T heir real life was about to slip into fantasy, which was pretty much the plan. At the tail end of the 1960s, Roger Taylor and Freddie Bulsara would lie on the floor together, head to head, getting lost in Electric Ladyland , talking about their future. Maybe they’d share a bottle of wine, nothing stronger. “Fred and I were no good at smoking weed,” Taylor says, more than five decades later. “I used to think my head was on fire at the back. It never did agree.”

Even before Bulsara joined the band that became Queen and renamed himself Freddie Mercury , he and Taylor shared a velvet-heavy fashion sense, a passion for Jimi Hendrix, and some fat-bottomed ambitions. “We wanted to be the best,” says Taylor. “We both really wanted success .” Queen’s drummer is, at the moment, sitt

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