Mary Austin, the woman who was Freddie Mercury’s lover and later his confidante and ‘best friend ’, has decided to go public about her relationship with the rock legend. She’s publishing a book that features Mercury’s old notebooks and lyrics and has given an extensive interview to the Guardian.
When he died in 1991, Austin inherited Freddie’s Kensington house and half his estate, including four silver trunks filled with the singer’s lyrics and notebooks. “To say I was overwhelmed is an understatement,” she says now. “I couldn’t look at the lyrics. I felt as I did when I originally packed them – that they were his personal belongings and I was being offered an opportunity to delve into them, and I couldn’t do that.”
The interview reveals some interesting titbits about Mercury and Queen. We all know that the band’s name was Freddie’s idea, but it seems Brian May’s suggestion was the truly awful Build Your Own Boat. They asked what I thought,” she says. “I said I preferred Build Your Own Boat. I thought it was a terrible name. But Brian was my friend. I’d just met Freddie.”
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In the 1970s, most Queen fans didn’t have a clue that Freddie was Farrokh Bulsara, a Parsi Indian who was born in Zanzibar. The singer deliberately covered his background, it seems.
“He hid that well,” says Austin, who thinks he was trying to pass as a white Englishman. “He’d stay out of the sun because his skin would darken, and he didn’t want that. With Freddie, you just saw what he wanted you to see.
“He’d get stopped in the street by police and they said, ‘Where are you from?’ and when he said Bombay they arrested him, because they thought he was taking the proverbial.”
The couple moved in together and Austin was the one who sourced the piano on which he wrote a number of Queen’s hits. “He’d suddenly say, ‘I need a piano. Where can I get a piano?’ … I’d say, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll try to find out.’ So, of course, I find the piano.”
Having a piano in their flat changed him, she says. “There was much more purposeful energy. He would sit at the piano, play the odd key, hum a bit and he looked very happy. Transported.”
Finding out he was gay was actually a relief, she says. “I wasn’t sure whether we were travelling in the same direction any more. Some time earlier I saw a dress and thought, that would be a really nice wedding dress. I asked Freddie, is it worth me buying it, and he looked at me and shook his head. So I knew from there on…”
Freddie Mercury: A Life In Lyrics is out now via Harper Collins.
