Is This The Real Life? (33 page)

‘The one about the dwarfs and the bald heads and the cocaine is not true,' insists Roger Taylor, between conspiratorial chuckles. He hesitates. ‘Actually, it
could
have been true.' Taylor is being chauffeured around the Lake District. It is now summer 2008, he has been
coaxed onto the campaign trail to support Queen and Paul Rodgers' album and tour. The drummer cruises through some of the most beautiful countryside in rural England, a mobile phone pressed to his ear, patiently taking a trip back thirty years to one of Queen's most debauched parties.

On Hallowe'en night, 31 October 1978, Queen celebrated the release of their seventh album,
Jazz
, in New Orleans. At midnight, a Dixieland brass band marched into the ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel, where over three hundred guests were already gorging on oysters, shrimp creole and champagne served by liveried waiters. Following the trumpet-playing retinue were the four members of Queen, fresh from their sold-out show at the Municipal Auditorium. Before the event, Queen's publicist had been ordered to trawl the bars and clubs around Bourbon Street in the city's French Quarter with an instruction to round up ‘every available freak' and invite them to the party.

As Queen arrived, a flock of transvestites, fire-eaters, dancing girls, snakecharmers and strippers dressed as nuns, appeared from the wings. The Rolling Stones' disco hit ‘Miss You' blared out of the speakers, as various female revellers shed their clothes on the dancefloor. In the
Sun
newspaper, a week later, Freddie Mercury, clad in braces and checked shirt (the de rigueur dress code in US gay circles) was photographed autographing a bare female behind under the headline “W
AY
D
OWN
Y
ONDER
I
N
N
UDE
O
RLEANS
'. The festivities rolled on until daybreak, with groupies dispensing blow jobs to music biz bigwigs in a back room, and one party girl stripping off to ‘smoke' a cigarette in her vagina. Or so the story goes …

Over the last three decades, the tale has taken on a life of its own to include all manner of bacchanalian excess: public sex, naked mud-wrestling, a nude woman served on a salver of raw meat, and, most infamous of all, dwarfs, sometimes described as ‘hermaphrodite dwarfs', ferrying cocaine on trays strapped to their, possibly bald, heads … ‘Look, if it's true I never saw it,' admits Roger Taylor, eventually. ‘But I have to say that most of the stories from that night are not
that
exaggerated.'

EMI's Bob Mercer had flown to New Orleans especially for the bash. ‘The party was outrageous,' he admits. ‘The story about the
gnomes and cocaine is apocryphal. As far as I know, I was the only one there that had any blow [cocaine], because all night I kept getting tapped on the shoulder by certain people and I kept having to go with them to my hotel room …'

At round 3 a.m., Mercer remembers escorting Brian May and Roger Taylor on a trip to ‘some of the seedier parts of the French Quarter'. Mercury was also ‘trolling in the same village', in the company of Queen's old PR Tony Brainsby and
Sounds
journalist Sylvie Simmons with whom he was competing to spot the best-looking men (‘He's mine!'). May, however, remembers the night differently. Eager to get away from what one eyewitness called ‘the groupies and fame-worshippers', the guitarist left the party and headed off on what turned out to be a wild goose chase.

‘You know that feeling, where everything's going on, everything's wonderful, fabulous, but inside there's this big hole?' said May in 1998. ‘So it was great, it was outrageous, but I remember thinking, all is not quite right.' Brian went looking for Peaches, the woman he had met in New Orleans on Queen's first US tour. ‘I'd fallen in love some years before in New Orleans and I expected that I would see her, but she wasn't there. I didn't find her but she found me later on.' Recalling the party in 2008, May still sounded dreamily wistful. ‘New Orleans is a party town, and I still have a huge emotional attachment to the place. I still feel a tug on the heartstrings when I go to that city.'

The arrival of a new day brought with it a $200,000 bill, and the mother of all hangovers. Hardened bon vivant Bob Mercer returned to his hotel room at 6 a.m., only to discover that he had been robbed. ‘I used to carry what we called a “nancy bag”,' he explains. ‘Men in those days carried all their gear in these bags because our pants were too tight to put anything in the pockets. I opened mine and I had no money, no credit card, no passport … I was supposed to fly to New York to catch a plane to London to go with Kate Bush to Holland for some record awards. Believe it or not, I got home. How? I don't know. I was like one of those marines who's dropped in the middle of a forest at night and told to find their own way back.'

While Mercer plotted his escape from New Orleans, a bleary-eyed
Queen held a press conference. ‘The party was deliberately excessive,' said May later. ‘Partly for our own enjoyment, partly for friends to enjoy … and partly for the hell of it.' But as Taylor ominously admitted, ‘The trouble was, as time went on, we just got better and better at having a good time.'

Sessions for what became
Jazz
had begun four months earlier and, for tax purposes, would be split between Mountain Studios, overlooking Lake Geneva, and Superbear Studios in Nice. In Mike Stone's absence, Queen had reunited with Roy Thomas Baker. ‘Mike had been like part of the band,' explained Brian May, ‘but by the time we were going to start
Jazz
, Mike had fallen in love and then had a period of falling apart.' Stone's later worked with Journey and Asia, bands who made great use of the stacked vocals and harmony techniques he had first used with Queen. Sadly, Stone died in 2002 and would never get the chance to work again with Queen.

By the summer of 1978, Roy Thomas Baker was basking in the success of his latest project, The Cars' debut album. The Cars, from Boston, Massachusetts, were part of what record company marketing departments were calling ‘new wave'; the radio-friendly successor to punk. It was now the era of Elvis Costello, Blondie, and The Police. ‘Roy came back with a huge amount of confidence,' said May. ‘He'd done The Cars' album really quickly, and was like, “Oh, I tossed that off in two weeks and it was a massive hit!”'

Queen wanted to retain the spontaneity of
News of the World
, without creating an obvious sequel. With The Cars, Baker had fused huge harmony vocals with sparse backing tracks. Queen would employ a similar technique for
Jazz
. ‘It was the first time we'd done an album away from home,' said Brian May. ‘The idea being that there would be no distractions, but of course there were even more distractions. Just different kinds.' According to May, one of Freddie Mercury's distractions was the Tour de France: ‘Fred got quite worked up about it, though we couldn't understand why, and then he came back with this delightful creation.'

The delightful creation was ‘Bicycle Race', a song with lyrics that name-checked
Jaws
,
Star Wars
, cocaine, Superman, the Vietnam War and the Watergate political scandal. If that wasn't enough, it had a
schizophrenic rhythm, pure Gilbert and Sullivan vocals, and, said May, ‘about a billion chords'. The song was exquisitely camp. ‘I'm not saying who was sleeping with whom and when,' insisted May, but a popular rumour still persists that ‘Bicycle Race' was composed after Mercury enjoyed a tryst with one of the Tour de France cyclists. ‘If anything, Freddie's personal life spilled over into his work in a positive way, the part that made it theatre,' suggested Roy Thomas Baker. ‘His horizons were broad, and being gay was one extra thing he could draw upon.'

Brian May delivered the perfect companion piece with ‘Fat Bottomed Girls'. ‘I wrote it with Fred in mind,' he said, ‘as you do when you have a great singer that liked fat bottomed girls or boys.' The song swung from thigh-slapping country-rock to heavy metal, with Mercury singing about his sexual initiation at the hands of one ‘Big Fat Fanny'. ‘Fat Bottomed Girls' evoked a Donald McGill saucy seaside postcard and an old
Carry On
film, with a mugging Kenneth Williams about to be pounced on by Hattie Jacques' predatory Matron.

With ‘Fat Bottomed Girls' and ‘Bicycle Race', Queen had acquired a double A-side single that would return them to the UK Top 20. But
Jazz
divided opinion within the group. Interviewed in 1984, John Deacon described it ‘as an album I dislike'. Roger Taylor was equally unimpressed. ‘It's not one of my favourites,' he admitted later. ‘
Jazz
was an ambitious album but I never felt as if it lived up to its ambition. The double A-side single was good, but I was never happy with the sound on
Jazz
, it never thrilled me.'

Interviewed in 2005, Roy Thomas Baker insisted, ‘I thought everyone had a great time. I thought their songwriting was equally as good as what they'd done before.' One of the high points of the sessions for Baker was working again with Freddie Mercury. At Mountain, the control room was on a different level to the studio, which irked the singer. ‘We installed a close circuit TV,' explained Baker. ‘When Fred and I had worked together before, I wouldn't sit behind the recording console but between the console and the window, so that Freddie could tell from my facial expression if I thought a particular vocal was good or not. Freddie wanted a camera on my face, so we could maintain that relationship.' Baker
found that Mercury was still ‘intense and strong-willed, but great to work with. He'd write everything down on bits of paper so he was always focused, and then play me little things, like a cymbal smash of some record, and say, “How do we get that sound?”'

The singer's imagination worked overtime for the opening track, ‘Mustapha'. Here, Mercury offered a rare nod to his heritage, scatting away in Arabic and broken English over a frenetic backing of drums, bass, guitar and piano. It was unlike anything Queen had attempted before, and a strikingly original, if uncompromising way to begin an album. ‘I thought it was fantastic,' said May simply. ‘Intrinsically difficult, but fantastic.'

Elsewhere on
Jazz
, Mercury displayed the usual split personality: playing the weary romantic on the ballad ‘Jealousy', while bragging about whoring himself out to an audience on the smoke-and-mirrors hard rocker ‘Let Me Entertain You'. When Roger Taylor said that Queen were getting better and better at having a good time, one band member seemed better at it than most. The ‘good time' being enjoyed by Mercury would be extolled in the future single ‘Don't Stop Me Now'. In the twenty-first century, the song has been used to sell Cadbury's chocolate, sung on reality TV talent shows, and voted The Greatest Driving Song Ever by viewers of the BBC's petrol-head programme,
Top Gear
. Mercury describes himself as a tiger, an atom bomb, and a sex machine travelling at 100mph, suggesting that the song's two greatest inspirations were sex and drugs. Interviewed in 2010 Brian May admitted that although the song was full of optimism, ‘lyrically it represented something that was happening to Freddie which we thought was threatening him.' Namely: his lifestyle.

May's contributions to
Jazz
swung from bruising heavy rock, ‘Dead On Time' (which included the sound of a thunderstorm recorded over Montreux) to ‘Dreamers Ball', a light, jazzy shuffle that apparently prompted a heated row in the studio between May and Taylor, who didn't like the song. ‘Around the
Jazz
album we were all getting into our own things and nobody much liked what the other guys were doing,' admitted May. ‘To be honest, there were times when we couldn't tolerate each other offstage.' On ‘Leaving Home Ain't Easy', May played his straightest hand yet
with a song seemingly inspired by the the drawbacks of being a globetrotting rock star. Elsewhere, he delivered an epic guitar solo to John Deacon's ‘If You Can't Beat Them' that was arguably the best part of the song. Deacon's other composition, ‘In Only Seven Days', stuck to the same pop middle ground as ‘You're My Best Friend'.

Roger Taylor has always saved his strongest criticism of
Jazz
for his own tracks, ‘Fun It' and ‘More of That Jazz'. ‘My songs are very patchy,' he said. ‘Instantly forgettable.' ‘Fun It' was Queen's first foray into dance music and included a syn-drum, the electronic gizmo that would briefly revolutionise the sound of so much pop music in the next decade. Taylor's second effort was the rather sullen ‘More of That Jazz', which reprised snippets from the tracks that had gone before but ended the album on a very downbeat note. ‘I don't think we were as much of a group at the time,' he said. ‘We were all living in these different places in a different country.'

The days of Queen bussing in to London from their respective bedsits for a recording session at Trident were long gone. In July, May had been forced to leave the UK for tax reasons soon after the birth of his son. He had flown to Canada for a break, before joining the rest of the band in Montreux. Deacon now had two children and the same commitments as May. Jack Nelson's earlier description of the four band members entering an airport (‘one would stop, one would go right, one would go left, and one would go straight ahead') seemed even more apt.
Jazz
had a fractured feel, as if all the pieces didn't quite fit and everyone was pulling in their own direction. Interviewed in 1982, Baker recalled the sessions less for the songs than for the local nightlife: ‘Every night we'd go to this club on the corner that had the most amazing stripper, so we had to stop the session at eleven o'clock, watch the stripper, and then go back to record again.'

Baker's co-production gave
Jazz
a crisp, cold sound, not that distanced from his work with The Cars. The choruses were as big as before, but everything else felt shrunken, as if it had been condensed, especially Taylor's drums. It was a modern sound far removed from the bombast of
Queen II
or
A Night at the Opera
, which is what all parties
had been striving for before. But as Roger Taylor said: ‘
Jazz
was disappointing … I don't think it really worked with Roy.'