For a brief moment in the late 1970s, three of Britain’s biggest rock stars considered forming a supergroup. Freddie Mercury, Elton John and Rod Stewart discussed putting a band together during a dinner party at a house Queen were renting in Bel Air, Los Angeles, according to Stewart’s own 2012 autobiography.
The proposed name was as flamboyant as the three men themselves: ‘Nose, Teeth & Hair’, a tribute to each singer’s most remarked-upon physical feature. Stewart had the nose, Elton had his famously thinning hair, and Mercury, self-conscious about the four extra incisors that pushed his front teeth into a prominent overbite, had the teeth. He reportedly never had them fixed, worried the procedure might affect his voice.
Stewart recalled the evening fondly, describing Mercury as “a sweet and funny man whom I really adored.” He wrote: “The general idea was that we could appear dressed like the Beverley Sisters. Somehow this project never came to anything, which is contemporary music’s deep and abiding loss.”
Even Mercury joked about the idea’s failure. Asked about the plan, he explained it never got off the ground “because none of us can agree on the order of the words,” referring to the band’s name, sometimes remembered as ‘Nose, Teeth & Hair’, sometimes as ‘Hair, Nose & Teeth’.
Filmmaker Rudi Dolezal, a close friend of Mercury’s who directed the 1991 video for Queen’s ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’, Mercury’s final appearance with the band before his death later that year, was a regular guest at Mercury’s legendary parties at his Kensington home, where the idea was reportedly discussed further. Dolezal told the New York Post that at one dinner party, with Stewart and Elton John both in attendance, “there was a lot of bitching about other artists, and about themselves.”
The supergroup, of course, never happened. Mercury died in November 1991, and any chance of the trio reviving their plans died with him.
Speaking on Chris Evans’ How to Wow podcast years later, Stewart reflected on those nights with characteristic candour. “Those were great nights, mate,” he said. “I don’t know if we were kidding each other about forming a band, but it just shows what a little cocaine and alcohol will do for you!” He also offered a more sobering update: he and Elton John, once close enough to discuss forming a band together, are no longer on speaking terms. “We don’t take to each other anymore,” he admitted.
What might have been one of rock’s most eccentric supergroups remains, in the end, just an anecdote: a snapshot of three icons at the height of their fame, unable to settle on so much as the order of three words.
