door in ragged clothes, a torch in hand, with his mane of hair interwoven with twigs and leaves. He had been out in the dark attending to his beloved plants and trees. He immediately got an update to The Infrared Gardener, due to his academic studies in astrophysics and infrared astronomy.
    John: Birdman or Deaky (self-explanatory). John had all his hair cropped off military-style at the start of the ’78 USA tour and looked like The Bird Man of Alcatraz. He received it in good spirits and wore the convict’s outfit the crew bought for him for the show encore.
    The gay contingent had their own unique way of giving nicknames by assigning girls’ names to all male members ofthe entourage and any other ‘friends’. They would then refer to everybody as ‘she’.
    Queen’s secondary nicknames:
    Freddie Mercury: Melina (Melina Mercouri – Greek film star)
    Brian May: Maggie (Maggie May – Rod Stewart song)
    Roger Taylor: Elizabeth (actress Elizabeth Taylor)
    John Deacon: Belisha (Belisha Beacon…?)
    I was called Helen. Don’t ask.
    The culmination of the acoustic interlude was when Fred and Brian performed a simplified version of ‘Love of my Life’. Time for audience participation, sing-along and one of the highlights of the show. It’s easy to become very cynical on the road and blasé towards the paying public, as the siege mentality sets in. However, to see and hear over 130,000 people in a stadium singing perfectly in a language not their own was really something special. It may sound like an old cliché but music does transcend all barriers.
    By now, the show was steamrollering into the final stretch with big hits such as ‘I Want To Break Free’, bang-your-head rockers like ‘Hammer To Fall’ and more audience participation ‘clap-your-hands’ with ‘Radio Ga Ga’. While rehearsing ‘Ga Ga’ for the live show, Fred had substituted the word radio with the rhyming word fellatio . This caused the band to break down in fits of laughter, but the paying public never got the chance to appreciate the ad lib. Fred liked to surprise and provoke, but above all he loved to perform and to perform well.
    There was only one occasion where I was really disappointed with Fred’s performance on stage, as to me he was the consummate professional. It was at the only show the band ever played in New Zealand, an