Is This The Real Life? (20 page)

The stars finally aligned in Queen’s favour in the New Year. In February, Feldman’s radio plugger Phil Reed persuaded the BBC to record a session with Queen for DJ John Peel’s
Sounds of the Seventies
show. Mercury re-recorded his vocals on four existing tracks from Trident at the BBC’s Langham 1 Studio in London’s West End. The songs, ‘Doing Alright’, ‘My Fairy King’, ‘Liar’ and ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ were broadcast the following week. The airplay and publicity was a boon.

In the meantime, Ronnie Beck had been granted an audience with EMI A&R executive Roy Featherstone at the annual MIDEM music business conference in the South of France. Featherstone was launching a new label, EMI Records, and later claimed that he’d been overwhelmed by the hundreds of tapes foisted on him at the conference ‘from people’s mothers to their howling dogs … nothing grabbed me’. Desperate for something, anything different, Beck forced him to listen to Queen. He was hooked. Being economical with the truth, Beck told Featherstone that other companies were already circling. Recalled Brian May: ‘So we got this message from Roy Featherstone, the head honcho at EMI. He’d heard the demos and he sent a telegram saying, “Do not do anything until you’ve talked to me. I want this band on my record label.”’

Trident, however, continue to play hardball, turning down EMI’s initial offer as too low. Negotiations continued and, in the end, EMI rolled over. They took Eugene Wallace and Headstone as part of the deal (neither was a hit), and in March 1973 Queen signed to EMI, for, it’s said, between £300–400,000.

Future EMI managing director Bob Mercer was the company’s director of A&R at the time. He could see the potential in Queen but also the pitfalls of their deal. ‘What was unusual at the time was that there wasn’t a weak link in the band,’ says Mercer. ‘Usually, the bass player is off or the drummer’s a wanker. Not Queen. And then there was that startling voice which pinned you to the wall. But Queen was not a conventional A&R deal. It wasn’t as if one of
our guys was out there getting shit-faced in a club with them at twelve o’clock at night. The deal came straight from the Sheffields. It was an opportunistic deal for the Sheffields, and Queen had a difficult, even impossible relationship with them by the time we signed the band.’

In April, a month after they cut their deal with EMI, Jac Holzman saw Queen again at the Marquee and made a formal offer from Elektra Records. John Anthony encountered him on the way out of the gig where Holzman had some advice to be passed on to Brian May: ‘Jac said, “We’ll do the deal … but tell the guitarist to make it look harder. Kids like to think it’s Beethoven.”’

Though technically beaten to the punch by the Larry Lurex single, Queen made their EMI debut with the single ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ on 6 July. The lyrics had a simple message: don’t let the bastards grind you down (appropriate in the light of Queen’s struggle and Mercury’s ongoing reinvention); the heavily phased guitar riff was pure Led Zeppelin, the chorus was pure pop, while Taylor returned to his schoolboy inspiration, Surfaris’ ‘Wipe Out’, for the tribal drum fill in the middle. ‘If Queen look half as good as they sound, they could be huge,’ raved
New Musical Express
. Except no one was listening. The single failed to chart, and years later, May still fretted over the final mix: ‘It never had the magic it should have had.’

Queen’s debut album, called simply
Queen
, finally saw the light of day on 13 July. The front cover spoke volumes. It was a picture of Mercury pulling an heroic pose onstage, shot by Roger Taylor’s friend from Cornwall, BBC cameraman Douglas Puddifoot. Freddie was meant to resemble ‘a figurehead on the prow of those old sailing ships,’ according to Brian May. Decorated with the Mercury-designed Queen crest logo, the back cover contained a montage of snapshots, including one of Mercury and Mary Austin’s flat decorated with fancy Biba artifacts. Apparently, EMI’s creative services manager pronounced the homemade cover ‘crap’. But the design was forced through. It was an early indicator of Queen’s unwillingness to compromise.

The liner notes renamed John Deacon as Deacon John and gave Taylor his full family name of Roger Meddows-Taylor; giving the
band an air even more regal air. It also included what would become Queen’s mission statement for most of the decade: ‘… and nobody played synthesiser’. As Roy Thomas Baker explained, ‘We would spend four days multi-layering a guitar solo and then some imbecile from the record company would come in and say, “I like that synth.”’

Like the single, the album sold slowly and made it to number 32 in the UK (though it would chart higher following Queen’s breakthrough two years later). In the press, some reviews were positive. ‘A thrusting, dynamic debut,’ claimed underground magazine
Time Out
. Others were less so. ‘A bucket of stale urine,’ said
New Musical Express
, sparking a resentment of the music press that would endure throughout Queen’s career.

Relieved that they finally had a record out, Queen now wrestled with the fear that it might be already out of date. ‘We were into glam-rock before The Sweet and Bowie,’ Brian May told
Melody
Maker
. ‘We’re worried now because we might have come too late.’ The competition was fierce. Androgynous-looking boys in exotic clothing had become de rigueur in rock and pop. That spring, Bowie released
Aladdin Sane
, and Roxy Music put out their second album
For
Your Pleasure
. Roxy, with their feather boas and art-school pedigree, had made their live debut a year earlier at the Hand and Flowers pub, a stone’s throw from the Kensington Tavern. Roxy had already enjoyed one hit single and album. ‘We don’t want people to think we’re jumping on their bandwagon,’ insisted May.

That summer, London’s number 9 bus became the scene for many an earnest discussion about Queen’s prospects. Carrying May, Mercury and various friends, the double-decker would inch its way through the traffic on Kensington High Street, past the Royal Albert Hall and the market, and into the West End. Chris Smith recalls catching the number 9 with Mercury just after the first Queen album came out. ‘Fred was getting a bit desperate: “God! I hope this band takes off. I don’t know what I’m going to do if it doesn’t.” And he looked up at me and said, “I don’t want to end up working in an art studio.” We both cracked up … I, of course, was the one that did end up working in an art studio.’

‘If you ever get on a number 9 bus and go upstairs to the front left, that’s where Freddie and I used to sit,’ explained Brian May.
‘We used to get the bus and go up to Trident to beat them on the heads, and to ask them why they weren’t doing anything about our record.’

There was some good news that summer. Mike Appleton, producer of the BBC TV music programme
The Old Grey Whistle
Test
, had received an unmarked promo pressing of the Queen album. The disc had been sent without Queen’s detailed press biography and photographs. Appleton liked what he heard, particularly ‘Keep Yourself Alive’. With no idea of who Queen were or how to contact the band, he produced an animated sequence for the song, lifted from a cartoon which had been used to promote US president F.D. Roosevelt’s election campaign. The film was broadcast on
The Old Grey Whistle Test
. An initially irate EMI and Trident both contacted the BBC, but the band were buoyed by the unexpected publicity.

In August, Mercury shaved his chest before filming a promo video for ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ and ‘Liar’. But the grooming proved pointless. The band rejected the video, unhappy with the lighting, among other things, and reconvened in a studio in St John’s Wood two months later. The final film shows Queen, daubed in eyeliner, bedecked in black satin, with May sporting the sort of opulent necklace usually found buried with an Egyptian pharaoh, and even ‘Easy Deacon’ in knee-length platform boots. Mercury preens, shimmies and, at one point, tosses a tambourine into the wings. It’s a fabulously assured performance.

In an attempt to drum up some support for their charges, Trident hired a publicist. Tony Brainsby was a bespectacled, stick-thin 28-year-old. Rarely seen without a drink or a cigarette in his hand, he had been a teenage pal of The Rolling Stones and had a client list that included Paul McCartney, Mott The Hoople and Cat Stevens. His Edith Grove townhouse doubled as his office and was a Mecca for pop stars, writers, actors, models and liggers.

Brainsby had seen Queen live and been impressed by their conviction in front of a disinterested college crowd. He was immediately intrigued by Freddie Mercury’s mannerisms (‘He’d say “darling” or “my dear” practically every sentence’) but also recalled the secrecy surrounding the singer’s past life (‘For years I
believed his proper surname to be Bulsova’). Mercury was, said Brainsby, ‘better at being seen, heard but not known.’

But when Brainsby took Queen on as clients, he met with hostility in the music press. ‘They were called posing ponces,’ he recalled in 1997 (Brainsby died in 2000). ‘They were accused of getting session musicians in to cover for them because people found it so hard to believe they could look like that and be talented.’ While many of their contemporaries presented an air of stoned insouciance, Queen made no attempt to conceal their intelligence, middle-class backgrounds or clarity of thought. May and Taylor would earnestly outline their game-plan, with the drummer particularly prone to outbursts: ‘We are a bloody good band!’

Steven Rosen, who would go on to write for
Rolling Stone
, was spending the summer of 1973 in London trying to break into music journalism. He’d been given Tony Brainsby’s name. The PR took pity on Rosen, who’d been sleeping in Hyde Park, and let him crash at Edith Grove. To help out the aspiring writer, Tony made a suggestion. ‘He asked me if I wanted to interview Queen,’ recalls Rosen now. ‘And right away I thought the name was a bit too glam. Tony had a white test pressing of the first album and in my infinite stupidity I passed. He was like, “I could have all four guys here in the office and you’d have one of the first interviews with them.” And I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” I still think about that moment.’

While critics, even the destitute ones, were broadly suspicious, Brainsby noticed that the band had a dedicated following that over the next two years would expand to include an age group much older than was associated with the traditional rock fan (‘housewives, middle-aged women – I had one old woman that used to ring me up’). Queen would soon appoint Taylor’s Truro friends Pat and Sue Johnstone to run their fast-growing fan club, when the deluge of mail they received via EMI became too much for the company to deal with.

In the meantime, Brainsby also wasted no time placing Queen in the teen mags. His pitch was simple: they were well-educated, fancy dressers and their guitarist had made his instrument out
of a hundred-year-old fireplace. Queen may have been fuming over accusations that they weren’t a serious group (Roxy Music drummer Paul Thompson had denounced them as ‘too contrived’), but in October, they showed up in
Mirabelle
magazine, discussing their academic achievements, likes and dislikes. Mercury’s ambition was to ‘appear on
The Liza Minnelli Show
’ and Taylor’s was ‘to go super-nova!’. ‘Tall, dark, handsome’ Brian May’s likes are given as ‘cats, Hermann Hesse and prawn cocktails …’

In August, desperate to start recording again, Queen had gone back to Trident to begin work on a second album. This time they insisted on and were granted proper studio time during daylight hours. Roy Thomas Baker, Robin Geoffrey Cable and Mike Stone were retained. “Jack Nelson very nicely said that we had to go and see the boys as they didn’t want me to do the second album,’ explains John Anthony. ‘So I went to Haverstock Hill where they were rehearsing and said, ‘I wish you well.’ There was no hard feeling. I was working flat out anyway. But I used to still go and watch them rehearse, and advise them on the live show.’

Taylor informed
Record Mirror
that the next Queen album ‘would be alright as long as our egos don’t get out of control.’ It would prove a prophetic statement. Not for nothing would Queen’s second album have a working title of
Over the Top
. Mercury quickly gave his bandmates and Baker a glimpse of what he had in mind, escorting them to the Tate Gallery to show them
The Fairy Feller’s
Master-Stroke
by the Victorian artist Richard Dadd. ‘It’s one of the most complex paintings I’ve ever seen,’ said Taylor. ‘It had about fifty different scenarios all done by a man who was, quite literally, going bonkers.’ Dadd, who believed he was acting on an instruction from the Egyptian god Osiris, had murdered his father, and spent nine years working on the painting while an inmate at the Bethlem Royal Hospital. It showed an intricate woodland scene with fairy-tale creatures lurking, sometimes almost unseen, behind the undergrowth. Mercury’s song of the name would be peopled with just such creatures.

Richard Thompson had always declined Freddie’s invitation to accompany him on his weekend gallery visits. But the former Wreckage drummer was still aware of Mercury’s fascination with
one particular artwork. ‘I was at the flat with Mary Austin once, and Fred came back from the Tate with a picture postcard of
The
Fairy Feller’s Master-stroke
,’ says Thompson. ‘Freddie was most annoyed as the picture on the postcard had been printed the wrong way round!’ Roy Thomas Baker was also marched to the Tate to gaze upon the Dadd masterpiece, and Mercury’s instruction to the producer was simple: ‘Anything you want to try, throw it in.’

The band and Baker made full use of Trident’s sixteen-track facility, attempting, said Taylor, ‘to break the boundaries of what people thought you could do in a recording studio’. Six-part harmonies became the order of the day, and though they stuck to the ‘no synths’ rule, piano, Hammond organ, castanets and tubular bells found their way into the mix (Baker: ‘It was the kitchen-sink album’). May and his co-producer also took the first album’s idea of an orchestral guitar a stage further on the tracks ‘Procession’ and ‘Father to Son’, creating a sumptuous din that sounded like the London Symphony Orchestra jamming with Jimi Hendrix. ‘Queen were relentless,’ said Baker. ‘They were coming up with millions of ideas.’ In the end, the title,
Queen II
, was the only simple thing about the album.