Is This The Real Life? (37 page)

On the night of 8 December, John Lennon was shot dead outside his apartment building in New York. The day after Queen played Wembley Arena and performed a quickly rehearsed version of Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. Mercury fluffed the lyrics and May forgot some of the chords. Away from the braggadocio of his live performance, Mercury was still playing down the importance of his songwriting in any interview, and Lennon, more often or not, was his yardstick. ‘I don’t believe that I have a talent to write deep messages,’ he said. ‘John Lennon can do that but I can’t.’

Queen’s
Flash Gordon
soundtrack was released on 8 December. In the UK, it would match the single’s Top 10 placing but stopped shy
of the Top 20 in America. It had Queen’s name on its cover, but it wasn’t a Queen album in the conventional sense. Though, oddly, it attracted some of their best press yet (‘Wham! Zam! Thok! An album of truly epic proportions!’ raved
Record Mirror
).
Flash Gordon
only contained two full-length songs, ‘Flash’s Theme’ and ‘The Hero’, with the rest given over to short, incidental pieces; ideal for the film, but unlikely to hold the attention without the visual spectacle. Also, not everyone in the band seemed to share May and Taylor’s passion for Flash Gordon. When one of Queen’s crew stuck the album on during a late-night drinking session, a refreshed John Deacon slurred, ‘Who is this?’

Back in Germany for the tour’s final dates, Straight Eight were invited to Queen’s after-hours party at Berlin’s Black Cat club. For a pub-rock band from Shepherd’s Bush, it was something of an experience. ‘It was a strip club and very hardcore,’ recalls Rick Cassman. ‘The atmosphere was one of high decadence, with drink and drugs flowing.’ A Playboy centrefold model invited to the party proved a charming distraction. ‘I couldn’t resist asking her for a dance,’ admits Cassman. ‘Imagine the girl in the cartoon of
Roger Rabbit
dancing with a stick-thin, wasted punk rocker. After about three minutes, Roger Taylor came up and whisked her away.’ Up onstage, male and female strippers had sex, while down on the dancefloor, Straight Eight’s roadie (‘a big lad from Birmingham’) passed out after too much over-indulgence and had to be carried out of the venue.

Like jaded Roman emperors, Queen viewed it all with the dispassionate air that came from years of witnessing such excess. That night, while most of the band basked in the seedy delights of the Black Cat, Mercury was off elsewhere enjoying his own misadventures. They all had plenty to celebrate. By the end of 1980, Queen had sold in the region of 25 million singles and 45 million albums internationally. They had also been accorded an entry in
The Guinness Book of Records
as Britain’s highest-paid directors of a company (reported annual salary: £700,000 each). With
The Game
now five times platinum, Queen owned the world. But as Brian May wearily admitted: ‘The excess was starting to leak into the music.’

Queen’s 1981 began with the Japanese premiere of
Flash Gordon
and five nights at the Budokan in Tokyo, picking up a waif-and-stray English pop star along the way. Gary Numan had scored a run of hits since 1979 with his Bowie-influenced synthesised pop. Numan had flown to Tokyo on an invite from the rock band Japan. ‘I was supposed to be guesting onstage with them,’ he says. ‘But when I got there it was all a misunderstanding, and they didn’t want me with them at all.’ On a whim, Numan managed to get a ticket for Queen’s first show at Budokan. ‘Someone must have spotted me, because Queen’s security guy came over and invited me backstage.’

Queen asked Numan to join them for dinner at one of Tokyo’s swankiest restaurants. ‘But I was incredibly shy and a plain eater,’ he admits. Daunted by the Japanese food and having to use chopsticks instead of cutlery, he chose to go without. ‘So Freddie noticed and asked what I wanted to eat. I had to tell him: McDonald’s.’ Mercury called over his chauffeur, checked with the restaurant manager, and fifteen minutes later Numan was tucking into a cheeseburger and French fries, while Queen savoured the sushi and Mercury entertained the whole table with racy anecdotes. After hours, Freddie gave his credit card a workout at Tokyo’s prestigious Shibuya Seibu department store, which had been closed to the public to allow him to shop in peace. Before long, though, Queen would be spending an even larger amount of money to buy their way out of trouble.

In Werner Herzog’s 1982 film
Fitzcarraldo
, the lead character, a rubber baron and opera fanatic, journeys into the heart of the Peruvian jungle to find a remote crop of rubber plants from which he hopes to make his fortune and build his own opera house. Having travelled as far as he can by river, Fitzcarraldo enlists the natives to help him drag his ship through the jungle and across the Peruvian mountains. It is a punishingly slow, arduous and yet strangely compelling task. In 1981, Queen’s road crew would experience their own Fitzcarraldo moment, attempting to move over 100 tons of their paymasters’ equipment by air, sea and road, and even
through the jungles of South America. Just months later, they would go back to the continent for a second run. This time they would be lucky to get back alive.

Queen’s first trip to South America in February 1981 finally came together after nine months of meticulous planning. ‘South America had been mooted a few times,’ recalls Peter Hince. ‘But there were always offers coming into the Queen office to play unusual places; Moscow was another one. The band were always keen, but this time they were up for it because they were so buoyed by the success of
The Game
. At that point Queen really were the biggest band in the world.’

By 1981, many of the bands that had inspired Queen had either split or were in the process of falling apart. With the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980, Led Zeppelin had closed down; The Who were limping on without Keith Moon, but would only last to make one more album before throwing in the towel (albeit temporarily), while Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
tour would be their last live shows for six years. The arrival of punk and new wave had led to huge critical opprobrium, but Queen had survived.

In 1980, guitarist Peter Frampton and the funk band Earth, Wind & Fire had played shows in Brazil and Argentina. However, both had performed on a small scale and at indoor venues. ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ had been an unexpected number 1 hit for Queen in Argentina and Guatemala, and they were now officially the biggest-selling band in South America. Queen’s plan was to transport their full show and perform at the nation’s outdoor sports stadiums. Road manager Gerry Stickells and Queen’s business manager Jim Beach made several exploratory trips to the continent, and a temporary production office was established in Rio de Janeiro.

It was unknown territory in more ways than one. As Hince recalls, ‘There were so many people involved, you didn’t really know who was in charge or what was happening.’ Jose Rota, based in Buenos Aries, was appointed as the tour’s main promoter, and given the task of liaising between the Queen office and local promoters elsewhere on the continent; a process fraught with difficulty, when it was quickly discovered that one promoter was
unable to pay the band their guaranteed fee. Dates were scheduled, re-scheduled and cancelled.

Queen’s production manager, Chris Lamb, had flown ahead to Argentina, but ran into trouble at Customs. Lamb aroused suspicion by having a canister of flash powder; an essential pyrotechnic for the show. He was also carrying the crew and backstage passes, which featured a picture of two topless women and a banana. One story claims that Lamb was forced to doctor the offending passes with a marker pen before being allowed into the country. ‘I think it was the usual thing,’ offers Hince. ‘You paid someone and they let you in. Everything was done in US dollars, and the Queen office made sure there was plenty to go around.’

After Japan, while the band members kicked back with a week’s holiday, the crew began the tortuous operation of transporting 20 tons of equipment from Tokyo, and 40 tons from Miami, to Buenos Aires for the first date at Vélez Sársfield football stadium. A DC8 was chartered to make the 35-hour journey from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, with the crew flying to Argentina from Tokyo via New York. As soon as they arrived in Buenos Aries, Hince and the rest of the crew were given strict instructions: ‘Basically, we were told, “Right, you are not going to Drug Heaven, the laws here are very strict, and please remember this is a Catholic country.”’

As well as their gear, Queen also had to provide a hundred rolls of artificial turf to cover the precious pitches of South America’s biggest football stadiums. ‘That was half the problem,’ said Brian May. ‘Trying to get permission for the audience to actually stand on the pitch.’ On the way to Vélez Sársfield, one of the equipment trucks overturned. It took forty-eight hours to locate a crane big enough to clear the load. Meanwhile, at the stadium, Queen’s sixty-strong crew, aided by local workers, were tasked with constructing a stage (100 feet high, 140 feet long and 40 feet deep) from scratch in the 80-degree heat.

‘I took a photo of the first piece of wood and a measuring tape on the ground of the empty stadium,’ says Peter Hince. ‘Even the locals that were helping us out didn’t believe that the gig was actually going to happen. They were convinced the whole thing
would be called off at the last minute. So all of us were feeling edgy the whole time.’

The crew’s paranoia was understandable. According to Peter, Queen were also provisionally booked to play shows in Cordoba and Belo Horizonte (Hince: ‘These got blown out for whatever reason’) and the Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Queen were desperate to play Maracana as it was the biggest stadium in the world, but the gig was pulled when the governor of Rio declared that the venue could only be used for events of sporting, religious or cultural significance. These included appearances from the Pope and Frank Sinatra in 1980, but not Queen in 1981. In the end, Queen would play three shows in Buenos Aires, a night each at Mar del Plata and Rosario, and two in São Paulo, Brazil.

Queen (‘S
UPERGROUPO
N
UMERO
U
NO
!’ declared the
Sun
) arrived in Buenos Aires to an extraordinary reception. After being escorted off the plane by security guards and a government official, the band were fast-tracked through Customs. ‘As we walked into the airport building, we couldn’t believe our ears,’ said Freddie Mercury. ‘They stopped all the flight announcements and were playing our music instead.’ Queen were accompanied by a small group of reporters from the music and national press, including
Melody Maker
’s Ray Coleman and the
Sun
’s Nina Myskow. But, from the moment they set foot on Argentinian soil, their every move would be shadowed by local TV and radio crews.

Queen would be hustled from airport to press conference to the Sheraton Hotel to gig in armoured vehicles. ‘They were these battleship-like personnel carriers, bristling with machine guns poking through holes in the metal,’ wrote Nina Myskow. ‘Fleets of motorcycle cops sirened their way alongside the circus.’ While Queen were hungry for their own personal victory by beating their contemporaries to become the first rock band to play huge gigs in a new territory, there was vast political capital to be made out of their visit. General Roberto Viola was in the process of becoming de facto president of Argentina, and it was Viola that had arranged for Queen to be met at the airport. Queen’s visit was being sold as Viola’s personal PR coup. In a country under military rule and with such a volatile political climate, it was little wonder that the
Argentinian secret service were monitoring the band’s visit.