Is This The Real Life? (30 page)

On 28 January, the tour reached Chicago, encountering sub-zero temperatures, snow and ice. The band's equipment trucks had been delayed from the previous gig. But despite the cold, Mercury ignored the promoter's plea and refused to allow the audience queuing outside into the venue until Queen had completed a lengthy soundcheck. ‘The others didn't do anything because Fred ran the show,' recalls O'Donnell. Later, at the gig, Queen came under attack from a dozen eggs hurled onto the stage, causing May to slip over during ‘The Millionaire's Waltz', after which Mercury berated the audience (‘You motherfuckers!'), putting paid to their usual second encore.

Behind the scenes, Phil Lynott was impressed by his Queen counterpart's behaviour. ‘Freddie set Phil off on a very difficult trail,' says Chris O'Donnell. ‘He got it into his head that if you were not difficult you wouldn't get anywhere. But being difficult and demanding isn't so easy when you're in the support band and it can't be so easily accommodated.'

Temptation on tour would also contribute to the end of Mercury's relationship with David Minns. America, more than England, allowed the singer the freedom to indulge himself. Interviewed in 2004, Minns admitted, ‘Freddie was clearly having
flings with other people.' During the tour, he took up with a 27-year-old chef named Joe Fanelli.

‘We were on tour in the States and suddenly he's got boys following him into his hotel room instead of girls,' said Brian May. ‘We're thinking, “Mmmm …” and that really was the extent of it. I always had plenty of gay friends, I just didn't realise that Freddie was one of them until much later.'

‘The thing is, I remember Freddie before Queen,' adds O'Donnell. ‘It was interesting how you can invent this androgynous personality. Boy, was he a hustler. Hanging out at Kensington Market, hanging out with Mary Austin, with whom he was in a loving relationship … But there was not a smidgeon of Freddie being gay. It wasn't until he signed with John Reid Enterprises and moved into that circle, with Elton, that he became more flamboyant and found more of an expression in the gay community.'

Brian Southall, EMI's head of promotion, accompanied a posse of journalists to New York for a sold-out gig at New York's Madison Square Garden before flying on to shows in Syracuse and Boston. ‘I'm sure Freddie was “out” within the band,' maintains Southall. ‘By 1977, there was no question of him not being gay, but it certainly wasn't an issue. But there was very much an attitude from the others of “We do what we do, and Fred does what he does”.' Southall recalls that the band ‘came together for the gig rather like a football team'. The rest of the time they operated individually: ‘Brian was with Chrissy, and he always travelled with English tea and biscuits. He also used to collect matchbooks. There wasn't much frivolity with Brian.' As well as his matchbooks, tea and biscuits, Brian carried a large map of the United States over which he had superimposed the tour itinerary to include flight and hotel details and stopover times.

John Deacon was also travelling with his wife and son. ‘I went to a Japanese restaurant with John,' remembers Southall, ‘and he had some new fancy Seiko digital watch that had a calculator, so he could add up Queen's royalties in four different countries. Queen, especially John, were always interested in how the business was going. I remember thinking, “Marc Bolan was never like this …”'

On a night out, Southall accompanied Phil Lynott and Roger
Taylor to CBGBs, the hub of the New York punk scene. ‘There was always frivolity and fun with Roger, but also questions being asked in the house. Roger was the party animal, Brian and John were not, and Freddie was his own party animal.' While the tour was relatively drug-free, Mercury was using cocaine. Fired up on the drug, it was easier for Fred Bulsara to ‘be' Freddie Mercury.

Bruce Gowers flew to Miami to shoot a promo film for the next single, ‘Tie Your Mother Down'. A fortnight later, Queen sold out two nights at The Forum in Los Angeles. Between the gigs they visited Groucho Marx to present him with a gold disc for sales of
A
Night at the Opera
and
A Day at the Races
. It was a timely photo opportunity, with Marx dying just five months later.

After playing San Francisco, Mercury suffered a recurrence of the throat problems that had plagued Queen's last US tour (‘I have to take it easy on the red wine,' he told one journalist). Some gigs were cancelled – but the tour resumed for a final run in Vancouver and Alberta. Despite a mutual respect, Queen and Thin Lizzy each gave the other a run for their money. Madison Square Garden was Queen's night; Nassau Coliseum was Lizzy's … But as Chris O'Donnell admits: ‘However good Thin Lizzy were, once Queen came on with the full production, they wiped the floor with us most nights.'
A Day at the Races
hit number 5 in the US charts, with ‘Somebody to Love' at number 13.

The tour also reunited Freddie with one of his friends from pre-Queen days. Mark Malden from Ealing art college had been living in Canada since 1969. He bought tickets for Queen's show at Montreal Forum and managed, after hours of waiting, to make contact with his old friend for the first time in eight years. Mercury was astonished to see him. ‘After the show I got a phone call from Dane Clarke, saying, “We are in the lower lobby bar and Fred wants you to have a drink,”' says Malden. ‘Our conversation went on for a long time, but the first thing Fred said to me was, “So, Mark, what do you want?” I said, “I don't want anything.” He replied, “Everybody from the college that has come to me wants something. One of them wanted me to model their clothes … I had to say no and they were upset …” At that point, I vowed I would never take anything from him.'

Malden could see the pressure his friend was under, and just how much he was being indulged by his coterie of assistants, gofers and hangers-on: ‘The trouble is everybody wanted something from Fred, and that had made him suspicious of everyone. But, to me, he wasn't Freddie Mercury. I still thought of him as Fred Bulsara.' The problem was, as Queen's success grew, fewer and fewer people knew who Fred Bulsara was.

When Queen returned to the UK, they found a country divided. It was Queen Elizabeth's silver jubilee year. To celebrate her 25-year reign, the nation's shops were filled with commemorative mugs, plates and tea towels. It seemed as if every saleable nick-nack had been embossed with the monarch's Mona Lisa smile. Plans were now underway for countrywide street parties in the summer. In the opposite corner, EMI's
enfants terribles
The Sex Pistols were gearing up for their second single release, ‘God Save the Queen', a song that would reach number 2 in the charts in May and which, some suggest, was deliberately denied the top spot to save embarrassment in a year of royalist celebrations.

‘Tie Your Mother Down' was released in March, but was a minor hit (barely making it into the Top 50 in the US). It was a surprise flop, losing out not to The Sex Pistols or any of the new punk upstarts but to David Bowie, Bryan Ferry and Queen's onetime support band Mr Big, whose single ‘Romeo' made the Top 5 that month.

Queen went back on the road, playing eight dates across Scandinavia and Europe, quickly followed by eleven shows in the UK. Mercury, as always, was in his element. He toasted the audience with the ever-present champagne and tossed carnations into the stalls. He switched outfits from his white kung fu jumpsuit to his tiny silk shorts and matching kimono to an exact replica of a costume worn by the Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Behind him, the rest of the band played up a storm. ‘Death On Two Legs', ‘Brighton Rock', ‘Liar' and ‘Keep Yourself Alive', for example, were flashy, bombastic, heavy metal tracks that sounded wonderful in big arenas.

At Earls Court, Queen debuted their most ornate stage prop yet: a specially commissioned lighting rig in the shape of a crown that
would ascend at the beginning of the gig and descend at the end, amid industrial quantities of dry ice. The rig weighed two tons and cost a bank-breaking £50,000. Beyond the visual spectacle, the whole thing could also be perceived as a forthright ‘fuck you' to their detractors. Behind the scenes, though, one of EMI's senior executives recalled meeting Mercury after a show at the Glasgow Apollo: ‘He told me he didn't understand the whole punk thing. It wasn't music to him.' The executive suggested that punk ‘would settle down to its place in the market. It's only the kids telling you what they want.' After all his onstage bravado, it seemed odd to find Freddie Mercury expressing doubts about anything.

In June, Queen released their first EP. It included ‘Good Old-Fashioned Loverboy' backed by the older tracks, ‘White Queen (As It Began)', ‘Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to …)' and ‘Tenement Funster'. To Queen's relief, it made number 17 in the charts. When pitted against the music press, Mercury remained comically defiant. Interviewed by
NME
's Tony Mitchell that summer, he defended Queen's broad musical style (‘I'm into this ballet thing'), his aloof attitude towards fans (‘What do you expect? Somebody to go round and have tea with the front row?'), and the accusation that
A Day at the Races
was a pallid sequel to
A Night at the Opera
(‘We haven't dried up!').

Writing just twelve months earlier in
NME
, Tony Mitchell had poured praise on
A Night at the Opera
. But now he felt alienated by their lead singer's attitude. ‘I thought Queen were a pioneering rock band,' said Mitchell, years later. ‘But Freddie Mercury treated me with utter contempt. He had lost touch with reality.'

The
NME
interview ran under the infamous headline: ‘F
REDDIE 
M
ERCURY
: I
S
T
HIS
M
AN A
P
RAT
?'

C
entrepoint, the 35-storey office block, has loomed over London's Charing Cross Road for more than forty-five years. Tourists and sightseers emerging, blinking, from Tottenham Court Road tube station have used it as a marking post for just as long. Opposite stands the Dominion Theatre. In the autumn of 1957, Judy Garland staged a one-month run of her live show here. In 2010, Queen's musical,
We Will Rock You
, is enjoying its eighth year.

Above the door of the theatre, dwarfing the musical's distinctive gold logo, stands a statue of Queen's late singer Freddie Mercury, duplicating an original piece by sculptor Irena Sedlecka that can be found on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Regrettably, the face resembles a random selection of moustachioed men of the twentieth century, including Josef Stalin, Saddam Hussein and, bizarrely, actor Tom Selleck. However, Sedlecka's statue recreates the ubiquitous Freddie pose, with the right hand raised in a clenched-fist salute and the left clutching a short microphone stand. The pose is enough to achieve the necessary deception. Just don't look too hard at the face.

The notion of a statue of Freddie Mercury fighting it out with Centrepoint as a West End landmark would have seemed incomprehensible in the twentieth century. But then, stranger still,
We
Will Rock You
is now the longest-running musical in the history of the Dominion Theatre. How many times, you wonder, did Ealing art student Fred Bulsara glance up at the same theatre hoarding before ducking down into Soho for a gig at the Marquee? Later, in Queen's earliest days, Mercury and Brian May would pass the Dominion, then screening
The Sting
,
The Towering Inferno
and every Hollywood blockbuster of the time, as they travelled on the number 9 bus from Kensington to Trident Studios.

‘We Will Rock You', the song that gave the Queen musical its name, was recorded in the late summer of 1977. After completing the final stretch of their European tour, Roger Taylor, eager to keep working, had made demos of four tracks for a possible solo project. One of these was a cover of The Parliaments' 1967 song ‘(I Wanna) Testify'. Taylor's version was co-produced by Mike Stone, and slipped out as a solo single in August. It cost him £5,000, failed to chart, but was, Taylor explained, ‘simply a bit of fun'. Then again, he could afford such luxuries.

Taylor was in a relationship with Dominique Beyrand, but didn't yet have the same commitments as some of his colleagues. Veronica Deacon was pregnant with her second child. By the end of the year, Brian and Chrissy May would be expecting their first child. Mercury's complex love life would find David Minns replaced by the American Joe Fanelli, who, as one of Mercury's friends later explained, ‘was a sweet, naive kid, uprooted and dragged into Freddie's lifestyle'. While May, especially, fretted over going back out on tour and the pressure this placed on his relationship, Taylor and Mercury were itching to get back out again.

‘We got very insular, shut off, self-protective,' the drummer admitted a year later. ‘I suppose we had too much time on our hands. We were holed up in England and we're always at our most depressed when we're not working. We got a bit fed up and lacking in inspiration.'

Publicly, as ever, Queen would defend
A Day at the Races
and
A
Night at the Opera
, but, in a less guarded moment, Brian May
admitted ‘they may have been overproduced'. The plan was to make, as the guitarist put it, ‘a more spontaneous album'. Regardless of musical trends and critical disdain, Queen had gone as far down that path as they could. As Roger Taylor admitted, ‘I thought
A Day at the Races
was the most brilliant thing we'd done, but it hadn't sold better than
A Night at the Opera
, and that didn't seem the way things should be going.' At least one of Taylor's home demos would point the way ahead.

Alongside ‘(I Wanna) Testify', Taylor had cut three originals: the single's B-side ‘Turn on the TV', ‘Fight From the Inside' and ‘Sheer Heart Attack'. As its title suggested, the last of these had been kicking around since Queen's 1974 album of the same name. Newly completed, ‘Sheer Heart Attack' was a fiery rock 'n' roll song that replicated the verve and energy of the contemporary punk scene, but predated those bands by nearly four years. While Mercury had supposedly told one EMI executive about his dislike of punk, his bandmates were slightly more accepting. The now 28-year-old Taylor's yen for songs about teenage rebellion was evident in his own work. He would tell interviewers that he liked ‘The Sex Pistols and raw rock 'n' roll' but was suspicious of the hype. May, similarly, would applaud The Pistols' ‘passion and energy' but was vexed by the music's self-destructive element: ‘Maybe I'm a sheltered soul, but I was a bit bewildered by all this stuff around them. The whole punk ethos was a bit manufactured and I never took it seriously.'

John Deacon, as always, said nothing. However, by the following year, the bassist had adopted a drastically short haircut, which would earn him the soubriquet ‘Birdman', after the shaven-headed prisoner ‘the Birdman of Alcatraz', portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the film of the same name. There was a comparison to be made with Charlie Watts, The Rolling Stones' unlikeliest hippy, who'd recently dispensed with his own flowing locks for the album
Black
and Blue
. Like Watts, Deacon was Queen's eternal pragmatist. He shunned publicity, seemed to abhor the frippery and pretension of the music industry, and was content simply to play music and earn enormous amounts of money. On Queen's next tour, Deacon would model a shirt and skinny tie of the kind he might once have worn with The Opposition. Bizarrely, in 1978, it made him look like
a member of The Jam, one of the most critically lauded new bands from the punk scene.

With Taylor snapping at his bandmates' heels, Queen imposed a deadline of just over two months in which to make their new album. Booking a US tour for November left them no option but to complete the record. The process would begin in July and finish in September and would be split across West London's Basing Street Studios and Wessex Sound Studios, a converted Victorian church hall in North London. Working quickly would, it transpired, also allow Freddie more time for antique shopping and bidding at Sotheby's.

The new Queen album would be called
News of the World
, after Groucho Marx reportedly rejected the group's request to borrow the title
Duck Soup
. ‘The story goes that Groucho cabled them,' says EMI's Bob Mercer, ‘and told them he didn't want the next Queen album to be called
Duck Soup
but said, “I would like it to be named after my next movie:
The Rolling Stones' Greatest Hits.
”'

By autumn that year, the UK album charts were a curious mix of diva Barbra Streisand, Swedish pop titans Abba, and the progressive rock band Yes, who inspired Queen in their early days. Only the presence of The Stranglers in the Top 10 hinted at punk's growing popularity. That would soon change. Bob Marley and The Wailers had just completed their
Exodus
album at Basing Street, while Queen's supposed nemesis The Sex Pistols were putting the final touches to their debut,
Never Mind the Bollocks (Here's The Sex Pistols)
in Studio B at Wessex Sound.

Andy Turner would go on to become programme director for London's Capital Gold radio station. In the summer of 1977, though, the eighteen-year-old had just started work as an assistant sound engineer at Wessex (‘Basically, I was Queen's tea boy'). On his first day in the job, he was told he would be working with the band for the next two months. ‘I was a fan,' says Turner now. ‘I was in awe of Brian May after hearing “Keep Yourself Alive” on
The Old
Grey Whistle Test
.' While spontaneity may have been the buzzword for the new album, in Queen's world, nothing was that spontaneous. ‘On day one, a lorry arrived with Roger Taylor's drum kit. We unloaded it, set it up in Studio A, and spent the best part of the
next two days getting the right drum sound. Roger sat there with his drum tech, hitting drum after drum after drum … That was on Monday, and the rest of the band weren't due to arrive until Wednesday. I remember thinking, “Bloody hell! You're being charged £200 an hour for this.”'

As with
A Day at the Races
, Queen planned to co-produce with engineer Mike Stone. ‘Wessex always used to use in-house producers, so that was unusual,' recalls Turner. ‘So there was very much this thing of having the Big American Producer brought in for the project.' One of the first changes Stone made was to bring in a new set of studio speakers. ‘I don't think there was anything wrong with the ones they already had. But Mike managed to blow a set. Then again, I guess Queen could afford it …'

Paying £200 an hour also gave Queen other privileges. ‘One of my duties for Freddie was to go down to the bakery on Dalston High Street every morning before he arrived and get him some Mr Kipling almond slices to go with his tea,' explains Andy. After one late-night recording session, Mercury invited Turner and the studio's young maintenance engineer, Howard, to accompany him to a party. The pair politely refused, but Andy would still be accorded privileges of his own during the recording sessions. ‘Basically, Freddie told me that no one else in the band was allowed any of his almond slices, but that I could help myself. To be honest, I thought this was just Fred being Fred …' Then, one afternoon, Brian May crossed the line. ‘Brian took an almond slice without asking, and there was a minor row about it. Freddie made this big announcement: “No one is allowed to touch my almond slices, no one … except Andy!”'

Back at work, Roger Taylor's ‘Sheer Heart Attack' was soon finished, with the drummer playing everything except the guitar solo. Taylor's other new track, ‘Fight From the Inside' was weaker, and sounded like a swipe at fly-by-night musical trends, including, inevitably, punk. But before long, Queen would have their close encounter with rock 'n' roll's latest public enemy number one. Roadie Peter Hince remembers meeting Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten (real name: John Lydon) at Wessex in 1976 when Queen were working on
A Day at the Races
(‘He seemed like a pleasant sort of
bloke. What was all the fuss about?'). Mercury's interview with
NME
in June the year before (‘
IS THIS MAN A PRAT
?') had quoted the singer discussing his passion for ballet.

According to Hince, The Sex Pistols' bassist, born John Ritchie, better known by his stage name Sid Vicious, had stumbled into the control room at Wessex and drunkenly asked Mercury, ‘Have you succeeded in bringing ballet to the masses yet?' ‘Fred then said, “Aren't you Stanley Ferocious or something” and threw him out …' The story varies depending on who is telling it. Others remember Mercury replying to the question with the withering put-down, ‘Oh yes, Mr Ferocious, dear, we're doing our best.' Another possibly apocryphal tale has Vicious and/or Rotten crawling into the studio on their hands and knees while Mercury was playing the piano.

‘We used to bump into them in the corridors,' said Brian May. ‘I had a few conversations with John Lydon, who was always very respectful. We talked about music. I don't remember everything about Freddie's legendary conversation with Sid Vicious. But I remember Sid looking like such a boy. Straight out of school.'

Roger Taylor recalls Queen and The Sex Pistols ‘looking at each other with real distrust', before finding a common ground with Pistols' guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook. ‘They were down-to-earth guys,' said Taylor, ‘but Johnny had a big charisma about him.' Beyond the haircuts, the clothes and the bank balances, the two lead singers had more in common than either would care to admit. Johnny Rotten, like Freddie Mercury, was a self-made creation. Both Lydon and Bulsara appeared to be fundamentally shy boys who had acquired a larger-than-life persona to mask all sorts of insecurities.

Queen's ex-manager Jack Nelson once said of his charges: ‘When we'd get into an airport, one would stop, one would go right, one would go left, and one would go straight ahead.'
News of the World
was the first Queen album to truly highlight those differences. Queen's diversity had previously been a selling point; now it resulted in an album that didn't always gel. Almost the equal of
Sheer Heart Attack
was Brian May's ‘It's Late', a strutting rocker with a dramatic lyric about a love triangle (May: ‘It's about all sorts of
experiences that I had'). It backed up the guitarist's belief that ‘
News
of the World
would help Queen get back to basics and find some vitality again', but not everything would succeed as well.

John Deacon's rather trite ‘Who Needs You' (described in the music press as like something from ‘a Carmen Miranda forties musical') and Mercury's ‘My Melancholy Blues' were fine but undistinguished. Deacon did better with his big-hearted pop song ‘Spread Your Wings'. May's ‘All Dead All Dead', with its orchestral guitar fills, was better than the faux blues of ‘Sleeping on the Sidewalk'. ‘It was the quickest song I've ever written' said the guitarist, but it was just as quickly forgotten.

Mercury's ‘Get Down, Make Love' was far better. The sparse piano fills and funk groove suggested the R&B and dance music that soundtracked New York's gay club scene. The lyrics sounded like a celebration of sexual abandonment (‘New York is Sin City. I slut myself when I'm there,' Freddie said). Meanwhile, sticking to the band's ‘no synthesisers' policy, Brian May helped accompany the tale of the sexual escapades with some unearthly noises coaxed out of the Red Special and an effects pedal.