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We swept to Wembley in the back of one of a fleet of black limousines. I was on my way to see Queen perform live on stage for the very first time. We arrived at Wembley with about an hour to spare. The special enclosure was awash with the country's greatest rock performers. I was agog.

Freddie went to get ready. Queen would be appearing after David Bowie, who was on stage now. When David Bowie came off and headed into his own trailer, Freddie whisked after him, taking me with him. David was strange. He was sitting in front of an electric fan, trying to dry his hair.
"It's about the only fan you've got David, isn't it?" quipped Freddie. They laughed. Then Freddie said: "This is Jim. I believe you've already met."
David glanced up at me and looked blank: "No, I don't know him at all."
"Well who did your hair the other night?" I said, but I don't think it registered. Very strange.

When it was time for Queen to go on, I walked with Freddie to the stage and, watching from the wings, witnessed the most magical 20 minutes of my life. At last I had seen the real Freddie Mercury at work, whipping 70,000 people into a frenzy. He gave everything to his performance; nothing else mattered to him. When he came off, he rushed to his trailer and I tottered behind like a puppy. His first words were: "Thank God that's over!"
Joe ripped his wet clothes from him and dressed him. Adrenalin still overflowing, Freddie knocked back a large vodka to calm himself. Then his face lit up. The expression said: "Yes, we've done it!"

As we stepped out of the caravan we met a grinning Elton John. "You bastards!" he said to Freddie. "You stole the show!" Everyone backstage was converging on Freddie, Brian, Roger and John. Organiser Bob Geldof said later: "Queen were simply the best band of the day."

When we fell into bed that night, Freddie cuddled up and whispered: "Did you enjoy it?"
"What do you think?" I answered, hugging him tight. "It's the first time I've ever been to a concert."
"You're joking!" he said.
"No," I added. He was dumbfounded. I fell asleep knowing that for the first time I'd actually seen the real star Freddie Mercury doing what he did best - wowing the world.

The next morning Live Aid seemed an age away to Freddie, but not to me. When I got to the Savoy on Monday morning it was still bursting out of my ears.

I was soon back in the old routine. Every two weeks I would fly to Munich and be met at the airport. The first time after Live Aid I flew to Munich to join Freddie and was whisked direct to the Musicland studio, to watch him working on material for Queen's new album, A Kind Of Magic. In the studio Freddie had a one-track mind - work, work and more work. I watched him through the glass, but he rarely glanced my way because he was so totally absorbed. He chain-smoked or, rather, chain-lit Silk Cuts, and to boost his energy and adrenalin he slipped down slugs of vodka.

Freddie's drive amazed me. He had to keep on the go; it was part of his life blood. When he wasn't singing he'd bounce into the control room and sit behind the banks of sliders to tweak the playback mixes himself. He was always in total control.

By those happy days, the relationship between Freddie and me had deepened. I came to miss him when we were apart;  I became upset. And Freddie felt the same way about me. then one weekend in London he started talking about living our lives together.

"If I asked you to come and live with me in Munich, would you?" he asked. I'd never even considered moving in with Freddie until that moment.
"Yes, I will," I said, adding, "on one condition. If I move to Germany I must have a job." I had financial commitments in Britain, and wasn't prepared to throw in my job at the Savoy to scour Munich for a job as a hairdresser who couldn't even speak German. My independence was important to me, and I wasn't prepared simply to live out of Freddie's pocket.

Freddie let the matter drop. then, 15 minutes later, he said: "And if I decide to leave Munich and come back to London?"
"Then I would consider what I wanted to do," I answered.

In the end, there wasn't much time for consideration. Over a period of weeks Freddie took to phoning most nights at three or four in the morning. Eventually my landlady got so fed up with it she gave me two weeks notice. Freddie's persistence had made me homeless. When Freddie came back to London I told him I was being evicted.

"I'm being kicked out because of your late-night calls," I said. 
"Well, don't worry about it," he said calmly. "Move into Garden Lodge. There's no one there - it's empty." So I did.

I spent my first night in the large master bedroom alone, with Oscar snuggling up on top of the massive bed. I hung up a few shirts and my suit for work, but otherwise I didn't unpack as I didn't know where to put my things. Freddie returned to Britain for good the following weekend. and immediately dragged me off to bed. He said he had missed me terribly; I knew he meant it. After he had picked out wardrobes for me to use in the dressing area, he cleared all his things from one of his drawers.
"That's for your little bits and pieces." 

So that's how I came to move in with him. We lived together for the next six years like man and wife.

When Freddie and I were in private he could be particularly romantic. We never once broached the subject of how long we'd be together. We just accepted that we were and would be. Occasionally he'd ask me what I wanted out of life. "Contentment and to be loved," I'd reply. It seemed like I'd found both in Freddie.

Another thing he'd often tell me, right up until the night he died, was: "I love you." And it was never an "I love you" which just rolled off the tongue; he always  meant it.

I didn't find it so easy to show emotion. I'd lived on the London gay scene for many years and had come to realise you can get hurt very easily when relationships end. Each finished relationship builds up a new barrier and they become difficult to break down. But, in time, Freddie tore them all down.

I think we both shared a fear of the same thing - loneliness. You can have all the friends in the world around you, yet still feel agonisingly lonely, as Freddie said time and again. We were both acutely aware that many of our gay friends were haunted by the prospect of living out their lives alone, unwanted and unloved.

Friday, July 11 and Saturday July 12 were milestones in Queen's career - two sell-out concerts at Wembley Stadium as part of their Magic! European Tour. It was the band's first time back on the massive stage since their show-stealing Live Aid set a year earlier, and over the two nights 150,000 people would see them.

Freddie had recurring problems with nodules on his vocal cords, the price he paid for being a singer. That meant he toured with a small machine, a steam inhaler in which he firmly believed. He also sucked Strepsils throat lozenges all the time. On the first night of Wembley Freddie had some throat problems, but dismissed them as not drastic enough to stop the show. As always, I watched from all over Wembley on both nights.

The after-show party on Saturday was held at the Roof Gardens Club in Kensington and, because the press would be there, Freddie wanted Mary Austin, the company secretary of Freddie's private business, Goose Productions, which managed all his personal affairs, on his arm. It was a rare deceit that he was not in love with me and he apologised for it.
"It's got to be this way because of the press," he said.
I understood, and followed a few paces behind them.

A few weeks later, I read a feature about Freddie in the Daily Express. It reported Freddie's response to Mary's desire to have a baby by him: he would sooner have another cat. The feature also reported that Freddie was unattached.

Freddie felt that keeping to this line made things simpler for the two of us, and he was right. However, he did say in the article: "For the first time I've found a contentment within myself." He told me he was referring to our relationship.

Freddie felt Mary had long since become a public part of his life in the papers and knew she could deal with it easily enough. But he always tried to shield me from the press. He looked on fame as a double-edged sword.

After work on Friday, August 1, I flew to Barcelona to join Freddie on tour. He told me he'd been interviewed by Spanish television and declared cheekily that the main reason he was in Spain was in the hope of meeting their great opera diva, Montserrat Caballe. After the Barcelona concert we all went out to a fabulous fish restaurant. At one point I asked Roger Taylor how the tour was going.

"Well, Freddie's different this year," he said. "What have you done to him?"

He told me Freddie was a decidedly changed man. He'd stopped trawling the gay venues while the others went back to their hotel, and he'd stopped burning the candle at both ends. Roger's comment spoke volumes. I took it as a reassuring nod of approval which was very much appreciated. Coming from one of Freddie's closest friends, and one of the band, I saw it as a vote of confidence in our affair.

When the tour was over, we went on holiday to Japan. On our return, when we had cleared customs, we were ambushed from a Fleet Street reporter and photographer gleefully throwing into Freddie's face and Aids-scare story. Under the headline "Queen Star Freddie In Aids Shock" the News Of The World had alleged that Freddie had been "secretly tested for Aids" by a Harley Street clinic under his real name Freddie Bulsara. The results had shown conclusively, according to a bogus spokesman for Freddie, that he did not have the "killer disease". The tasteless story was  a flyer - rubbish from start to finish. It even closed by claiming that Freddie and Mary were living together in Garden Lodge.

Freddie flipped. Why had no one from the Queen office in London raised the alarm and alerted him to the story?
"Do I look like I'm dying from Aids?" Freddie told the reporter. He said he had no idea what anyone had been saying and was clearly annoyed at what he called "such rubbish".
"It makes me feel sick," he said. "Now go away and leave me alone."
"Do I Look Like I'm Dying From Aids?  Fumes Freddie," screamed the headline from the Sun on the next day. He was furious.

He said he hadn't been tested, as the papers had suggested, but the story did make him very edgy. He was clearly on his guard and for the next few days he seemed preoccupied with the story. Usually Freddie ignored any press speculation, but this time the press seemed to have struck a nerve. I guess that he had doubts about his own health, as before we met he'd done more than his fair share of living the fast-lane life of a successful rock star; all sex, drugs and rock and roll, with a string of one-night stand strangers.

The day the Sun ran the story I went back to work at the Savoy, to my humdrum routine at the barber's shop. The day didn't go well. I learned, to my horror, that the concession had been sold. I met the new owner, but wasn't very impressed with him and was even less so when he appointed his brash little brother as manager. Life at the Savoy began to get rocky.  The new management tried to change the business from an old-fashioned gentlemen's barber shop into a trendy cut and blow-dry place. My life at work was fast becoming unbearable, but at least I had Freddie and Garden Lodge to come home to. 

For Christmas that year, Queen had agreed to release an album of live versions of many of their hits, called Live Magic. They had also agreed to take the best part of a year off to give them each a chance to recharge their batteries as well as pursue solo projects. With so much time suddenly on his hands I thought Freddie would want to go clubbing, but quite the opposite happened. Like me, he became a stay-at-home. We began to lead a very quiet life together at Garden Lodge. Most Saturday evenings Phoebe and Joe went out and left the two of us cuddled up on the sofa watching television. Some nights we'd even be in bed by 10pm, though that never meant Freddie got up any earlier the following morning.

At the end of February, Freddie flew to Barcelona with Phoebe and record producer Mike Moran to meet Montserrat Caballe for the first time - when Freddie had made his remark on Spanish television she'd been watching and had arranged to meet him. The two great singers met in a private dining room at the Ritz Hotel. Freddie said he'd had absolutely no idea what to expect except that Montserrat was prone to tantrums. She turned up late, and Freddie introduced himself by handing her a cassette and spluttering: "Here, I've got this for you to listen to." On the tape was Exercises in Free Love, a song he'd written with Mike Moran. Montserrat liked the demo tracks and said she would be happy to work on an album with Freddie. He came home on cloud nine.

A week later Freddie and I were off to Covent Garden to hear a recital by Montsy, as Freddie called her. At the end of the performance, for an encore, she came on accompanied by Mike Moran. She announced she was going to sing a song "written by two great new friends of mine," adding, "and I believe the other is in the audience tonight".

Freddie was really surprised. His hands shot up to his eyes and he started laughing, with an expression of total astonishment on his face. The spotlights swung on Freddie, his face cupped in his hands, and the audience rose to their feet clapping wildly. So Freddie stood up and acknowledged the applause, and sank back into his chair. He listened transfixed as Montsy performed Exercises in Free Love.

Later that week, when Montsy arrived in the studio to work with Freddie, things didn't go quite the way she expected. She thought that to record with Freddie she only had to fly in, sing a few songs from sheet music and leave, but she hadn't reckoned on Freddie's unique way of working. He hadn't written out any of the music for her in advance. Instead he was going to ask her to try something, then keep reworking it until they found the exact effect he was after.

He told her: "Puccini and all these other composers are dead. I'm alive dear."

With that, she accepted his odd way of recording. He proved a hard taskmaster. Later she admitted that in those sessions Freddie got more out of her voice than she knew she was capable of.

Before Easter I went home to Ireland to visit my family. I'm sure my family suspected I was gay, although I'd never said anything and I never mentioned I was Freddie's lover. I stayed with my mum, who didn't have a phone, so it meant I had to walk four miles to the nearest phone-box to ring Freddie. The day before I was due to fly back I rang Freddie at home. He asked when I'd be back, and there was an urgency in his voice which made me suspect something was wrong.
"The doctors have just taken a big lump out of me," he replied. I asked him to tell me more, but he said he couldn't over the phone; he'd tell me when I got home.
"Well, don't worry," I said. "I'll be home tomorrow." My immediate reaction was that Freddie was exaggerating a little. If he was feeling low, he had a habit of wounding dramatic over the phone to win extra attention from me.

Next day, when I got back to Garden Lodge, Freddie was in our bedroom. As I lay in bed with my arm around him, Freddie cuddled up close and told me what he couldn't tell me the previous day.

He pointed to a tiny mark on his shoulder, no bigger than a thumbnail and with two tiny stitches in it. The doctors had taken a piece of his flesh for testing and the results had just come back. He had Aids.
"Don't be ridiculous," I said. I couldn't believe it: the doctors had to be wrong.
"Who did this test?" I asked. "Come on, we'll go to somebody else." We had to get a second opinion.
"no," said Freddie. "These guys are the best available."
"If you want to leave me I'll understand," he said.
"What?" I asked.
"If you want to leave me and move out of Garden Lodge I won't stop you; I'll understand," he said.
"But I love you," I said. "I'm not going to walk out on you now or ever. Let's not talk about it any more."
Freddie looked up at me and we hugged very tightly. The consequences of what he'd just told me never really sank in. It was something I was never prepared for, nor had any idea how to deal with. Instead I tried to put it out of my mind as much as possible.
In many ways I was still hoping for a miracle: a mis-diagnosis. Apart from ensuring our sex was safe from then on, I wasn't worried about my own health for a moment. Freddie suggested several times that I had and Aids test myself, but I wouldn't, nor would I give him a reason for my decision.

The truth was that I couldn't see what good my having a test could do. If I was HIV positive, I thought there was a real possibility that Freddie might suffer some kind of guilt as in all probability he'd have given it to me. If the test proved negative and I was in the clear, I felt that it would be equally unfair on Freddie, like saying, "Yah boo, sucks. I'm all right jack!" The only thing that mattered was looking after Freddie and trying to keep him healthy.

That was the last time we referred directly to his illness and from that moment, if anything came up on television to do with Aids, we would turn over to another channel or switch the set off. It's not that he was unsympathetic to others with the illness; he simply didn't like being reminded of his own fate.

On May 4, Freddie was devastated by another story about him in the Sun. And so was I. His old friend, Paul Prenter had stitched him up. Aids Kills Freddie's Two Lovers, it declared, and the story was run across three pages. Tony Bastin, from Brighton, and John Murphy, an airline steward, had died from the disease in 1986. And Prenter claimed that Freddie had called him late one night and poured out his fears about Aids.

The feature also named me as his lover. My immediate thoughts were of what my family back home in Ireland would make of it. I was due back for a visit, and if word was out that I was the lover of someone so famous they would certainly be disappointed to hear it third-hand from the press. It was something I'd have preferred to tell them in my own time.

We later learned that Prenter had been paid about £32,000 by the paper for his story. Freddie never spoke to him again. For the next few days there was more in the Sun, and at each episode of Prenter's story Freddie became angrier. Prenter sold the paper several photographs of Freddie with various lovers and these were thrown over two pages under the heading All The Queen's Men.

A few times after the Sun sell-out, Prenter rang Garden Lodge, but Freddie wouldn't speak to him. Prenter tried to excuse his appalling behaviour by saying that the press had been hounding him for so many weeks he'd finally cracked under the pressure. Freddie didn't want to know Prenter's excuses; he felt unforgivably let down. The saddest thing about the Prenter episode was that it crushed Freddie's ability to trust others, except for a select few. He made no new friends after that.

I often felt sorry for Freddie. For all he had - the money and the success - he couldn't walk down a street or go shopping without being stared at, a pet hate of his.

Feeling bruised by Prenter and the Sun., Freddie decided that he needed to get well away from them both and we flew to Ibiza for a weeks holiday. At the end of the trip Freddie and Montserrat Caballe made a surprise appearance at the Ibiza '92 festival to celebrate Spain's staging of the Olympics five years later. The night was wonderfully decadent, held at the lavish Ku Club in San Antonio in front of an elite audience of about 500 people. When Freddie and Montserrat sang Barcelona in public for the very first time, you could feel the pride the song was instilling in them all. Some even shed a few tears.

Back in London, I was beginning to discover I did not have much job security at the Savoy. Things at the barber's shop were coming to a head. I'd started telling some of my regular clients that there was a chance I would be leaving, although I had no idea where I'd go next. By mid-July I'd had enough. When I'd done my last trim of the day I phoned the owner of the shop and asked to see him, but he was too busy. "Fine," I told him. "As of 4.30 this afternoon, I'm finished." He didn't ask me why, but asked whether I could work a month's notice. I said I  wouldn't.

I rang Freddie at Garden Lodge to tell him what had happened. "All right, dear" Freddie said calmly. !you start working tomorrow for me in the garden. We'll work your wages out when you get home."

When I got back to Garden Lodge, Freddie was waiting for me. "Give us a cuddle," he said. "Well done! I'm glad you're not going to work there any more." Then we talked about me taking over from the part-time gardeners. I told him I'd work as his gardener on one condition - that no one, not even he, could interfere in what I was doing or the way I worked. It was agreed. Not only that, I even got a wage increase; he put me on £600 a month after tax.

Freddie's condition was soon showing physically. A few large red marks appeared on the back of his hand and on his left cheek. These were Kaposi's Sarcoma. He got the first marks neutralised by special laser treatment, and they faded slowly. But the treatment left slight blemishes, so he wore make-up to cover them up.

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