01-30-2005 – The Mail on Sunday – Queen’s Boring Bassist

HOW FREDDIE MERCURY’S DEATH DROVE QUEEN’S ‘BORING’ BASSIST INTO THE ARMS OF A LAP DANCER
The idea of legendary rock band Queen going on the road without Freddie Mercury, their flamboyant lead singer who died of AIDS, is inconceivable to many fans. But when the band announced they would embark on their first tour in 19 years this May, the concerts sold out in hours.

When they take to the stage, Mercury’s replacement, Paul Rodgers from Bad Company, will be joined by Queen guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor. But John Deacon, the ‘no-nonsense’ bass player will be missing.

What could lie behind his decision to give up the chance to join the lucrative tour? Why has he distanced himself from the remaining band members and resolutely avoided the limelight since Mercury’s death in 1991?

Since his colleague’s death, this solid family man, a dedicated father of six embarked on a pattern of behaviour completely out of keeping with his image as the boring man of rock.

He became a regular at a London strip club and became involved with a lap dancer and glamour model 25 years his junior. Leading an amazing double life, he even bought her a flat and a new Mercedes sports car.

Maybe this awkward and unlikely situation is why he has refused to give interviews and even failed to attend May’s wedding in November 2000 to his longtime girlfriend, actress Anita Dobson.

Although Deacon, 53, was always portrayed as the band’s most uncomplicated member, it appears he was, in fact, much more complex and intriguing. For behind his shy, enigmatic demeanour lies a man crippled by insecurities, haunted by the death of Mercury and resentful of the success of May and Taylor.

Deacon was born on August 19, 1951, at St Francis Private Hospital, Leicester. He was the adored eldest son of Lillian and Arthur. Arthur, an insurance broker, took his son on fishing trips and trainspotting expeditions. He also encouraged him to take up the guitar when he was just seven. When his father died suddenly when he was 11, Deacon was devastated.

He threw himself into music and formed his own band, The Opposition, when he was 14.

According to Jenny Fewins, who danced with The Opposition, he was ‘a boring charneveracter. The clearest memory I have of him is being in a dressing room and everybody larking about. John never said a word. He was completely unremarkable.’ After school, Deacon studied electronics at the University of London. There, in 1971, he was introduced to Queen’s founder members Taylor and May. They had just recruited Mercury and were casting around for a bass player.

‘We were so over-the-top, we thought that because he was quiet, he would fit in with us without too much upheaval,’ recalled Taylor. May agreed: ‘He’s very solid and nononsense. He’s always got his feet firmly on the ground.’

Privately though, even then Deacon felt detached from his colleagues. He once said: ‘We all have our own friends. I would never think of going round to Fred’s house and he would come to mine. We are just poles apart in that sense.’ At 20, he met trainee teacher, Veronica Tetzlaff, at a disco.

From a devout Catholic family of Polish origin, Veronica shocked her parents when she fell pregnant in October 1974 with their first child, Jimmy.

Deacon and Veronica hastily married in January 1975.

Typically, at the wedding it was Mercury who stole the show.

Wearing a feather boa, with a woman on either arm, the singer made a grand entrance at the Carmelite church in Kensington.

By 1982 Queen had already released their first Greatest Hits album and were cementing their reputation as the biggest British band since The Beatles.

Much as he hated the attention, John was forced to live with it but it was having a damaging effect on his marriage and family life.

Ruth Bullen, wife of Deacon’s best man, Nigel, says: ‘When he came back off a tour, he couldn’t revert to being an ordinary person, playing with the kids, taking them to the park and things,’ Veronica , a demure redhead, was hardly the archetypal rock star wife. ‘She’s a normal, quiet, devout Catholic,’ says Ruth.

‘She wasn’t into the glamorous life at all. It took her a few years to realise she could have practically anything she wanted. It was ages before she got a nanny to help with the children.’ When the band took a break in 1985 to pursue solo projects, John who didn’t sing confessed: ‘I went spare, really, because we were doing so little.

I got really bored and I got quite depressed.’ Queen reformed the following year and continued to dominate the charts, playing sell- out stadium tours for the next two years.

In 1989, Mercury was diagnosed with HIV and in November, 1991, he died, leaving his band members shattered none more so than Deacon.

‘Freddie’s death affected him badly,’ says Deacon’s college friend and musical collaborator, Robert Ahwai. ‘ Maybe he thought “Freddie was the band, so what’s the point?” John had lost his father when he was quite young. He suffered from depression after Freddie died and I am not sure he has ever come out of it.’ While May and Taylor rushed to pay tribute to Mercury, Deacon didn’t approve of the hype surrounding his death and avoided speaking in public.

With Mercury dead, it looked unlikely Queen would ever reform. May and Taylor went on to solo projects with some success, but Deacon and Ahwai suffered a series of failures, sending the bass- player further into a spiral of depression.

Once again Deacon withdrew into himself, ostensibly to concentrate on spending time with his wife, five sons and one daughter. However, three years ago he began spending evenings alone at the most unlikely venue: Sophisticats strip club in the West End of London.

Simon Langer, joint owner of Sophisticats, says: ‘We took over the club in October 2001 and Deacon was coming here then. We knew who he was. He would sit in the VIP suite drinking expensive champagne. He was very quiet and, as far as I could see, did not have much of a character to speak of.

‘One of the girls Olga, who is Russian said Deacon had first started coming in here eight months before I took over, and had texted her every day asking her out. But she said he was too old and she wasn’t interested.’ So, instead, Deacon turned his attentions to British lap dancer Emma Shelley, 25, who performed under the stage name ‘Pushbar’.

It was a most unusual friendship, and one he tried to keep secret from his wife of 27 years despite taking Emma to highprofile London restaurants such as Nobu.

Before long, he was reportedly lavishing the model who is well known on the glamour scene and a regular on the Playboy TV channel with expensive gifts. According to Langer, he paid for Emma and her family to go on a Pounds 10,000 holiday to Marbella. She was then seen driving a new Pounds 25,000 Mercedes sports car and, according to Land Registry records, Deacon bought her a flat in January 2002 for Pounds 316,000 cash.

But shortly after their relationship became public, John stopped seeing Emma and today she insists they are no longer together.

Speaking from her mother’s smart bungalow in Purley, Surrey, with the Mercedes SLK parked outside, she says the relationship ended when ‘I found out that John was a family man.’ Characteristically, Deacon refuses to comment.

Today, as the rest of Queen prepare for the tour, Deacon lives with his family in their four-bedroom house in Putney, South-West London.

His only comment on the idea of Queen reforming came when it was suggested that Robbie Williams might fill Mercury’s shoes.

‘I don’t want to be nasty, but Robbie Williams is no Freddie Mercury.

Freddie can never be replaced and certainly not by him.’ Perhaps no one will ever know the real John Deacon. One thing, though, is sure. As Ruth Bullen puts it, ‘I don’t suppose you can live the life he has without paying a price.’