There is nothing we love more than discovering an incredible little piece of music history that might be widely lost to the passing of time. In today’s instance, dive into the proposed supergroup between Elton John, Freddie Mercury and Rod Stewart that almost came to be.
Tales of Elton John and Freddie Mercury’s antics are especially well documented. In the 1970s and ‘80s, both of their parties were infamous, wild and lavish. There are even stories of the pair dressing Princess Diana up in drag to take her for a night out on the town. It is a well-established fact that the pair loved a good time.
Rod Stewart, meanwhile, was in the same circle as another major music player enjoying the spoils of his fame. At the same time, Stewart seemed to be securing chart hit after chart hit, placing him at the top of the musical food chain alongside Elton John and Queen in the late 1970s.
One night, when the three forces were hanging out, Stewart suggested the idea of combining their power. In his memoir, Rod: The Autobiography, the singer remembered the night as a sweet tale of three music makers coming together.
“Elton and I spent a long evening there [in the rented mansion] with Freddie Mercury,” he wrote. Stewart seemed especially fond of the Queen singer who he described as “adorable”, remembering him as “a sweet and funny man.”
He recalled that the idea of a collaboration came up as they sat “discussing the possibility of the three of us forming a supergroup”. While they failed to get any further regarding sound or logistics, never actually forming the band, they had some details set. “The name we had in mind was Nose, Teeth & Hair, a tribute to each of our remarked-upon physical attributes,” Stewart remembered.
“The general idea was that we could appear dressed like the Beverley Sisters,” he continued. “Somehow this project never came to anything.”
The three remained friends up until Freddie Mercury’s death in 1991. Mercury and John were especially incredibly close, with the musician setting up an AIDS foundation in memory of the Queen leader.
John and Stewart, however, have had a frosty and complex relationship. There has been a more than 50-year-long history of tension, both reigniting and squashing feuds with each passing year. In 2019, Stewart brought it back up when he declared John’s final tour a “money-grabbing” exercise. It seems that without Mercury, the glue that held the friends together disintegrated as their band never came to be.
