Is This The Real Life? (39 page)

After the chaos that accompanied the recording of ‘Under Pressure’, the offer of a return trip to South America in September offered a welcome break from the sessions. Not that Mercury needed much persuasion. Prior to the trip, the singer celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday with a five-day party at New York’s Berkshire Place Hotel at which £30,000 worth of champagne was consumed. Mercury was now in the process of buying an apartment in the city. With his hangover only just subsiding, he joined the others in New Orleans for rehearsals, before Queen flew to Caracas, Venezuela, where they were booked to play three nights at the indoor sporting arena, Poliedro de Caracas.

However, they arrived just as Venezuela’s ex-president and national hero, Romulo Betancourt was dying in a hospital in New York. The gigs went off without a hitch, and Queen were invited to appear as non-performing guests on a live TV pop show on
28 September. Mercury categorically refused, but the others agreed. Unable to speak or fully understand Spanish, May, Taylor and Deacon looked confused as an announcer dashed onstage to declare that Betancourt was dead, and demanded a two-minute silence. With the cameras still rolling, a second announcer appeared just minutes later to declare that it was a false alarm: Betancourt was still alive. In the end, the ‘Father of Venezuelan Democracy’ passed away later that night, plunging the whole country into a period of national mourning. ‘This meant no music for two weeks,’ explains Peter Hince. Queen’s remaining shows in Venezuela were immediately cancelled, leading to a fall-out over their fee with the promoter.

The next run of gigs was due to take place in Mexico nearly ten days later. The band decamped to Miami, Florida, before an eighteen-strong group of crew members made their way to Loredo, Texas. From here, they travelled to the Mexican border. ‘Under normal circumstances you can visit Mexico on a US driver’s licence,’ says Peter Hince. ‘But the crew were told that we all needed visas.’ To complicate matters further, they were also informed that the authorities could only issue a total of six visas a day. ‘The official line on the visas was that we were “assisting Mexican technicians”. I still have the visa application and there was some unbelievable stuff on there: a mugshot, a profile picture, fingerprints, mother’s maiden name, shape of eyes … It was just an excuse for someone to get some cash.’

After the visas, and more money, had been successfully negotiated, the crew were ferried into a no-man’s land compound outside the border and ordered to wait. ‘My mate and I got bored, wandered through a gate into Mexico, bought an ice cream and came back,’ laughs Hince. ‘Eventually, they let us through, and we drove about 60 miles before we reached another checkpoint … and more money had to change hands.’

Queen were booked to play the 56,000-capacity Estadio Universatario stadium in Monterrey, nicknamed ‘The Volcano’. ‘Tickets had only gone on sale two days before, and they were selling the tickets through supermarkets,’ says Peter Hince. ‘The organisation was terrible.’ After the gig, a bridge outside the
stadium collapsed as the crowds were leaving. There were no fatalities but some fans sustained injuries. ‘So the police locked the stadium gates and wouldn’t let us leave. Once again, so someone else could get some money. If it hadn’t been for Gerry Stickells, we would never have got the gear out of there.’

A second gig at ‘The Volcano’ was cancelled. A week later, Queen arrived at Pueblo where they would play two nights at the 22,000-capacity Estadio Ignacio Zaragoza. Asked about Queen’s trip to Mexico, Brian May told
Mojo
magazine in 2008 that ‘a whole lot of trouble happened that I don’t even want to go into.’ Roger Taylor said: ‘It was a miracle we made it; there were some monstrous corruption issues.’ One rumour has it that the promoter was kidnapped following the gig in Monterrey. But according to
Queen:
As It Began
, the 1992 book ‘written in co-operation with Queen’, the band’s ‘promoter was arrested and thrown in jail the day before the Pueblo gig. They had to pay $25,000 to get him out of bail so the tour could continue.’

There was worse to come at the gig itself. ‘The stadium had been built for the Olympics and it was virtually defunct,’ says Hince. ‘The pitch was covered in rubbish and there were no working toilets.’ To aggravate matters, the crew had been billeted in the worst hotel in town (‘When you flushed the chain, the shit came back up through the shower’), leading to cases of food poisoning and dysentery. With nearly twice the capacity crowd inside the stadium, and many in the audience ‘out of their heads on mescaline and tequila’, the atmosphere before the show was dangerously tense. It didn’t improve when Queen arrived onstage. Many in the audience had been allowed to bring in ghetto-blaster cassette recorders, with which they were recording the gig. When the batteries ran out, they began throwing them at the band. Before long, the stage was covered in batteries, rocks, dirt and even shoes. ‘It’s not that they didn’t like the band,’ ventures Hince. ‘It’s just that a rock gig was an excuse to go completely wild.’ Queen managed to complete their set, but Mercury was incensed: ‘
Adios, amigos
, you motherfuckers!’

‘After the show, the band went absolutely apeshit,’ remembers Peter Hince. ‘They said, “That’s it, we are going home.” Gerry calmed them down and explained the situation: “We have another
show tomorrow, then a day off, and then another one after that … If we don’t do the show tomorrow, it’s going to be very hard for us to get the gear out of the country. You won’t see it again. Do the show, and on the day off we will get out.”’

On the second night, the police were instructed to search the crowd, and to confiscate alcohol and batteries from the ghetto-blasters before letting anyone into the stadium. Once inside the venue, the crew spotted that the police had set up stalls to sell back the confiscated batteries and bottles of tequila. Despite this, the second night’s show was relatively peaceful. But due to outside issues, later blamed on ‘problems with tax and currency’, Queen would not be paid for the gig. With more US dollars changing hands to hasten a speedy getaway, the stage was stripped down, the trucks loaded and Queen’s gear driven from Pueblo to Texas under an armed guard. The third show was forgotten, the promoter was irate, but Queen and their crew escaped in one piece.

Back in Munich, there was what Peter Hince describes as ‘an inquisition’. The band had lost a significant amount of money, estimated, by some, at around a million dollars. ‘In a sense,’ says Hince, ‘it bought them back down to earth.’ As Brian May put it, ‘We thought we could repeat what we’d done in South America, but we escaped by the skin of our teeth. All of us.’

After the trauma of Mexico, the band’s nerves were soothed by the success of ‘Under Pressure’ in October. In the meantime, EMI busied themselves for the release of
Queen’s Greatest Hits
and a corresponding collection of their finest promos,
Greatest Flix
. Both would be released to mark Queen’s tenth anniversary; the band discounting their first year with other bass players and marking the beginning of the band as 1971, when John Deacon had joined. In November, the band flew to Canada and played two gigs at the Montreal Forum, filmed for their first concert video release,
We
Will Rock You.
By the end of the month
Greatest Hits
, packaged with a portrait of the band by Princess Margaret’s ex-husband Lord Snowdon, was at number 1 in the UK.

Before Christmas, Queen were back in Munich to complete work on a new studio album. Among the new songs was Deacon and Mercury’s blue-eyed soul number ‘Cool Cat’ and ‘Back Chat’, written by John Deacon and yet another excursion into funk. As with
The Game
, much of the new material was written to pass what Brian May called ‘the Sugar Shack test’. This time, Mercury was pushing even harder for a change of direction. ‘Fred’s thing was: less is more, make it more sparse, and play less guitar,’ said May. The choice of album title,
Hot Space
, would seem very appropriate.

Sessions for
Hot Space
picked up again in the New Year and continued until March 1982. But there was more to contend with than just time-honoured musical differences. ‘Munich became almost another home, and a place in which we lived different lives,’ said May. ‘Emotionally, we all got into trouble in Munich. Every single one of us.’ The band’s after-hours activities had escalated to the point where it was seriously impinging on the working day. ‘We’d go out after the studio and then we weren’t getting back until eight in the morning,’ complained May. ‘So you don’t get much work done the next day … and then it’s time to go out drinking again.’ Interviewed in 2008, even Roger Taylor conceded: ‘We had got fairly decadent by then. We started work at all sorts of odd hours. The days drifted into the nights into this endless cycle.’

The walls of the Sugar Shack were now decorated with gold discs for
The Game
, and with its glamorous clientele of fellow rock musicians, sports stars and models, it exerted a magnetic pull on some of the band. ‘The latter days in Munich were lost in a haze of vodka,’ recalled May. ‘There were no drugs in my case, but there were so many drugs around.’ After one drunken interlude, May returned to Musicland to complete the solo on ‘Put Out the Fire’, one of the few rock tracks on
Hot Space
in which he sounds as if he’s allowed to slip the leash.

May fought his corner again on ‘Back Chat’, urging John Deacon to compromise on the song’s pure funk sound. ‘“Back Chat” is supposed to be about people arguing and it should have some kind of guts to it. It wasn’t angry enough,’ said the guitarist. Ultimately, Deacon was persuaded to allow May to ‘get some heaviness into it’. But the arguments wouldn’t end there. ‘I remember John saying I
didn’t play the type of guitar he wanted on his songs. We struggled bitterly with each other.’

Mercury had his own emotional distractions to contend with. These included his latest lover, a New Jerseyite named Bill Reid, whose relationship with Freddie was fiery, even in the studio. Yet Freddie could often become what May calls ‘a wonderful diplomat’ by stepping in to mediate. ‘Fred was the only one who could come along and say, “Now dears, we can do this and we can do
this
, now just fucking do it!” And it would always work,’ said Brian. ‘For a person who was famous for saying, “We don’t compromise, dear”, he was a great mediator in the studio. He would always cut through everything with such humour: “Oh, for God’s sake, what a stupid business!”’ Recalling one such episode during the making of
Hot Space
, Peter Freestone remembered Mercury losing patience with May’s tireless request for more volume: ‘Suddenly he exclaimed, “What the fucking hell do you want? A herd of wildebeest charging from one side to the other!”’

Mack remembers ‘heated discussions about everything and the whole thing was close to breaking up’. But part of the problem was that everyone was working to a different schedule. ‘Making
The
Game
was the last time the four of them were in the studio together. After that, it felt like it was always two of them in one studio and two of them in another. You’d come in one day and say, “Oh, where’s Roger?” and someone would say, “Oh, he’s gone skiing.”’ Mack became so frustrated over how long the album was taking that he began measuring it against his wife Ingrid’s pregnancy. ‘I told Queen, “It’s easier to conceive and give birth than it is to get this album finished.”’ A week before the sessions were complete, Ingrid gave birth to their first child, John Frederick. Mack immediately asked Freddie to become the boy’s godfather.