Is This The Real Life? (47 page)

Mercury had dedicated ‘Love Me Like There’s No Tomorrow’ to Barbara Valentin, but the end of 1985 would signpost the end of Mercury’s relationship with the former actress and model (‘One minute we were all over the place together, inseparable, and then out of the blue came this break,’ Valentin told writer Lesley-Ann Jones). Mercury would give up the apartment he and Valentin shared in Munich and move back to London and into Garden Lodge, the Kensington retreat he had spent years renovating. While Jim Hutton had often been used to make his Austrian lover Winnie Kirchberger jealous, Mercury had grown closer to the Irish hairdresser. Before long, Jim would be invited to move in with Freddie.

Before her death in February 2002, Valentin suggested that Mercury’s decision to leave Munich marked a major turning point in his life. Publicly, the singer still displayed his usual bravado, but privately, Mercury could no longer ignore what was going on
around him. In 1981, doctors in New York had first noticed several cases of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a virulent form of cancer, in homosexual men. Almost simultaneously, in New York and Los Angeles, doctors observed an unusually high percentage of gay men contracting the lung infection Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia, and failing to respond to conventional treatment. It was the beginning of America’s awareness of what would become known as AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), a disease caused by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that attacked the body’s immune system. One of the ways in which it could be passed between individuals was by unprotected sex. In a climate of suspicion and misinformation, tabloid headlines would dub AIDS ‘the gay plague’.

On 3 October 1985, the gay American actor Rock Hudson became the first celebrity to die from AIDS. By the end of 1985, 20,303 cases had been reported to the World Health Organisation. A year earlier Mercury’s friend, the American DJ and broadcaster Paul Gambaccini, had run into the singer at London’s Heaven nightclub. Gambaccini had already witnessed the impact of AIDS on New York’s club scene. When he asked Mercury if he planned to curb his sexual behaviour, Freddie replied: ‘Darling, my attitude is I’m doing everything with everyone.’ As Gambaccini recalled in a later interview, ‘I realised for the first time that Freddie Mercury was going to die.’

Before Mercury left Munich, Barbara Valentin claimed to have noticed a decline in the singer’s state of health, including a recurrent and unexplained throat problem. One of the symptoms of an immune deficiency prevalent in AIDS sufferers are extreme cases of candidiasis or oral thrush, bringing to mind DJ Simon Bates’s description of the singer’s tongue as ‘a duffel coat’. Some have speculated that Mercury first took an HIV test in late 1985. Even if he hadn’t, others around him had. Peter Hince remembers a scene backstage, when one of Mercury’s entourage came into the dressing room, delighted with the negative results of his HIV test. ‘The reaction from Freddie and Paul Prenter was very muted,’ says Hince, ‘which surprised me at the time.’

Still buzzing with the success of Live Aid and ‘One Vision’, EMI
ended 1985 with
Queen: The Complete Works
, an embossed box set which, for £70, included every Queen LP to date, a bonus disc of previously unreleased tracks, and a map of the world, marked with places in which Queen had played or territories conquered.

Queen picked up the album sessions in January 1986, and would spend the next three months between Musicland and Mountain, with extra work at London’s Sarm West, Townhouse and Maison Rouge studios. The band members had split themselves between two producers: Mack would work with Mercury and Deacon at Musicland; David Richards would do the same for Taylor and May at Mountain. For Mack, though, this was the opposite of the ‘Four Musketeers’ approach that had made his first Queen project,
The
Game
, such a success. ‘Everybody was doing their own thing now, in their own studios,’ he sighs.

By now, the original concept behind the album had also changed. ‘We did all the music for the film first,’ explained Deacon. ‘Then, when we came to do the album, we rearranged a lot of the tracks, made them longer, wrote more lyrics and tried to arrange them into fully-fledged songs.’ ‘There was an extraordinary collaboration between Michael Kamen and the band,’ recalled Mulcahy. ‘It wasn’t just like we finished the film and asked for a song. Queen were very much involved in edit and during the months of post-production.’

The finished Queen album,
A Kind of Magic
, would include nine songs, with alternative versions of six, including the title track, used in the
Highlander
movie. Outtakes from the album would include Roger Taylor’s much-regarded ‘Heaven for Everyone’, a song he would record later with his own side-project The Cross. Michael Kamen and Steve Gregory weren’t the only outsiders involved with the record. The new Queen album would also find a home for touring keyboard player Spike Edney, singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading and string arranger Lynton Naiff.

As well as ‘One Year of Love’, John Deacon had paired up with Mercury and written another soul track, ‘Pain is So Close to Pleasure’; a song that Brian May tactfully described as ‘very unusual for us’. The guitarist would feel more affinity with Deacon and Mercury’s flag-waving ‘Friends Will Be Friends’. Meanwhile, at
Mountain, David Richards helped May and Taylor with their material. As well as the heroic ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’, May came up with ‘Gimme the Prize (Kurgan’s Theme)’, a song named after
Highlander
’s anti-hero, filled with schlock-horror sound effects and an over-the-top guitar solo. Back at Musicland, Mercury would revisit Queen’s past life himself with ‘Princes of the Universe’, a chest-beating rocker of the kind he hadn’t written in years.

Representing the Drum Department at Mountain, Roger Taylor would get two of his songs onto the finished album. ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’ (with a backing vocal from Joan Armatrading) was by-numbers synth-rock with a lyric preaching against the perils of driving under the influence, possibly inspired by the Bass Department’s encounter with a breathalyser. Far better was Taylor’s ‘A Kind of Magic’. The song’s title had been plucked from a line in the
Highlander
script. A different version of the same track would be used over the film’s closing credits, but the album version would end up as one of Queen’s purest pop songs. While ‘A Kind of Magic’ would be solely credited to Taylor, Mercury had a significant part to play. ‘Freddie got a bee in his bonnet and said [to Roger], “You go away and I’ll make a hit,”’ said Brian May in 2010. ‘I knew he was going away to LA for a week,’ recalled Mercury. ‘And I got hold of it and changed it around completely.’ As with ‘Radio Ga Ga’, the singer took the drummer’s song, believing that it had greater commercial potential than anyone realised. ‘We were knowingly making a pop record, a commercial record,’ said Taylor.

Released as a single in March 1986, ‘A Kind of Magic’ raced to number 3 in the UK, helped by Russell Mulcahy’s video (a ‘thank you’ gesture from the director for Queen’s involvement in
Highlander
). Here, a wizardly Freddie Mercury transformed his down-at-heel bandmates into swish rock stars. The song’s optimistic lyric sounded immediately familiar to Queen’s support band Airrace from the year before. ‘Our album had been called
Shaft of
Light
,’ says guitarist Laurie Mansworth. ‘On
The Works
tour, Freddie commented that he liked the name of it. He said that the title would make a great line to use in a song.’ Sure enough, in the first verse of ‘A Kind of Magic’, Mercury could be heard singing about how one shaft of light showed the way. Meanwhile with
Highlander 
due to open in America before the UK, Queen opted for ‘Princes of the Universe’ as their US comeback single, enlisting
Highlander
star Christopher Lambert to appear in the accompanying video. But America looked the other way and the single failed to even break the Top 50.

Further evidence of Capitol’s confused relationship with Queen came when Mercury met up with the band’s old friend Billy Squier to work on tracks for Squier’s next album,
Enough is Enough
. ‘Freddie and I collaborated on two songs,’ says Squier now. ‘We were both on Capitol at the time, and there seemed to be a lot of excitement at the label when they heard we were working together. The head of A&R even flew over to London to express his enthusiasm for our little project.’

Squier and Mercury spent a productive night in Kensington working on the songs ‘Lady with a Tenor Sax’ and ‘Love is the Hero’. ‘As dawn broke, Freddie sat down at the piano and threw off a new intro for “Love is the Hero” that totally blew me away,’ says Squier. ‘Yet, when I delivered the record, the label execs decided they did not want to include it.’ The intro comprised a high-camp, high-drama Mercury vocal. ‘They mumbled something at the time about it being “confusing for my audience”.’

Squier, himself, had already run into trouble with the video he’d made for his 1984 single ‘Rock Me Tonite’. Squier performed a solo dance routine, based on a young Tom Cruise’s tongue-in-cheek performance in the movie
Risky Business
. Unfortunately, Billy’s cavorting hadn’t gone down well with his audience. ‘It was anathema to those who saw me as a no-frills rock star and guitar slinger,’ he admits. ‘I’ve always thought Capitol were concerned about Freddie’s image problems, and the fan reaction to “Rock Me Tonite”, and feared he might drag me down once and for all. But from my perspective, having one of the biggest stars in the world lending his extraordinary talents to my record seemed like a pretty good idea.’

With a new single in the chart, and the album almost complete, Queen did their customary disappearing act in four different directions. Mercury completed his recordings for Dave Clark’s
Time
and showed up for the premiere of the musical at London’s
Dominion Theatre, camping it up in the interval by attempting to sell ice creams in the audience. Before long, he was casually tossing tubs of ice cream towards his customers without asking for payment. As one of Mercury’s entourage explained: ‘Freddie wouldn’t have been able to give anyone their change. I don’t think he knew what a pound coin looked like.’

Clark had already asked Mercury to appear in
Time
. While claiming to be impressed by David Bowie’s recent theatrical performance as the Elephant Man in New York, Mercury was aware of his limitations. ‘He declined,’ explained Clark. ‘He said, “For one thing, my darling, I don’t get up until 3 p.m., so I can’t do matinées. For another, when I do a show, I sing my butt off for three hours and then I drop dead. So it would be impossible to do eight shows a week.”’

In the meantime, Taylor joined David Richards to produce the Queen-influenced rock band Magnum, while John Deacon became one third of a trio called The Immortals, cutting a chirpy pop single ‘No Turning Back’ for the soundtrack to the First World War flying ace movie
Biggles
. Neither the single nor the film made any impact. Meanwhile, in London, Brian May would have a fortuitous meeting with the woman who would become his second wife, actress Anita Dobson, at the premiere of the Hollywood comedy
Down and
Out in Beverley Hills
. At the time Dobson was playing fiery pub landlady Angie Watts in the BBC’s hit soap opera
EastEnders
. At the premiere, May and his wife Chrissy squeezed past Anita to reach their seats. Chrissy had coaxed Brian into watching
EastEnders
, and he had become hooked. ‘I said [to Anita], “Excuse me, I think you’re wonderful,”’ May later told
Smash Hits
magazine. “I asked if she’d like to come to our concert at Wembley Stadium … and she said, “Er, thank you very much.”’

Queen had lined up two Wembley Stadium concerts in June, with other outdoor shows arranged for Dublin’s Slane Castle, Newcastle’s St James’ Park and Manchester’s Maine Road. Tickets sold out almost immediately, prompting promoter Harvey Goldsmith to confirm another date in August at Stevenage’s Knebworth Park, the scene of Led Zeppelin’s final UK concert seven years earlier. The
Magic
tour would also include a run of
shows across Scandinavia and Europe, before culminating in Ireland, the UK and Spain.

On 11 May, the band made another appearance at the Montreux Golden Rose Pop Festival, where they mimed to tracks from the new album. Mercury woke up to a copy of the
Daily Mirror
and a photograph of himself performing at the show under the headline ‘F
LABULOUS
F
REDDIE
’. ‘Freddie always took great pride in his trim waist,’ recalls EMI’s Brian Southall. ‘But there was this one picture of him leaning to the side and showing a tiny bit of flab. Of course, the good
Daily Mirror
sub had come up with this headline. Ray Coleman had written the piece, which talked about Queen’s excellence and majesty and largesse. But because Ray was the person Queen knew at the
Mirror
, Ray was the one they attacked. Ray got very distressed, and got on to the
Mirror
to explain and made them apologise, so he could be let back into the Queen camp.’

In May, Queen had bedded down at a rehearsal studio in Wembley to prepare for the tour. Though now pushing forty, Mercury could still get away with the cutaway vest and jeans he’d worn at Live Aid. Nevertheless, his friend, the costume designer Diana Moseley was hired to dress the whole band for the tour (‘You had to be gentle with Queen,’ she recalled. ‘You couldn’t just rush in and push things. Brian needed a little coaxing.’) Among Moseley’s creations would be a huge ermine gown and crown, which Mercury intended to wear during the band’s final curtain call.

‘One Vision’, ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’, ‘Friends Will Be Friends’ and the title track would introduce the setlist. In came a snippet of the nowarchaic ‘In the Lap of the Gods … Revisited’ and an acoustic rock ’n’ roll medley that included ‘Tutti Frutti’, Ricky Nelson’s ‘Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart)’ – a song Mercury had first played in India with The Hectics – and Lieber and Stoller’s ‘(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care’.

Mindful of what it took to hold a stadium audience’s attention, the
Magic
set was an extravagant construction that included a 64-feet stage flanked by a pair of 40-feet runways. ‘We are going to play on the biggest stage ever built at Wembley,’ enthused Roger Taylor, whose girlfriend Dominique gave birth to their daughter Rory just
days before the tour began. The drummer’s parting shot was that Queen’s new spectacular would make ‘
Ben Hur
look like
The
Muppets
’. Gerry Stickells and Queen’s road crew would now be tasked with managing three separate stages; a process nicknamed ‘leapfrogging’. While one stage was being used, the second was being built, and the third was being transported to the next show.