In 1969, 22-year-old Freddie Bulsara was still a few years away from becoming Freddie Mercury, frontman for Queen. But he was well on his way to stardom.
After graduating from London’s Ealing Art College in 1969, Mercury held a few miscellaneous jobs — at one point he worked as a luggage handler at Heathrow Airport, at another he sold clothes and scarves in Kensington Market with his future bandmate Roger Taylor.
“I used to run it with this bloke, Freddie, who I knew because he regularly came to see Smile, the band Brian [May] and I were in at the time,” Taylor recalled to Reader’s Digest in 2020. “Back then, I didn’t really know him as a singer—he was just my mate. My crazy mate! If there was fun to be had, Freddie and I were usually involved.”
But Mercury had his sights set far beyond the market stalls. On Aug. 13 of 1969, he met Ibex, a part progressive, part heavy blues band from Liverpool who had only just played their first show ever a few months prior in May. At that time, Ibex was made up of Mike Bersin on guitar, John Taylor on bass and Mick Smith on drums. Most importantly, they were open to the idea of a new singer.
10 Days Later…
Just 10 days later, Mercury had learned the band’s set, plus come up with a few ideas of his own, and traveled up to Bolton, Lancashire, where he made his debut public performance.
“As a three-piece, we’d thought it was sufficient to play fairly basic music and not worry too much about stagecraft. Freddie was much better at putting on a show and entertaining people,” Bersin would later recall to Queen historian John S. Stuart. “That was pretty radical for us. I thought that’s what the liquid light show was for, you know. We make the music and the audience can watch the pretty-colored bubbles behind us. But Freddie was different. He was always a star. People used to pull his leg about it when he had no money, one pair of trousers, one T-shirt and one pair of boots. He’d look after them all really well and people would say, ‘Here comes Freddie, the star.'”
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It also helped that Mercury was, as Bersin put it, the “most musical” out of all the band’s members.
“He was trained on the piano, and he could write on the black notes,” Bersin explained. “He said, ‘We’re never going to get anywhere playing all this three-chord blues crap, we’ll have to write some songs.’ A couple of things came out of it, but they’ve all vanished now.”
Just a couple of weeks later, Ibex played their third and last show on Sept. 9 in Liverpool. Mercury moved on to another band, Sour Milk Sea, named after the George Harrison song, though this group also split up within a few months. It would all work out in the end, of course, as Mercury would join Taylor and May in Smile, later to become Queen.
Listen to Freddie Mercury Sing With Ibex in 1969
“Freddie knew where he wanted to go,” Bersin said. “That’s why he was an international star. It wasn’t an accident. It happened because that’s what he wanted to be from the moment I first met him. He was a man with a goal and a drive.”
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Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso