It hadn't been the most active research pursuit, but I had always willed a connection between Freddie Mercury and the V&A Museum. Perhaps it was a fanciful wish to link the two, since it's the museum I love and work for. It wasn't an implausible link either, there was that story about him taking the band to the Tate Britain to see Richard Dadd's The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke, so why wouldn't Freddie drag his friends to the V&A? I think we've all done it.
I was watching a Freddie documentary earlier this week when the anecdote I had longed for materialised. In A Life in Ten Pictures, Freddie's former girlfriend, Rosemary Pearson, spoke of their visit to the V&A together to see a ballet exhibition. It was a part of a project they had been working on at the Ealing School of Art. I had to wind it back a couple of times to see if I hadn't misheard anything. Had I found my story of Freddie at the V&A?
I looked back at the history of the V&A's exhibitions and calibrated the dates - the only ballet exhibition that could have coincided with Freddie being at the Ealing School of Art was Ballet Illustration: 1581-1940, which was on between 13 April and 1 October 1967. I checked the catalogue out at the British Library that night.
When I sat down at my desk, I wondered what on earth I expected to find exactly. Through all these elaborate set designs and elegantly drawn lithographs, there was some desire for an uncovered link, a moment that hadn't been fettered by some other fan or documentarian.
Page after page, there were smatterings of familiarity, but that was to be expected. So much of it seemed to be connected with Queen's aesthetic, whether it was sumptuous rococo stylings or the checks of the Harlequinade. I turn the page: Scharamuza. I flip back to the description: "Scaramouche brings on to the stage two small baskets, in which are concealed two small scaramouches. He then dances a measure, at the end of which he opens the baskets and is surprised to see what they contain..." Could that be the Scaramouche from Bohemian Rhapsody?
As I approached the end of the catalogue, towards the early 20th century designs with the Ballet Russes, I came across a costume design by Alexandra Exter from Don Juan in 1927. It was black with a band of white, assymetrically cut across the chest. The resemblance was startling, it's just like a costume Freddie wore on stage in 1973. There were slight modifications to the trousers and the right sleeve, but it looked almost the same. The influence was there and I couldn't deny it.
I sought out Rosemary Pearson, now known as Dr Rose Rose, and asked about her recollections about their visit. She kindly sent over her memoir, but there wasn't any detail about gallivanting through the Cast Courts, not as I had imagined it. Instead she wrote about the two of them poring over that same exhibition catalogue. She described how Freddie became entranced by its contents, crying out: "Bakst, Balanchine, Diaghilev, the names sound so delicious – so are the costumes! God, there's so much androgyny here. I'm going to swoon, DARLING! Catch me in your arms as I faint, it's all too perfect... and so CAMP!"
In what seemed like a living scene in the middle of the studios of the Ealing School of Art, Freddie became entranced by the costumes of Nijinsky's Scheherazade and Diaghilev's Après-Midi D'Une Faune. He pretended to pass out on the studio floor, swooning: "Dancing in that gear must have really challenged male-female boundary stuff, even in the theatre!" The chapter ends with a painting of that moment of inspiration at the Ealing School of Art, mythical figures spring to life in the middle of the studio floor.
It became very intimate, and whereas before I asked, did they even come here? I was left asking, should I even be here?
Addendum: Here is a portrait of Freddie in Rose Pearson's V&A travelling exhibition poster, Gothic Woodcarving in England. It was submitted as an end-of-year-project at the Ealing School of Art in 1969.
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