Tim Staffell

In the early '60s, two high school friends in London—Tim Staffell and Brian May—formed a five-piece rock band called 1984. Despite the Orwellian band name, Staffell says it was actually a "kind of fun covers band" that got regular gigs around London. After high school, the band broke up, but Staffell and May stuck together, and eventually found a drummer named Roger Taylor to form a new group called Smile. Although the band was together for only two years, it has an important place in music history as the rock group that laid the foundation of what would become Queen. Between 1968, when the band was formed, and 1970, when Staffell left, Smile was a powerful voice in the '60s London rock scene. It was a tight-knit community, and Staffell and the other members of Smile were friends with a young musician who called himself Freddie Mercury and played music with a few other bands. The story of Smile, Staffell leaving the band, and Mercury joining with May and Taylor to form Queen serves as the opening backstory to the Oscar-nominated biopic Bohemian Rhapsody . But the story that audiences have seen in the movie—which broke box-office records for the highest-grossing music biopic—isn't the real one. The film shows a young Mercury attending a concert at a London club. The band performing is Smile, playing its original song "Doin' Alright," which was later re-recorded by Queen. (That's Tim Staffell's voice in the movie; he recorded a version of the song for Bohemian Rhapsody .) After the show, Mercury watches as Staffell heatedly quits the band. Seeing his opportunity, Mercury walks up to the remaining musicians, introduces himself, and stuns the guys by singing his own a cappella version of the song. The rest is history ... or at least it would be if B ohemian Rhapsody didn't tell a fictionalized version of Queen's story. In an interview with Esquire, Staffell—who released an album last year and is prepping another in 2019—explains the true story of how he left Smile, how Queen was formed, and the details Bohemian Rhapsody left out or changed. Members of the group Smile posed in Addison Gardens, West Kensington, London in August 1969. Left to right: Bruce Sanderson (with eye patch), Paul Humbertone, Brian May (sitting on bonnet), Pete Edmunds, Tim Staffell, Clive Armitage and Paul Fielder. My departure from Smile was completely amicable. I began to want to play music that was more improvisational. I was drifting towards listening to jazz and blues. The movie has used artistic license to depict the departure, but it wasn't really like that because Freddie and I were good friends at college. Freddie joining the band was very natural, as he was really good friends with the band members before I left and simply dovetailed in. I just said to them, 'Look guys, I've already gone for some auditions,' and I said, 'I'm not happy with this anymore and I don't think it's gonna work out.' How wrong could you be? Unlike what we see in the movie, Mercury and Staffell were good friends from college. We were in the same year at art school. We were taking the same course. The thing about Freddie was, he always had an unshakeable faith in himself. People would say that he was shy, but deep down he had this absolutely unshakeable faith. He used to say that he was gonna be a superstar someday. He used to play air guitar, using a meter long steel rule, in the classroom, which was amusing. Staffell, Mercury, and May were all connected through the tight-knit London music scene. The music scene in London in the '60s and '70s was really formed from the ground up. It was kids making it up in their garages, in their living rooms. Almost everybody in the social circle was a musician. You couldn't separate the social aspect from the musical aspect. So we had a big pool of musical friends that would combine and recombine, trying different band ideas out. It was like a melting pot. Freddie socialized with us when we had gigs, when we did gigs, went to par