Is This The Real Life? (24 page)

Capitalising on the success of ‘Killer Queen’,
Sheer Heart Attack
bettered even
Queen II
’s number 5 placing by reaching number 2 in the UK in its second week on sale (and only denied the top spot by Elton John’s
Greatest Hits
). They even had some critics on their side. ‘A feast, no duffers and four songs that will run and run,’ extolled
NME
, which singled out ‘Now I’m Here’, ‘Killer Queen’, ‘Flick of the Wrist’ and ‘In the Lap of the Gods’ for special praise.

All four of those songs now featured in the band’s setlist, spliced in among ‘Ogre Battle’, ‘Liar’ and the encore medley of ‘Big Spender’, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and ‘Modern Times Rock ’n’ Roll’. Mercury managed to conceal any pre-gig nerves behind even greater displays of onstage bravado: ‘Queen is back. What do you think about that?’ he demanded in Liverpool. For some shows, Freddie’s white stage outfit was accessorised by a chainmail-effect gauntlet on his left hand, suggesting a glam-rock falconer. After a change of costume, the singer would reappear, clad head to toe in black wearing a leather glove complete with talons on his left hand (‘Do you like my claws?’). Offstage, of course, the intra-group bickering continued as usual (‘Oh my dear, we’re the bitchiest band on earth. We’re at each other’s throats,’ Mercury told
Melody Maker
) but onstage, their focus was formidable, their ambition tangible.

The night after Liverpool, at Leeds University, Taylor’s onstage monitor malfunctioned. Back in the dressing room, the drummer kicked a wall, bruising his foot so badly he was taken to hospital for an X-ray. During the show itself, Mercury had called a halt after
fans were crushed in the scrum at the front of the stage. At the Glasgow Apollo a week later, the singer himself would be hauled into the crowd before being dragged back to safety by the security guards.

When tickets for the final night at the Rainbow sold out, a second show was added. Both nights were filmed, and while the planned live album was never released, an edited film of the gig was released in the cinema a year later.
Queen Live at the Rainbow
would play as support to Burt Reynolds’ crime caper
Hustle
. It remains a fabulous period piece: Queen in their final days as a cult rock band, before the phenomenal success of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ changed their lives for ever.

Outside the Rainbow, after the show, Freddie Mercury’s driver handed him a note that had just been passed to him. It was from Bruce Murray. ‘I’d managed to get a message to Fred through the chauffeur,’ Murray laughs. ‘We both looked at each other through the car window and stared. Freddie said, “What the fuck are you doing here?” I laughed and said, “I’m here to see you, you prick!”’ Murray followed Mercury’s limousine to a club in Berkeley Square, where the two spoke for the first time since India. ‘He told me he was skint,’ says Murray. ‘They were playing these shows, but he had no money.’ Later, at his mini-cab office in Norbury, Murray would receive a phone call from the singer. ‘He’d say, “I need to get to a party, but I have no money, will you take me?”’ One night Murray chauffeured his friend to a party hosted by Elton John. ‘Fred said, “Come in, come in …” But I said no, it really wasn’t my scene. I didn’t want to be a hanger-on.’

While Queen filled theatres and their singer preened from the pages of the music press, not everyone was aware of their success. Patrick Connolly hadn’t seen his friend Fred Bulsara since leaving Isleworth Polytechnic in 1966. Connolly was walking past Claridges, the Mayfair hotel, one afternoon, when he heard a familiar voice: ‘Patrick! Patrick!’ It was Fred. ‘He asked me to come in and have a cup of tea,’ recalls Connolly. ‘Queen were playing a concert in London that night. I was amazed by the change in him.’ At Isleworth, Patrick had designed Freddie’s audition posters and helped him pass his Art A-level, but, with no interest in pop music,
he was completely unaware of his current success. ‘I had to admit to him, “Fred, I had no idea.” And he laughed and said, “Oh Patrick, you’re the only person that doesn’t know!”’

For the second time that year, though, Queen would go from playing to their own partisan audience to crowds that cared rather less. In November they began a two-and-a-half week tour of Scandinavia and Europe. When they arrived for a show in Munich, Queen found an audience filled with GIs from the nearby American airforce base. Queen were alternating as headliners with Lynyrd Skynyrd, a gritty rock ’n’ roll band from America’s Southern states, who’d just had a Top 5 hit with ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. They were the antithesis of Queen, and the GIs loved them. ‘For the first time in many months, I felt like I’d done a hard day’s work when I came offstage,’ grumbled Brian May. ‘We were getting nothing back.’

While Queen found the audience’s indifference draining, there was also a clash of cultures between the two groups. ‘Skynyrd couldn’t believe it when they saw us four caked in make-up and dressed like women,’ recalled Roger Taylor. According to Taylor, representatives of Skynyrd’s record label, MCA, were positioned in the audience during Queen’s set. ‘They would be holding up banners that said things like “Shit!” and “Queen Suck!”’ he recalled. It’s difficult not to be reminded of the scene in
This Is Spinal Tap
, where the hapless rock band encounter their former support act, Duke Fame, and recall an audience that ‘were still booing him when we came onstage’. Yet Taylor’s memory demonstrates just how at odds Queen were with most of their peers, and how determined the band were to prove that these ‘four nancy boys could give [Skynyrd] a run for their money.’

After a third German date in Hamburg, Lynyrd Skynyrd were off the tour. Barely a week later Queen headlined the 6,000-seater Palacio de los Deportes in Barcelona. The gig had sold out in just twenty-four hours, and was their biggest yet.

Back at home, though, the band’s bank accounts and living conditions suggested they were anything but pop stars. Taylor still rented a bedsit near the river in Kew Road, Richmond. Mercury and Mary Austin’s rented flat had a grand address, 100 Holland Road,
Kensington W14, but little else. Neither Freddie’s piano, which, bizarrely, doubled as a headboard for his and Mary’s bed, nor the couple’s collection of Biba knick-knacks could detract from the rising damp that had left the walls covered in fungus. Deacon was about to get married, but was still living in a bedsit in Parsons Green. Furthermore, Trident had just turned down Deacon’s request for the £4,000 he needed to put down on a deposit for a house. (‘Do you know how much money £4,000 was in 1974?’ protests Norman Sheffield). Brian May’s living conditions seemed to be the worst of all: a single room in a house in Earls Court, where his girlfriend Chrissy also lived. ‘We lived mainly on cod in a bag and fish fingers,’ he recalled in 2009. ‘We had a single gas ring and no water supply, except the communal bathroom up the corridor.’ More depressing still was the story that to access this bolthole, May had to enter through the building’s basement boiler room.

By now, EMI’s Bob Mercer put Queen in touch with lawyer Jim Beach of the law firm Harbottle & Lewis. Beach acquired copies of the band members’ contracts with Trident and began looking for a way out. Mercer’s relationship with Trident had become similarly troublesome. ‘The Sheffield brothers had their relationship with Roy Featherstone, who had signed the band,’ he explains. ‘So it became something of a bone of contention when the band started saying to him, “We don’t want you talking to the Sheffields.” Roy felt that was the way he’d signed the band and, in the end, he and I had a pretty stand-up fight about it.’

While their lawyer began the slow process of extricating Queen from their contracts, EMI released ‘Now I’m Here’ as the band’s next single in January. Now the melodramatic opening number in Queen’s live set, it was too heavy for most daytime radio playlists but managed a respectable number 11. The day after its release, John Deacon married his long-time girlfriend Veronica Tetzlaff. The couple had been together for over three years after meeting at a party at the Maria Assumpta college, where Veronica had been a student. The Catholic wedding took place at the Carmelite Priory on Kensington Church Street. Veronica was two months’ pregnant with their first child, Robert.

Deacon’s best man was his old schoolfriend and former
Opposition drummer Nigel Bullen, who would watch in awe as Freddie Mercury made the grandest of entrances. The Queen singer had arrived in a stretch limo, was wearing a huge feather boa and had a woman on each arm. ‘At first I thought it was the bride,’ Bullen admitted. Deacon’s Opposition bandmates had seen Queen play live, but they would now witness the after-effects of being in a band that had appeared on
Top of the Pops
. On a pre-wedding trip back to Leicestershire, Deacon had gone for a drink with The Opposition’s ex-singer Dave Williams. Somebody put ‘Killer Queen’ on the pub jukebox, and within minutes ‘Easy Deacon’ was being pestered for autographs.

Around the same time, Chris Smith had run into Brian May at Kensington Market and taken him to the Greyhound. ‘They’d had a hit with “Killer Queen”, and he was getting well-known,’ says Smith. ‘The pub was packed, and as soon as I walked in, with Brian behind, the whispering started: “That’s him from that band …” I sat him in a corner and went to get the drinks, and I remember thinking, “So this is what fame’s like.” When I sat down, Brian said, “No one’s bought me a drink for a ages.” I said, “Well, that’s what you do. You buy the next one. That’s how it is.” I don’t think he’d been treated normally for a while. I think Freddie and Roger could cope with fame – they seemed to love it. But I’m not sure Brian could.’

After his honeymoon, Deacon returned to the fray, and Queen reconvened for another go at the United States.
Sheer Heart Attack
had received an American release and would peak at number 12. There was still much lost ground to make up for after the earlier aborted US dates. ‘We were confident that we would go down all right in the East and Midwest,’ ventured Roger Taylor. ‘But we were told not to expect too much in the South and far West.’ ‘With a name like Queen there were always questions from day one,’ recalls Mott The Hoople’s then roadie Peter Hince, ‘especially in America. Waitresses in the Holiday Inns would be like, “Gee, you guys are great … are you all fags?”’

After a week’s rehearsal in New York, road-testing their new PA and lighting rig, Queen opened in Columbus, Ohio, and ploughed straight into two or three consecutive gigs without a break, taking
in Cleveland, Detroit and Boston. Three weeks later, after a show in Philadelphia, Mercury was losing his voice. A hospital doctor diagnosed possible nodules on his vocal cords. Freddie was told to rest, but played the following night’s show at Washington’s Kennedy Center anyway, managing, against expectations, to scale the high notes as before.

However, not everyone was as enamoured of Queen’s lead singer. When the band had dropped off the Mott The Hoople US tour, their place had been taken by homegrown rock band Kansas. The same group would open several dates for Queen on the 1975 tour. The lead vocalist Steve Walsh would go on to praise the headline act with the exception of their frontman. ‘Freddie Mercury was an asshole,’ said Walsh. ‘He was a prima donna.’ It would not be the last time Mercury’s attitude alienated some of the people around him.

With his voice causing problems, he became increasingly distraught. Mercury was in agony after Washington, and six dates were cancelled immediately. The suspected nodules turned out to be laryngitis and a strained throat, and he was prescribed painkillers and told to speak only when necessary. Despite the setback, when the tour picked up again in Chicago, Mercury’s performance was as assured as ever.
Melody Maker
’s US stringer Al Rudis saw the show and was entranced by the singer’s mic stand technique: ‘He plays it like a guitar, aims it at the audience rifle fashion … wields it like a cane and a samurai sword, and pretends to break it across his knee like an Apache declaring war.’

On a day off before playing two nights at Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Civic Auditorum, May and Taylor went to see Led Zeppelin at the nearby 18,000-seater Forum. ‘We thought if we played the Rainbow in London we’d made it,’ said May. ‘Then we saw Zeppelin at the Forum and thought, “Jesus Christ, if we ever make this kind of thing” … Our manager was there and he said, “Couple of years’ time, you’ll be doing this.”’

In 1975 Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip was a ready-made playground for any visiting rock band. Like every English rock group before them, Queen made a pilgrimage to the notorious Rainbow Bar and Grill in West Hollywood. The Rainbow was a regular haunt for the
likes of The Sweet, Led Zeppelin, The Who’s Keith Moon and their attendant female admirers. ‘I thought, “My God, what a strange island of odd humanity this is,”’ said May. Taylor, however, loved it. As John Anthony insists, ‘Roger always wanted to be a pop star, and wanted to enjoy everything that being a pop star entailed.’

Frustratingly, the tour limped rather than galloped towards the finishing line. Mercury’s voice was still a problem and yet more dates had been cancelled. After a successful show at San Francisco’s Winterland, the band flew to Canada, managing three gigs before cancelling the final date in Portland and flying home. Once again, a US tour had been scuppered by a band member’s failing health.

While Jim Beach continued to wade through Queen’s contracts, the band holidayed in Hawaii before flying on to Japan for a hastily arranged eight-date tour. However slow their progress may have been elsewhere, and however aggrieved they felt about their situation with Trident, Queen had become pop stars in Japan, the second largest market for pop music in the world.

On 17 April the band arrived at Haneda Airport to be greeted by, recalled Roger Taylor, ‘thousands, literally thousands of fans’ (Deacon: ‘hundreds and hundreds’) brandishing album sleeves, photographs torn from music magazines and homemade banners (‘Love Queen’, ‘Welcome Roger Queen’). The tour was bookended by two sold-out nights at the 14,200-capacity Nippon Budokan Hall. During the first, Mercury was forced to stop the show to prevent over-excited fans getting crushed in front of the stage. Part of the second show was recorded by a local TV station and captured May and Mercury trading moves in their now well-travelled Zandra Rhodes frocks. ‘The noise was enormous,’ recalled John Deacon. ‘The screaming and the throwing presents onstage.’ ‘Something just clicked in Japan,’ said May. ‘Suddenly we were The Beatles.’