Is This The Real Life? (52 page)

‘At one point he invited us all over for a meeting,’ said Roger Taylor in 2000, ‘and told us the absolute facts, which we were all starting to realise anyway.’ ‘As soon as we realised Freddie was ill, we clustered around him like a protective shell,’ recalled Brian May. ‘But we were lying to everyone, even our own families. Freddie didn’t want the world intruding on his struggle. He used to say, “I don’t want people buying our records out of fucking sympathy.”’ Mercury demanded the same of Queen as he did of Jim Hutton and the inner circle at Garden Lodge: business as usual. ‘He had to be treated normally,’ said Mary Austin. ‘If he found you were flagging or becoming too emotional, you would be pushed back in line.’

May had been planning another solo album; Mercury had songs left over from
Barcelona
, and there was still material unused from
The Miracle
. According to Hutton, ‘Queen were dazed by Freddie’s eagerness to return to the studio’, but they agreed, and, for the first few months of 1989, the band worked in two-to-three-week bursts; a schedule partly dictated by their singer’s health. When they weren’t with Queen, May and Taylor seemed unwilling to rest, guesting on charity covers of Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’ and Queen’s own ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’, with Taylor soon moonlighting at Mountain Studios on a second album with The Cross.

No sooner had Queen’s anti-tabloid single ‘Scandal’ dropped out of the chart, than Mercury was back in the news headlines. In November, the
Sunday Mirror
claimed wrongly that Freddie had offered to be a ‘father’ to Mary Austin’s forthcoming child. At the
time, Mary was several months pregnant but refusing to name the child’s biological father. In the same month, Queen made a public appearance together on a TV special,
Goodbye to the Eighties
, which was scheduled to be broadcast on New Year’s Eve. Queen picked up an award from Cilla Black and a youthful Jonathan Ross for Best Band of the Decade. Fans and critics scrutinised Mercury’s appearance and every gesture. While he stood back on the podium and let Brian May give an acceptance speech, he did not yet look like a dying man.

At the end of the month, Queen went back to Montreux. Mercury had given up smoking on doctor’s orders, and insisted on banning cigarettes from the studio entirely; a popular decision with Brian May, a devout anti-smoker, particularly since the death of his father. In the early 1980s, Mercury had found the chaos and hedonism of Munich preferable to the calm of Montreux; now, however, the slower pace of Swiss life suited him. In his final year, the singer would buy a penthouse flat in Teritet, overlooking Lake Geneva.

Song ideas were pooled, and out of these came Brian May’s frustrated love song ‘I Can’t Live With You’ and ‘Headlong’, an ebullient hard rocker in the style of ‘Breakthru’. ‘At first I thought about it as a song for my solo album,’ he admitted. ‘But as soon as I heard Freddie sing it, I said, “That’s it.” Sometimes it’s painful to give the baby away.’

Mercury’s contributions were typically diverse: ‘Delilah’ was a tongue-in-cheek tribute to one of his cats, while the gospel-flavoured ‘All God’s People’ had started life as a piece for the
Barcelona
album. John Brough helped engineer an early take for the song at Townhouse Studios, and saw that, regardless of his failing health, Freddie remained a hard taskmaster.

‘It was still a solo track at the time, but Freddie had asked Brian to play a solo on it,’ explains Brough. ‘Brian did a good solo, but decided he could do better and played it again. Freddie said, “No, I don’t like it”, and so it went on, and I could see Brian getting more and more tense. After another solo, Freddie said, “Oh, that’s rubbish.” David Richards, Mike Moran and I were all looking at each other. At the time, it seemed horrific. After another solo, Freddie
made some comment like, “Oh, come on! You and that fireplace guitar … play it like you mean it!” So Brian let rip with this great solo, and, of course, Freddie had this big grin on his face. He knew what Brian could do, and he was just pushing him.’

A jam between May, Taylor and Deacon in the Montreux casino concert hall became the starting point for what would become the album’s title track, ‘Innuendo’. Stopping just short of six-and-a-half minutes, ‘Innuendo’ was a Queen marathon in the tradition of ‘Liar’ or ‘The Prophet’s Song’. Mercury sang about crumbling mountains and crashing waves to an opening motif that suggested Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’ colliding with Ravel’s
Bolero
. Steve Howe, guitarist with Yes, visited the studio, and ended up playing acoustic guitar on the song. ‘It’s a very strange track,’ said May later. ‘Like a fantasy adventure-land.’ The origins of the song’s title were rather less mystical. ‘It’s a word I like to use in Scrabble,’ Mercury later revealed. Although the old-school Queen of
Innuendo
was still a year away, EMI’s December release of
Queen at the Beeb
, a compilation of their BBC sessions from 1973 onwards, seemed strangely prescient.

Queen Productions declared 1990 to be the band’s twentieth anniversary, despite the fact that they had celebrated the tenth only in 1981, and on 18 February, the group were finally given the BPI Award that EMI had long been petitioning for. Queen were rewarded during a ceremony at London’s Dominion Theatre. But since their appearance on
Goodbye to the Eighties
, Mercury had gone downhill. Freddie led the band onstage to the sound of ‘Killer Queen’. He looked swamped by his baggy suit, his hair thinner and his clean-shaven face haggard beneath a layer of make-up. After May’s acceptance speech, and a quick word from Taylor, Mercury leaned hesitantly towards the microphone, quietly said, ‘Thank you, goodnight’, and disappeared into the wings.

At the anniversary party afterwards, more than three hundred guests crowded the Groucho Club in Soho. Inside, Mercury was photographed with Liza Minnelli, the star of what Queen’s first producer John Anthony remembered as Freddie’s favourite movie,
Cabaret
. Outside, scenting blood, a press photographer snapped the singer leaving the club looking, frankly, terrible. Joe Fanelli’s complaint to the newspaper that Mercury was just ‘a little pissed,
like everyone else’ fell on deaf ears. The speculation about Mercury’s health continued.

May found a brief respite from it all, joining his old 1984 bandmates (minus Tim Staffell) at bassist Dave Dilloway’s house. ‘Brian hadn’t changed,’ says Dave. ‘He was sat there, playing away, while the conversation went on around him. At the time, he must have known Freddie had AIDS.’

Before long, Fanelli would break the news that he had AIDS. Freddie had met Joe almost fifteen years before and they had been lovers, but since the end of their relationship Fanelli had been Mercury’s chef. Knowing that Joe would have to leave Garden Lodge after his own death, Mercury brought him a house in Chiswick. It was the first of several magnanimous gestures in what would turn out to be his final year. Jim Hutton would also take the test in secret, only to discover that he, too, was HIV positive. ‘I was dazed,’ he said later. ‘But I didn’t tell Freddie. He had enough to worry about.’ Before long, and to help Hutton and Peter Freestone administer his medication, Mercury would be fitted with a Hickman line on his chest.

Mercury’s bandmates could only wait until their singer was ready to start work again. May began writing the music to the London Riverside Theatre’s production of
Macbeth
, and Taylor went back to singing in his own band. In March, The Cross put out their second album,
Mad Bad and Dangerous to Know
. Taylor had found a deal with EMI, and had thrown the songwriting open to his bandmates. The album had a harder sound, with ‘Top of the World’ like a reworking of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’. It was a marked improvement on
Shove It
, but the group faced the same problems. ‘I’ve never been able to convince people that it’s a group,’ Taylor protested. ‘Everybody writes, everybody shares the money equally, really it’s not the Roger Taylor solo experience.’ The album failed to chart, and every interview with The Cross invariably included questions about Queen, Freddie …

Come July, Queen had decamped to London’s Metropolis Studios, a facility owned by their former engineer Gary Langan. Gary had been there when Queen heard the first playback of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. In 1985, he had stood at the side of the stage
at Live Aid (‘When I’m finally popping my clogs, that will be one of the moments I take to my grave’). Langan had heard the rumours, and was shocked by the change in Mercury’s appearance. ‘The whole thing had taken its toll,’ he says. ‘We bumped into each other at Metropolis and had a few words, but he was trying to be as private as possible. It wasn’t a great thing to see.’

In August, Freddie finally confirmed his sister Kashmira’s worst suspicions. “I did suspect he had AIDS,’ she later told the
Daily Mirror
. ‘But I didn’t want to ask a dying man that question so I waited to see if he wanted to tell me.’ It was when Kashmira glimpsed the wound on her brother’s foot that she realised. ‘He chose that moment to say, “Look, my dear, you must know that I am dying.”’ Just as with his closest friends and his bandmates, Mercury insisted that his sister never mentioned it again. His parents, meanwhile, were never told outright. ‘He used to love and respect us so much that he didn’t want to hurt us,’ explained Jer Bulsara in 2000. ‘We knew all along and we didn’t want to displease him.’

By now, the singer routinely ran a gauntlet of press photographers just to get from Garden Lodge to Metropolis. Living through the celebrity culture of the twenty-first century, it’s easy to forget how unusual it still was then for the press to pursue a pop star to such a degree. Queen’s raised profile after Live Aid and the hysteria and misinformation surrounding AIDS proved to be a dangerous combination. However much Mercury insisted on secrecy, it was now impossible for him to conceal the obvious change in his appearance. When a
Sunday Mirror
photographer captured him looking frail, Brian May informed the press that ‘Freddie’s OK … He definitely hasn’t got AIDS, but I think his wild rock ’n’ roll lifestyle has caught up with him …’ But May’s statement failed to throw anyone off the scent. Just days later, the
News of the World
pictured an emaciated Mercury leaving a London restaurant with his GP, Gordon Atkinson. Before long, Paul Prenter, long banished from the Queen camp, was quoted speculating about his former employer’s health in the American press: ‘I am desperately afraid that it might be AIDS.’

One afternoon, engineer John Brough found himself summoned to Garden Lodge. ‘Every year, the band would record a message for
the fan club,’ he says. ‘Freddie wanted me to record his message. Peter Freestone asked me to come to the house for noon. When I arrived, he apologised and said that Freddie had a meeting that had over-run.’ It was one-thirty before Mercury finally arrived, and it was obvious that all was not well. ‘He looked very tired and very ill,’ says Brough. ‘But in himself he was just the same, with the same very dry sense of humour. We went to one of the spare bedrooms. He had the stage mic, the wand, and we recorded a vocal. It was a hot day so the window was open, and every time he went to sing workmen outside started drilling. Freddie was like, “Oh fuck!” Very funny. We did this thing with a synth and a vocal, and then he said he had to have a rest and he’d leave me to do the mix. Afterwards, Peter told me to invoice them, and I said, “Look, forget about it.” I was asked to go back a few days later, and when I did, Peter handed me a bag. Inside there was this cardigan from Harrods. It was a thank you from Fred. That was the last time I ever saw him.’

Their singer’s health was still an issue as Queen prepared to promote
Innuendo
. In January 1991, they released the epic title track as a single. ‘It’s a risk because a lot of people say, “It’s too long, it’s too involved, and we don’t want to play it on the radio,”’ said Brian May. ‘But we had the same feelings about “Bohemian Rhapsody”.’ ‘Innuendo’ was a far cry from pop hits such as ‘A Kind of Magic’. The introduction sounded like a heavy metal funeral march, the flamenco guitar mid-section like something dropped in from another record. It may have been a challenge to radio programmers, but for Queen fans of a vintage stripe, ‘Innuendo’ had gratifying echoes of
A Night at the Opera
.

Against expectation, ‘Innuendo’ gave Queen their first UK number 1 since ‘Under Pressure’. The accompanying video used animation and old footage and had the group members re-drawn in the style of artists such as Picasso, Da Vinci and Pollock. In a coincidence reminiscent of Tim Staffell being hired to work on the cover of his ex-bandmate Roger Taylor’s first solo album, one of the animators commissioned for ‘Innuendo’ was Jerry Hibbert, a classmate of Staffell’s and Fred Bulsara’s at Ealing art college. When Hibbert asked if the video was being animated because his old mate was too sick to appear, he was informed that Freddie was
not
ill.
Nobody in the Queen camp was budging from the party line.

Innuendo
, the album, followed in February. Like the single, the artwork also felt like a throwback to Queen’s past. Roger Taylor had unearthed a book of illustrations by the nineteenth-century artist Jean Grandville, and suggested using one of the pieces. Grandville’s
A Juggler of Universes
would be hand-coloured by Richard Gray and adapted for the
Innuendo
sleeve. While the title track mollified Queen’s heavy metal audience, the rest of the album was as diverse as ever. The difference was that
Innuendo
seemed to hang together better than any Queen album since
News
of the World
. Brian May, in particular, was a dominant force. ‘By
Innuendo
, the others were having emotional problems, and I was a bit more together,’ he explained. ‘I was able to pitch into the writing a lot more.’ As well as his own ‘Headlong’ and ‘I Can’t Live With You’, May was a notable presence on the feisty heavy metal track ‘The Hitman’, ‘All God’s People’ and ‘Bijou’, a showcase for his guitar and Mercury’s voice inspired by Jeff Beck.

While every song was credited collectively to Queen, it was often easy to spot the original composers. Mercury’s ‘Delilah’ was pure filler, but so too was Taylor’s ‘Ride the Wild Wind’, which sounded like a companion to
A Kind of Magic
’s ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’. Mercury, meanwhile, was responsible for
Innuendo
’s best forgotten song, a solemn ballad titled ‘Don’t Try So Hard’. Missing from
Innuendo
was any of the funk influence that John Deacon had previously bought to Queen. The bassist had recently purchased a holiday apartment in the French ski resort of Biarritz, and the appeal of the slopes outweighed that of Metropolis studio, resulting in Deacon being absent from some sessions.