Is This The Real Life? (25 page)

Offstage, they were assigned a personal bodyguard (Mercury: “Mine was called Hitami. He was very sweet and gave me a lovely Japanese lantern’) and filmed for the
Star Senichya
TV show, looking politely baffled as they recited personal messages to the camera, and sat cross-legged for a traditional Japanese tea ceremony. As Brian May explained at a press conference in Tokyo: ‘We are
overwhelmed … we have never experienced anything like this in any other country.’ Queen returned to England with their complimentary Japanese kimonos, and back to the harsher reality of what Brian May called ‘our crummy basement flats’. ‘We encountered something like Beatlemania,’ Taylor told
Mojo
. ‘We’d never seen anything like that, and we came back after playing the Budokan and I went back to my bedsit in Richmond. We were still on £60 a week.’

Chris Smith visited May at home straight after the Japanese tour. ‘Brian was shell-shocked,’ he remembers. ‘He said, “I was just in The Beatles. We got this amazing reception, even at the airport. Now I’ve gone from that to
this
.” And then he took me into the bathroom, and there was all this fungus on the walls. He said to me, “I’ve got no money, you know.”’ Walking into May’s room, Smith was then confronted by dozens of toy penguins. ‘Brian had done an interview in some magazine and told them he liked penguins, so fans had sent them to him. So there’s fungus on the wall, the room is tiny, but it’s full of penguins – small ones, big ones, six-foot ones … just loads of penguins.’

‘That first tour of Japan was what changed it,’ says Mark Ashton. ‘Queen had gone down extremely well, and the office gossip was that Freddie, especially, was very angry with Jack [Nelson]. I used to hear Fred in the office and he’d be very loud and very irate about Trident’s failings.’ Interviewed now about his time with Trident and Queen, Jack Nelson offers a noncommittal ‘the whole experience was very interesting’. Nelson would move back to the US for a job with EMI, before continuing in management for Chaka Khan and Blackstreet. ‘We parted on amicable terms,’ he said. ‘Brian and I talk all the time.’

In May 1974, the American rock group Sparks had enjoyed a number 2 UK hit with ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For the Both of Us’. Queen and Sparks had shared a bill at the Marquee, and Sparks’ quasi-operatic rock wasn’t so far removed from some of Queen’s work. A year later, Sparks could smell blood. ‘They came round and said, “Look, it’s pretty obvious Queen are washed up, we’d like to offer you a position in our band, if you want,”’ recalled May. ‘And I said, “Well, I don’t think we’re quite dead yet.”’

But May was still deeply frustrated. ‘After three albums people thought we were driving around in Rolls-Royces,’ he later told
Q
magazine. ‘That’s when we started to feel resentful. There was also a huge drawback in the fact that your manager is your record company, so you don’t have anyone that can represent you to the record company. So you have an impossible situation. It generated friction in every department.’

Furthermore, any money invested by Trident was recoverable before any profits could be shared out. As Norman Sheffield points out: ‘Trident invested over £200,000 in Queen, probably the largest sum ever invested in an up-and-coming band.’ Effectively, Queen had to pay back Trident. Having the best recording facility, the best stage show, indeed the best of everything, came at a price.
Sheer Heart
Attack
had supposedly cost £30,000 to make. When Queen finally had hits, they expected to make money, only to hear that they actually owed Trident. ‘We were deep in debt,’ said May.

‘I don’t think it was the deal that was wrong, it was the interpretation of the deal,’ offers producer Ken Scott. ‘Trident spent a fortune on that band. But some of it was chargebacks. The artist gets charged for things that they think are in-house. The artist looks at it and goes, “We are not paying that back.” It’s the age-old story and it happens again and again in this industry.’

Adding salt to the wound, on 12 May, ‘Killer Queen’ went Top 20 in the US. A week later, Freddie Mercury was presented with an Ivor Novello award for the same song.

On tour in the US, Queen had reportedly met with the late Don Arden, manager of Black Sabbath and E.L.O., and a music business impresario whose brutal reputation has earned him the nickname of ‘The Al Capone of Rock’ (Arden’s daughter Sharon would later manage Ozzy Osbourne and launch a worldwide TV career). In a 2002 interview, Arden claimed he went to see the Sheffields and in an hour convinced them to release Queen from their contract. Trident agreed in principle, and Queen signed a letter authorising Arden to act on their behalf. At some point, however, both parties changed their mind. John Anthony recalls ‘pleading with Queen not to sign with Arden’. Whether they heeded his advice or not, any deal with Don was soon off, but, said the band, ‘by mutual
agreement’. Despite his reputation, there were no known reprisals from the Arden camp.

Around the same time, Queen’s management wish-list included 10cc’s manager Harvey Lisberg, The Who’s tour manager Peter Rudge, and the late Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin manager and cofounder of Zeppelin’s Swansong record label. One of the stipulations of any contract with Grant would have included Queen signing to Swansong. Queen were also conscious of their possible place in a management pecking order that also included Bad Company and Led Zeppelin.

In the end, it was John Reid who took on the role of Queen’s new manager. Reid’s managerial career had begun just four years earlier when he took on a young singer-songwriter christened Reg Dwight and now known as Elton John. ‘We knew we were in a difficult position management-wise, but we were in a good position overall,’ explained Brian May. ‘So we went around and saw everybody that we could, and the only situation that was suitable for us, really, was John Reid.’

In August 1975, Queen signed an agreement with Trident that separated them from all of their deals. Queen’s publishing was now in the hands of EMI Publishing (which had taken over Feldman’s), while their record deals, with EMI in the UK and Elektra worldwide, were no longer processed through Trident. Inevitably, it came at a cost. Trident received a severance pay of £100,000 covered by an advance from EMI Publishing. Trident also retained the rights to 1 per cent of the royalties on Queen’s next six albums.

The bitter aftermath of Queen’s Trident deal still lingers. As recently, as two years ago, Ken Scott was waiting in the lounge at London’s Heathrow Airport when he spotted John Deacon. ‘So I went up to him and said, “Hi, John, do you remember me? I was an engineer from Trident called Ken Scott?” And John snapped back at me, “Yes, and I have nothing whatsoever to do with any of that any more!”’

R
ockfield Studios still looks like the working farm it once was. Tucked away in the Wye Valley near Monmouth, its barns and sheds were converted into a recording facility in 1963. The farm's owners, Charles and Kingsley Ward, had a group of their own, and realised it would be cheaper to record at home than trek down to London. Once the Wards had converted further outbuildings into living quarters, Rockfield became one of the first residential studios in the world. By the mid-seventies Rockfield had chalked up its first hit single with Dave Edmunds's ‘You Hear Me Knocking', and had become a Mecca for many of the flagship heavy bands of the era.

At the beginning of August 1975, just before heading to Rockfield, Queen set up base at a country house in nearby Herefordshire for three weeks of rehearsal. Queen's stay at the house would be recalled in novelist Tiffany Murray's 2010 memoir
Diamond Star Halo
. To make ends meet, Murray's mother had rented the house to rock bands during the seventies, and Freddie Mercury ‘with his fleshy lips and feathered hair' was remembered as always being the first one up in the morning, and of commandeering the piano to play a new piece of music to the six-year-old Tiffany which turned
out to be ‘Bohemian Rhapsody'. (‘Do you like it?' he asked. ‘It's fantastic,' I said. ‘It's a bit long,' he replied.)

If Queen would be remembered for one song alone it would be this one. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody' is the third biggest-selling British single of all time, whose worldwide sales tipped over two million following Freddie Mercury's death in 1991. But the band had little idea of what lay in store when they checked into Rockfield on 24 August to begin work on their fourth album,
A Night at the Opera
. They arrived just after John Anthony's protégés Van Der Graaf Generator finished their own stint at the studio. Billeted in a row of converted barns adjacent to the studio, and with only the Old Nag's Head pub in Monmouth within stumbling distance, distractions were few and far between.

‘They spent their free time playing Frisbee in the main yard outside the studio,' remembers Kingsley Ward. ‘Freddie also used to play the old upright piano we kept in what was then the horse tack and feed room.' Later, Roger Taylor would set up his drums in the same room, with yards of cable fed across the yard back into the studio.

The tranquillity of the Wye Valley offered Queen some respite from the turmoil in their professional lives. With the demise of their deal with Trident and the departure of Jack Nelson, another US tour had been cancelled. ‘It was an enormous blow,' admitted Roger Taylor. New manager John Reid's instruction to Queen that summer was simple: ‘I'll take care of the business; you make the best record you can.'

On the day Queen were due to start work at Rockfield, Roy Thomas Baker made a phone call of his own to Trident: ‘I told them I didn't want them to manage me any more … I think it was the only time I actually got a return call from them,' he said in 1982. Baker, too, would sign himself over to John Reid Enterprises. With one less business problem to distract him, the producer turned his attention to the job in hand.

The seeds of what became ‘Bohemian Rhapsody' went back to the half-written piece of music that Freddie and Chris Smith had fooled around with at Ealing more than five years earlier; the piece Smith remembered Freddie calling ‘The Cowboy Song' after its
lyric ‘Mama just killed a man'. Roy Thomas Baker had first heard the song early in 1975 during a visit to Freddie's flat. The pair were due to go to dinner, but Mercury insisted on playing him ‘something he'd been working on. So he sat down at his piano, played the first part and said, “This is the chord sequence”, followed by the interim part, and I could tell it was going to be a ballad. He played a bit further through the song and then stopped suddenly, saying, “This is where the opera section comes in.” We both just burst out laughing.'

As a studio apprentice at Decca Records, Baker had helped record the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, an ensemble known for their performances of Gilbert and Sullivan's light operas. It was an experience he wanted to draw on for the recording of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody'. ‘Queen came up with so many ideas,' he said, ‘but my job was to organise those ideas in order to make them work.' He had also adopted another mantra: ‘Ideas weren't problems. They were challenges. I'd never say, “That's not possible.”'

Baker's never-say-die attitude was a godsend. By now, Queen's working practices were well established. Each band member would write alone before bringing their song ideas to the others for suggestions, improvements, rejection even. It could be, said Roger Taylor, ‘a lonely process'. During the making of
A Night at the Opera
, the drawbacks of this method would become apparent. On some occasions, band members would end up working in pairs, sometimes even in different studios. ‘You lose a bit of the group feeling,' May told
Melody Maker
in 1975. ‘I can point to things on this album that suffered from not having us all there at one time and because there was too much responsibility on one.'

Therefore, when Mercury descended on Rockfield's Studio 1 with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody', his bandmates had no idea what to expect. Freddie had written down his ideas for the song in the notebooks his father Bomi used for his accountancy work. ‘It wasn't standard musical notation,' recalled Brian May. ‘But As and Bs and Cs in blocks, like buses zooming all over bits of paper. He seemed to have the whole thing worked out in his head.'

The finished article would find room for a cappella vocals, tender balladry, scything heavy metal and an operatic mid-section
that would take supposedly 180 overdubs. The basic backing track was recorded at Rockfield, with, as Taylor recalled, ‘Freddie conducting'. The first section, after the a capella intro, was straightforward enough, comprising just piano, bass, guitars and drums. Once completed, Baker left a thirty-second strip of tape on the reel for later use on what was already being called ‘the opera section', unaware of just how involved that section would become, before the group recorded the song's closing, heavy rock coda, with May playing a Mercury-written riff in E-flat; a difficult key for any guitarist. But, in keeping with Baker's mantra: it wasn't a problem, it was a challenge …

‘We were all a bit mystified about how he was going to link these pieces,' admitted May. In 1969, Freddie had co-opted The Beatles' instrumental breakdown from ‘A Day in the Life' to link his different ideas for ‘The Cowboy Song'. This time, he'd written his own pseudo-operatic midsection (‘mock opera' he said), with lyrics name-checking the seventeenth-century Italian comedy mainstay Scaramouche, the Spanish and Portugese folk dance the fandango, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, and Rossini and Mozart's operatic character Figaro. For added multiculturalism, he threw in the Arabic noun
bismillah
, commonly used in Islamic prayer. It was the first time Mercury had explicitly referenced his ethnic background in a song for Queen. Interviewed in 1996, Queen PR Tony Brainsby claimed that ‘Freddie avoided at all costs mentioning Zanzibar. He just didn't think it fitted the image.' Not that his bandmates were ever privy to what he was singing about. ‘We didn't speak to each other about lyrics,' admitted May. ‘We were too embarrassed to talk about the words.' To this day, no one connected with the band has ever revealed where the song's title came from.

In the pre-digital age, Queen had just twenty-four analogue tracks to work with. However, to complicate the process, they then had to record the backing vocals before the lead vocal. ‘That wasn't a regular way of doing things,' admits Baker. ‘But we wouldn't have had enough tracks left for the rich backing vocals if we hadn't gone down this route.' The process became even more involved when, as Roger Taylor explained, ‘Freddie started adding more and more “Galileos”.'

‘Every time Freddie added another “Galileo” I would add another piece of tape to the reel,' said Baker. In the meantime, Baker's endless loops of tape had begun to resemble ‘a zebra crossing whizzing by'. After numerous playbacks, it sounded as if the song was gradually fading away. What happened next has passed into Queen mythology, like the origins of Freddie's sawn-off mic stand.

The exacting process of recording one vocal harmony at a time had required, in the parlance of studio engineers, ‘bouncing' each harmony on to another track, and so on. Brian May explains: ‘The original tape had actually worn thin. People think it's this legendary story, but you could hold the tape up to the light and see through it. Every time the tape went through the heads, more of the oxide was worn off.' The tape was hurriedly transferred, but as May wistfully recalled later, ‘Every time Freddie added another “Galileo” we lost something.'

Queen rolled out of Rockfield in September. The studio's traffic of loud rock bands continued, as ex-Hawkwind bassist Lemmy rolled in with his new group Motörhead. While the Queen album was far from complete, the band had found a potential name for it. According to Roy Thomas Baker, after a particularly tense day at Rockfield, the producer had persuaded the group to relax at his rented house nearby. Baker had one of the first video players, and over a few drinks, the group watched the 1935 Marx Brothers comedy movie
A Night at the Opera
. Considering the epic ‘Bohemian Rhapsody', ‘the title seemed terribly apt'.

Back in London, Queen began a marathon spree of overdubbing at Sarm East and Scorpio Studios. Sarm's assistant engineer Gary Langan (who, with Gary Lyons, would also help engineer part of the album) had first met Queen during
Sheer Heart Attack
. Working on
A Night at the Opera
was an even greater eye-opener. Sarm East was a tiny studio at the bottom end of Brick Lane in London's East End. Day after day, the studio would be filled with an assortment of roadies, while Mercury, Baker and Mike Stone (Langan: ‘Rag, Tag and Bobtail') would take up residence at the Trident-B console (later sold at an inflated price as ‘the board used to mix “Bohemian Rhapsody”').

‘Freddie would only leave when Brian moved in,' says Langan
now. ‘For the rest of the time, he'd be sat there, for hours on end, drumming his painted fingernails on the desk, in his black satin trousers with the top button undone.' Langan was taken aback by how Mercury dressed up even for a working session at the studio. Others also recall that Freddie's hairbrush took up its place on the mixing desk in front of him.

Gary encountered the same level of perfectionism when May arrived at Sarm. ‘People talk about Michael Jackson spending two weeks on getting a drum track, but I can tell tales of Brian May spending a week on a guitar solo,' he insists. Langan was also intrigued by the band's dynamic. ‘For me, any band is made up of different chemical elements. In Queen, there was Roger Taylor, who was very much this wild child, and at the other end there was Mister Methodical Brian May. ‘I'd offer to make tea or coffee, and I'd go round the room taking orders from Freddie, Roger, Mike and whatever other hangers-on were there, and then I'd ask Brian what he wanted. Then there'd be this pause and then he'd ask, “How many teas are you making? How many coffees? … Two? …Three? Is it easier for you to make another coffee or another tea?” You could spend ten minutes just doing this. He was trying to make it easier for me, but in the end I'd be like, “Brian! Just tell me what you want!”'

It wasn't until every section of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody' was spliced together that anyone, even Mercury, realised quite what they'd created. For Gary Langan, hearing the song in its six-minute entirety was ‘a red letter day – my jaw was on my chest'. But it left others perplexed. Ian Hunter had quit Mott The Hoople, and was about to co-opt most of Queen into playing on his next solo album, when he dropped by the studio.

‘They unleashed it on us in four huge speakers,' he recalls. ‘I couldn't make head nor tail of all that pomp and circumstance. It was like being run over by a truck. Fred said, “What did you think?” I didn't have the faintest idea. He was like, “Did you not hear the third harmony in the second verse? There's a slight variation there.” I just looked at him aghast and said, “Give me a break.” He just didn't realise. He'd been in the studio three days solid.'

Unflinching, Mercury announced that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody'
would be Queen's next single. He had the rest of the band's support, or nearly all of them (‘There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit'). Interviewed in the early 1990s, the late Peter Brown claimed that John Deacon was against releasing the song as a single without editing it down. Reportedly, when John Reid played ‘Bohemian Rhapsody' to Elton John, the singer's response was: ‘Are you fucking mad?'

However, for a band, whom Freddie claimed, ‘argued about everything – even the air that we breathe', Queen presented a united front to EMI. Behind the bravado, they knew they were fighting for survival: they'd been bruised by the Trident deal and another US tour cancellation, and had to make an impact with their next release. ‘Tell me one other group that has done an operatic single?' Mercury demanded. ‘I can't think of anybody.'

Roy Thomas Baker defended the choice of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody' as a single by citing Richard Harris's ‘MacArthur Park', a 1968 hit that had tipped seven minutes. But his reasoning cut little ice with EMI: ‘Their comment was that the BBC wouldn't play a song that long when the current formula was three and a half minutes.'