Before the stadiums, Freddie Mercury was Farrokh Bulsara, a graphic design student in west London. He enrolled at Ealing Art College in 1966 and left in 1969 with a diploma in graphic art and design. He had studied art at Isleworth Polytechnic first, so by the time he reached Ealing he had a trained hand and a habit of drawing everything.

Ealing was a good place to be at that moment. Pete Townshend and Ronnie Wood had passed through. Gustav Metzger, the pioneer of auto-destructive art, had lectured there, and Townshend later credited that influence on the way he smashed guitars. The college treated pop culture as a serious subject for study. A student could draw a record sleeve in the morning and argue about the avant-garde at lunch without anyone seeing a contradiction.

That is the idea at the centre of this book, and Mercury is one of its clearest examples. He did not leave art for music. He took the training with him and applied it to a rock band. The logos, sleeves, costumes and stage sets were the work of a designer, and the singing was the part everyone noticed.

His Ealing friend Tim Staffell sang in Smile, the band that Brian May and Roger Taylor played in. When Staffell left, Mercury took his place and the group became Queen. Around that time he and Taylor shared a stall in Kensington Market, selling second-hand clothes and Mercury’s drawings. The art and the band started from the same bench.

A Victorian in the Tate

Mercury’s taste in art was not what you would expect from a young man in a 1970s rock group. He did not collect pop art or hang psychedelic posters. He admired Victorian painting, and one picture in particular: Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.

Dadd was a gifted Royal Academy student, praised young for his fairy subjects. In 1843, during a psychotic episode, he killed his father. He spent the rest of his life in institutions, first Bethlem and later Broadmoor. He painted The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke in Bethlem between 1855 and 1864. George Henry Haydon, the hospital’s steward, commissioned it. Dadd worked on it for nine years and still treated it as unfinished. Siegfried Sassoon gave it to the Tate, where it has hung since 1963.

The canvas is small, about 54 by 39 centimetres, and crammed with figures. A woodcutter fairy stands with his axe raised, about to split a hazelnut that will become a new carriage for Queen Mab. Around him a crowd waits in the grass: a magician, a patriarch in a triple crown, a politician, a dandy, a pedagogue, fairies, elves and creatures that fit no category. Everything is rendered in tiny, patient strokes, close to the way an engraver works. Nobody moves. The moment before the blow is held for ever.

Dadd also wrote a long poem to explain the picture, naming each figure and its role. Mercury read it. His song “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke”, on Queen II (1974), borrows its cast directly from Dadd’s list. He told the BBC he had done a good deal of research, and that is believable. He studied the painting the way a designer studies a brief.

Accounts agree that he returned to it often. He took bandmates to see it, and Taylor and the producer Roy Thomas Baker are named among them. The painting seemed to show him what Queen II could be: dense, theatrical and ornate, with a darkness underneath the decoration.

Why Dadd matters to Pop Art

On the surface, a Bethlem inmate’s fairy picture and a Marshall stack have little in common. Look closer and the links appear.

• Crowding. Dadd leaves no empty space. Queen’s arrangements, with their stacked vocal harmonies, behave the same way.
• Theatre. The painting is a stage set with a cast. Mercury treated every Queen performance as a staged tableau.
• Fantasy as freedom. The Victorians used fairies to say things they could not say directly. Mercury used the same device, and the song plays on the word “stroke” and on a word that sounds a lot like “queer”.
• Craft. Dadd’s patience is the opposite of the sloppy rock gesture. Mercury had the same respect for finish.

Pop Art borrowed from advertising and comics. Mercury borrowed from the Victorian fairy painting and heraldry, and he made them pop.

The Crest

The clearest evidence of his training is the Queen crest, which he designed himself. It works as a logo, but it is built on the rules of heraldry.

Each band member is placed by birth sign. Two lions stand for Leo, which covers John Deacon and Roger Taylor. A crab stands for Cancer, which is Brian May. Two fairies stand for Virgo, which is Mercury. They surround a large letter Q, and a phoenix crowns the whole thing. The fairies are worth noticing. Mercury put them on the band’s coat of arms, and they are a small echo of Dadd.

The crest was first seen on the back of the debut album in 1973. It became the band’s face on the next two big releases.

A Night at the Opera (1975)

The album came out in November 1975, with art direction credited to David Costa. The cover shows the crest in soft colour, mostly cream with touches of blue, yellow, pink and green, centred on a plain white ground. The early UK sleeve was embossed, so the crest stood up from the card. The script is Filmotype York.

The effect is a bookplate, or the monogram on an old opera programme. It was a bold choice in the year of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Most rock sleeves of the time shouted. This one stood still and let the crest do the work, in the same way Dadd’s figures wait in the grass.

The white background matters. It reads as a stage before the curtain goes up, and the title, borrowed from a Marx Brothers film, supplies the joke that keeps the pomp from turning stiff.

A Day at the Races (1976)

The follow-up, released in December 1976, takes the same crest and turns the background black. Queen borrowed another Marx Brothers title and kept the visual rule of one emblem, one colour field and no photograph.

That consistency is the design lesson. The pair of sleeves works as a system: the same mark under a different light, white for the opera and black for the races. Brian May later said he saw the two albums as parallel, and the sleeves make that point before the music starts. This is what a brand identity looks like when a trained designer runs it.

Conclusion

It is easy to describe Mercury as a showman who happened to draw. The evidence points the other way. He was a designer first, and he built the persona, the stage and the sleeves as parts of one project. Ealing gave him the discipline. Dadd gave him a model for obsessive, ornate fantasy. The crest gave him a symbol that could sit on a sleeve, a banner or a T-shirt without losing its meaning.

For a book about art and pop, the lesson is simple. The boundary between the gallery and the charts was never as firm as critics claimed, and Mercury walked straight across it.

Farrokh Bulsara (Freddie Mercury) – Ealing Art College 1966-1969

—

Art Pop / Pop Art: a study of the influences of art school, famous artists and movements on pop and rock music. Those institutions where failure is motivation, where the eccentric and pretentious emerge into the fascinating space where art and music meet.