Clean and Tell (Part Two)

During the 1980s Brickham cleaned regularly for Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. “Freddie was such a sweet man”, she says. “But he had terrible toilet habits! His aim was terrible when he peed and the carpet and floorboards around his toilet were quite rotten as a result!” Brickham also claims that Mercury frequently neglected to flush after using the toilet, leading to huge build ups of shit. “It was terrible”, she declares. “The things I saw in that toilet bowl! Not to mention the smell! I sometimes wondered what he’d been eating! It wasn’t so bad when it was just solid turds - you could dislodge them with the toilet brush before flushing - but when it was the liquid stuff there was no option but to dredge it out!” The absent-minded Mercury also had an extremely bad habit of wiping his arse on pieces of tissue paper which he then left lying about the flat. “I remember that Brian May once inadvertently blew his nose on one when he was visiting”, Brickham remembers. “He had Freddie’s shit all over his face. It was very comical.”

According to Brickham, the versatile vocalist’s greatest passion was collecting his own farts. “Whenever he cracked one off in the bath, he would trap it in a glass jar”, she explains. “Then, at parties, he would harmlessly explode them by dropping a lighted match into the jar. According to the particular qualities of the fart and the size of the jar, it would make a different musical note as it ignited. I once saw him play “Bohemian Rhapsody” using over a hundred jars!” Mercury built up a huge collection of bottled farts. Unfortunately, disaster struck one morning as Brickham was cleaning: “They must have been leaking, because when I lit up a fag, there was this huge explosion which wrecked the entire building. We were lucky to survive, poor Freddie’s moustache was blown clean off!” The force of the explosion shattered windows for a two mile radius. Suspecting a terrorist bombing, police sealed off the area for six hours. Even before the book - Dirty Work - has reached the bookshops, doubt has been cast on its authenticity, with a spokesman for the Spice Girls denying that Brickham had ever worked for them and describing her colourful claims as “total fabrication”. He added that the group’s laundry could easily pass the 'Daz doorstep challenge' with flying colours.