POPFESSIONS

Ruth Mortimer

There is no-one as deluded as a teenage girl with a crush on a popstar. And there was no-one more deluded in the 1980s than me. I was passionate about Queen singer Freddie Mercury.

Despite all the evidence that he was a raging homosexual - moustache, sex parties and er, boyfriends - I maintained a firm belief that Mercury was just shagging men because he hadn’t encountered the love of his life. Obviously, the love of his life was me.

It was clear how things would work when I met Mercury. He would sing “Love of my life” to me, gazing deep into my eyes. We would compare our most flattering catsuits. I would take my turn humping his microphone stand. Everything we needed for a successful union was there.

Unfortunately, only a few short years after my obsession with Mercury begun, he died of Aids in November 1991. I went into a state of deep depression. I took to my bed for a week, an equal period of mourning to that given to my beloved pet rat only a few months before.

I transferred my obsession from the man to his memory. I phoned the hotline obsessively to obtain tickets for the Freddie Mercury Memorial Concert. When I failed to get through, I told my mum that I would phone Childline if she didn’t find a way of getting me a ticket. As she lived in a Scottish village and held precisely no connections to the music industry, this was a tricky request. She failed.

I ended up watching the concert on TV at my best friend’s house (I still wasn’t talking to my mum). I wept and wept, hating George Michael for having the temerity to sing Somebody to Love at the concert and actually doing it reasonably well. Frankly, The Beatles would have had a hard time getting a slot on the Memorial Concert billing if I’d been in charge. In my eyes, they were all desecrating Freddie’s memory and lacking the talent to do him justice.

At least Freddie had me to think of his memory. I would preserve his beautiful legacy for all time, never taking a lover - like a nun in the church of Queen. Until a couple of months later, anyway, when I first heard The Charlatans. I was suddenly gripped by a new fever. Tim Burgess had to be mine. I was definitely the love of his life. He just didn’t know it yet.

I solemnly informed my mum of my new life direction. She sighed and said that at least Burgess might like girls.

I fixed her with a death stare. “He doesn’t like GIRLS, mum. He likes me. He just hasn’t met me yet.”