City: London, England
Venue: College of Estate Management
Date: October 16, 1970



The venue for this show was near Kensington Market, where Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor had been running a stall selling clothing and shoes since 1969 (it's where the two of them originally met).

Alan Mair, one of their co-workers at the market, later recalled that the gig wasn't very good. He said how Brian and Roger were very accomplished, but that Freddie looked awkward on stage and sang pitchy at times. He and some friends went to a local pub immediately afterward, as they were afraid of what to tell Freddie because he was so excited about the band. In the 1976 book on the band by George Tremlett, Mair offered these thoughts: "Being a musician myself, I thought they were very bad because there was a certain lack of finesse about the act. They were very new. Freddie's voice was very uncontrolled, and he was also stiff in his movements on stage, sort of cumbersome." He also distinctly remembers the band playing Liar at this show.

The contract for the gig was preserved, with £20 payable to B.H. May.

Queen's eventual bassist John Deacon was allegedly in attendance at this show.

On September 19, instead of rehearsing for this gig as planned, they mourned the death of Jimi Hendrix only as musicians could. A mutual love for Hendrix is largely what originally brought Freddie, Brian and Roger together (John Deacon later shared this with them as well); original bassist Barry Mitchell explained in a 2018 interview: "We all loved and adored Jimi Hendrix. We were shattered. We were supposed to be working on our own material because we had a gig coming up in a couple weeks. Our heart wasn't in it, so we spent the entire rehearsal jamming Jimi Hendrix songs."

Kensington Market was a central hub for London's arts culture at the time, as the stalls were mostly run by artists, musicians, actors and writers. Roger stopped coming to the Market around the time of signing with Trident (early 1972), but Freddie maintained his presence there into about February 1974 when their music career started to take off.




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