Is This The Real Life? (43 page)

In the US, it was a very different story. ‘They hated the video,’
May told
Mojo
’s Mick Wall. ‘It was received with horror in most of America. They just didn’t get it. To them it was boys dressing up as girls and that was unthinkable, especially for a rock band. I was in some of those US TV stations when they got the video, and a lot of them refused to play it. They were visibly embarrassed.’

‘I’m Canadian, so I understood,’ laughs Fred Mandel. ‘To me it was just Benny Hill, typical British humour. I liked seeing Roger as a schoolgirl and I especially liked seeing Freddie doing housework.’ Nevertheless, the all-powerful music channel MTV chose not to screen the video, and ‘I Want to Break Free’ limped to just number 45 in the US. ‘Middle America felt that Freddie might be gay, and Middle America was very important,’ says EMI’s Brian Southall. ‘That was the trouble: you could be terribly arty in New York or Los Angeles, but don’t try it in Kansas.’

‘For the first time in our lives we were taking the mickey out of ourselves,’ protested Mercury. ‘But in America they said, “What are our idols doing dressing up in frocks?”’ ‘Queen were asked to do another promo for “I Want to Break Free”,’ says Peter Hince. ‘They were told, “This one isn’t right for America, will you do a performance video?” And they said, “No.” They should have done it, because it killed them in the US.’

Hince accompanied John Deacon and Roger Taylor on a world promo trip for
The Works
. ‘We did Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, TV and radio. I think they flew to New York for a week and did a press day somewhere else, but it was as though they didn’t want to do press in the US. Of course, everyone wanted to interview Freddie and Freddie wasn’t doing any interviews. Prenter was going around, saying, “I made ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and ‘I Want to Break Free’ into hits.” Their attitude to America was like, Oh fuck ’em, we don’t need ’em. It was so strange, as they had just signed to EMI in the US. Maybe they thought EMI would be like a magic wand.’

‘Freddie didn’t want to go back to America and play smaller venues than we’d been before,’ admitted May in 2005. ‘He was like, “Let’s just wait and we’ll go out and do stadiums in America as well.” But it was one of those things that wasn’t to be.’

By the spring of 1984, Freddie Mercury had returned to Munich with Mack to complete work on what would become his first solo release, ‘Mr Bad Guy’. A month later, Taylor put out his second solo album,
Strange Frontier
. The drummer had apparently rejected some of his own original songs for the project, and had co-written others with his new production partner, Mountain’s resident engineer David Richards.

For a rock star whose reputation suggested one of carefree abandon, Taylor sounded remarkably dour. Wringing his hands over man’s inhumanity to man and the threat of nuclear Armageddon, one song, ‘Killing Time’, even suggested a bored, dissolute rock star in paradise watching his life pass by. There were covers of Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ and Springsteen’s ‘Racing in the Street’ to sweeten the pill, but
Strange Frontier
was terribly worthy and not much fun. The album would only just make it into the UK Top 30. In the music press,
Sounds
offered a rather blunt if ultimately fair assessment: ‘He can write the songs, but he can’t sing them like Freddie does.’

Taylor had even less to smile about when Queen reassembled to make a promo video for their next single ‘It’s a Hard Life’. Filmed in Munich, Mercury enlisted many of his friends and fellow clubbers, including Barbara Valentin, as extras in a lavish set that seemed a cross between an Elizabethan wedding banquet and the Sex Maniacs’ Ball. ‘I didn’t like it,’ said the plain-speaking John Deacon, but the bassist got away reasonably lightly. In one scene, Taylor, trussed up in tights and a regency ruff, looks mortally embarrassed (‘I tried to get my scenes cut out,’ he later admitted), while in another, poor Brian May poses with a skeleton-style guitar.

Meanwhile, Mercury’s costume, a dramatic slashed scarlet tunic decorated with feathers and twenty-six eyes, was modelled on an outfit once worn by the French torch singer Mistinguett. Unfortunately, it made the Queen singer resemble what May later described as ‘a giant amorous prawn’. ‘It was one of my favourite songs of Freddie’s and I remember being terribly disappointed that he wanted to wear this costume,’ he said. America remained equally unconvinced, and ‘It’s a Hard Life’ tanked, while reaching number 6 in Britain.

Then again, Mercury’s ridiculous costume had been the least of his worries during the shoot. He was having trouble walking, after being involved in a fracas in New York, a Munich bar, which had left him with damaged ligaments in his right knee. ‘Some cunt kicked me,’ he explained at a press conference. ‘It might mean I will have to cut down on some of my more elaborate gorgeous stage moves.’

Mercury had spent some time in plaster, but seemed match fit when the tour opened at Queen’s familiar stamping ground, Brussels’ Forest National. Fred Mandel had taken a gig with Elton John, and was replaced for the tour by The Boomtown Rats’ sometime keyboard player Spike Edney, recruited after ‘Crystal’ Taylor ran into him in a London nightclub. Edney was flown to Munich to meet the band. It was a baptism by fire. ‘Come four o’clock in the morning we were in the Sugar Shack club,’ he said. ‘By six o’clock in the morning we were back at the hotel, in Roger’s suite, where the champagne was flowing …’

The Works
tour stage set was modelled on Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
, included Queen’s grandest lighting rig yet, a huge catwalk for Freddie to show off on, and two enormous
Metropolis
-style cogs. Computerised technology being what it was in 1984, the band decided it would be safer for the cogs to be cranked by hand, giving the road crew another job for the night.
The Works
tour would take in Europe, the UK, Australasia and, controversially, South Africa, but not America. ‘That’s when the arrogance took over,’ ventures Peter Hince. ‘An attitude of, “We don’t need to tour the States.” I know that Gerry Stickells tried very hard to get them to reconsider.’

In a marked contrast to the
Hot Space
trek, the set drew on Queen’s heavier repertoire. After an intro of ‘Machines (or Back to Human)’ came ‘Tear It Up’ quickly followed by ‘Tie Your Mother Down’. Snippets of now ancient Queen numbers such as ‘Liar’, ‘Great King Rat’ and ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ would also be played as part of a mid-set medley. In Dublin, Mercury forgot the words to ‘Hammer to Fall’, but on several dates it was his voice rather than his memory that would let him down. Doctors feared a recurrence of nodules on his vocal cords. Mercury was scared that having an
operation to remove them would have an adverse effect on his voice.

On top of this, aspects of Freddie’s lifestyle had now been made public, after the
Sun
printed a story from a former employee. ‘It was Freddie’s old driver, who’d been sacked,’ sighs Peter Hince. ‘It was the strangest thing. Fred could be incredibly tough and ruthless and nasty, but he would just indulge some people, and you’d think, “For fuck’s sake, Fred, why?”’ The story was split across several editions, timed to coincide with Queen’s four-night stand at London’s Wembley Arena and Mercury’s thirty-eighth birthday. It included the revelation that Freddie was spending £1,000 a week on vodka and cocaine. If the singer was concerned about the story, he masked it well. For the encore, Mercury re-appeared in the wig and false breasts he’d worn for ‘I Want to Break Free’. Looking around to see which band member would perhaps least appreciate having his comedy mammaries shoved in their face, he sidled over to John Deacon. The wig-and-boobs routine would become a regular part of the show. Offstage, Freddie carefully deflected questions about claims that he was homosexual. ‘It’s good to be gay if you’re new,’ he told
Melody Maker
. ‘But if I tried that, people would start yawning: “Oh God! Here’s Freddie Mercury, saying he’s gay because it’s trendy to be gay.”’

In Hanover, a fortnight later, the leg injury Mercury had received in a Munich bar came back to haunt him. Halfway through ‘Hammer to Fall’, his damaged leg gave way on the catwalk staircase. ‘I did a wrong move, fell down, under the spotlights, and they thought it was part of the show,’ he said later, ‘but I couldn’t get up.’ Mercury was carried to his piano where he managed two more numbers before the show was cut short. Mercury joked that he was ‘now too old for rock ’n’ roll’.

In September, having watched Brian May and Roger Taylor struggle to make an impact with their solo projects, Mercury made his debut with the single, ‘Love Kills’, a Mercury/Moroder composition, written for the
Metropolis
soundtrack. Intriguingly, it was later revealed that May and Taylor and possibly even Deacon had played on the track, leading to speculation that it had started life as a Queen song. But with the song’s dancefloor vibe and the chorus’
macho but camp backing vocal, the finished article sounded like Mercury unbound, unrestrained, and quite clearly not Queen. ‘Love Kills’ would buck the trend of Queen solo projects and chart at number 10. Queen’s next single, ‘Hammer to Fall’, released simultaneously, managed number 13. Onstage, Mercury had begun informing audiences that Queen were
not
splitting up. A month later, when the band arrived in South Africa, some wished they had.

On 5 October, Queen played the first of a run of shows in Sun City, a luxury hotel and gambling resort near Johannesburg. Sun City was regarded as a ‘whites only Las Vegas’ and a totem of the divisive apartheid regime. As far back as 1957, before the emergence of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Musicians Union had been instructing its members not to perform in South Africa. Queen thought otherwise. ‘We’ve thought about the morals of it a lot and it’s something we’ve decided to do,’ Brian May told a press conference at the start of
The Works
tour. ‘This band is not political, we are not out to make any statements, we play to anybody who comes to listen.’ Part of Queen’s proviso for performing at Sun City would be that they would only play to a mixed audience. A spokesperson for the African National Congress would later insist that ‘the people who overwhelmingly attended those concerts were white.’

Queen were booked for a run of shows at Sun City’s 6,200-seater Superbowl. Such was the ticket demand that a further 1,000 standing-room-only tickets were quickly released. But before long, Mercury’s voice would let him down. During the third show, after struggling through ‘Under Pressure’, his voice failed completely, and the remainder of the gig was cancelled. A doctor was flown in, Mercury was injected with steroids and the next two shows were cancelled after he was ordered to rest. While Mercury hid away in his hotel suite with Winnie Kirchberger, waiting to complete the remaining dates, Brian May was invited to Soweto to present at the Black African Awards Show. Meanwhile a decision was taken to release a Queen live album through EMI South Africa and donate its royalties to a local school for deaf and blind children. Yet such gestures cut little ice with anti-apartheid groups, who protested that the South African government were making political capital out of Queen’s visit, regarding it as some tenuous endorsement of
their regime. Back in Britain, Queen met a barrage of hostile press, while their old nemesis
NME
drew a line between the South African visit and what they described as the ‘vile, fascist imagery’ of the ‘Radio Ga Ga’ video.