Classmates of FREDDIE MERCURY Share UNTOLD Memories of Mercury's School Life

Freddie Mercury was the Lead Singer of British Rock Band Queen. Queen had four members Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon.
Before he was the legend. Before he filled arenas with cheering fans and anthemic hits. Before there was Queen, or even Freddie Mercury, there was Farrokh Bulsara, a quiet boy born to Parsi parents in Zanzibar and dispatched to boarding school in a hill station not far from Bombay in India.
For Ajay Goyal and Subhash Gudka, who studied at St Peter’s School in Panchgani and knew Mercury before he was famous, the memories are fresh, . The Bulsaras were relatively rich - Mercury’s father was a cashier at Zanzibar’s British Colonial Office - and could afford to send him to a British-style boarding school across the Arabian Sea.
“There were about 60 of us East Africa students travelling to India to study then,” recalls Gudka, who attended the school from 1958 to 1962 and would have been a few classes ahead of Mercury. “For the school year, we’d take the same ship to India, he boarding at Zanzibar and me at Mombasa. I’d join him in First Class.”
Like everyone else from the time, Gudka remembers him as shy, not terribly chatty, but already displaying a flair for music. Goyal was in class with Mercury for two years and says every batch had three to five kids who’d signed up for music lessons. “I took up the violin but he was already good at piano.”
Both remember the five-member school band, The Hectics. “It was the era of Cliff Richards, Elvis Presley, Connie Francis and Pat Boone,” says Goyal. Other members Derrick Branche, Bruce Murray, Farang Irani and Victory Rana ended up pursuing careers in film and television, music, restaurants and the military. No one would have guessed that one would grow up to be among the world’s greatest rock stars, a man with millions of fans.
"He was shy, but never a nobody,” Goyal recalls. “We’d call him ‘Bucky’ for his protruding teeth, but only because we were kids who didn’t know any better. It’s probably why, in the only picture I have of him, he’s kneeling, happy to avoid the attention.”
Mercury moved back to Zanzibar a few years later and in 1964, the family fled East Africa for London during the Zanzibar revolution. “I remember that he didn’t want to leave India,” Gudka says.
“When they got famous, I recognised him immediately,” says Gudka. “I’d like to think that his time in school had given him the independence and confidence he displayed.”
Goyal, on the other hand, didn’t know his classmate was famous until three years ago, when he made the connection between Farrokh and Freddie on the school’s alumni page. “I’d heard of Freddie Mercury, of course, but I’d never made the connection with Farrokh. I was living in Montreal, Canada, when Queen played there. I would have attended the concert if I’d known it was him,” he says with regret.
It was a sad moment to have discovered at the same time that a childhood friend had reached the top of his game but had also passed way, in 1991, of complications from AIDS. “I wish I’d met him,” Goyal says.
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Thanks for this video DM&C

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It is really hard to believe that Freddie Mercury was shy

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Freddie Mercury had passion for music since he was in school

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I didn't know this.
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