Freddie The Bastard
"You might think I'm a dreamer," sang John Lennon, "But I'm not the only one." He was right of course. Remember 60's pop combo Freddie and the Dreamers? They were dreamers. Except Freddie of course. He was a bastard. Freddie the Bastard they used to call him. The right people could call him that to his face because he liked it. If you weren't the right person, or he was just in a bad mood that night, you could find yourself with your lips stapled to the back of a horse. That's what happened to Nigel Beckenstand, the Dreamers' original bass player. Back then they were called "Bastard and the Dreamers", but you couldn't say "bastard" on the radio back then, so the name had to change.
When you watch archive footage of the Dreamers today, they look pretty happy. But they weren't. They were terrified of Freddie the Bastard, but they had to maintain the pretense. They were too scared to look scared. None of them could even play an instrument before Freddie made them join his band. They all learned overnight. They had hit after hit since they were too scared not to. He had a cannon in his front garden, and if any of the band made a mistake on stage, they would get fired out of it into the wall of the pub next door.
Freddie hit the headlines after eating the then Minister of Transport. In fact, he retains a place in the Guinness book of world records for most members of the British cabinet eaten by one man after polishing off the Education Secretary two years later. They didn't dare arrest him for it. Even the police were terrified of him.
Then one day the hits just stopped coming. For a while people kept buying his records anyway, in case he found out and stabbed them in the elbow like he did that nun one time, but it soon became clear that he had vanished, and a collective, if nervous, sigh of relief was heard around the country.
And where is he now? Nobody knows. Some say he's dead. Some say he fled the country. But others talk in half-whispers about strange doings in holiday camps and pubs around the UK, where rumours of a Freddie and the Dreamers reunion abound.
What a bastard.
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