Is This The Real Life? (56 page)

Meanwhile, there were reminders everywhere. In May that year, the US teen-comedy film
Wayne’s World
gave Queen’s profile its biggest boost yet in the US. The movie, a spin-off from a regular sketch on NBC’s comedy show
Saturday Night Live
, charted the misadventures of a pair of suburban teenage rock fans, Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar. In one momentous scene, the duo and two of their friends drove through their neighbourhood with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ playing on the car’s cassette deck. The foursome’s karaoke vocals and headbanging routine became a huge hit.

Wayne Campbell had been played by the comedian and writer Mike Myers who had lived in London in the 1980s. He knew Queen’s music, and had contacted Brian May about using ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. ‘Mike Myers phoned me up and sent me a copy and said, “You make sure Freddie hears it,”’ said May in 2010. ‘Freddie was already not well by that time but I took it round to him and he loved it.’ The singer had also hoped that the song’s performance in the movie might give Queen the break they needed in the US. As he told May at the same time: ‘I suppose I have to fucking die before we ever get big in America again.’

In the end, it was
Wayne’s World
, more than Freddie’s death, which
revived Queen’s American fortunes. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was re-released in the US and went to number 2 (the proceeds donated to the Magic Johnson AIDS Trust, named after the HIV-positive basketball player). Another compilation,
Classic Queen
, followed the single to number 4. Meanwhile, in England, Montserrat Caballé, backed by the European Chamber Opera, gave a charity performance of Mercury’s favourite opera,
Il Trovatore
, at London’s Whitehall. Mercury and Caballé’s ‘Barcelona’ single was re-released to celebrate the city’s hosting of the 1992 Olympics, giving the duo a Top 5 hit.

In September, Brian May released
Back to the Light
. ‘I wanted to make this record on my own, with nobody else to argue with, just to see what happened,’ he explained. May’s last solo release,
Star
Fleet Project
, had been an exercise in guitar virtuosity; the songs on this one were more contemplative. One track, ‘Nothing But Blue’, was about Mercury, and had been completed the night before his death; another, ‘I’m Scared’, found May reeling off a list of extraordinary fears and insecurities. The album went Top 20 in Britain, while the first single, an earnest ballad titled ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’, which May had premiered at the tribute concert, became a Top 5 hit. With a South American tour, supporting Joe Cocker, in the offing, May now faced the challenge of fronting his own live band.

May’s touring party included Spike Edney, bassist Neil Murray, guitarist Mike Caswell (later replaced by Jamie Moses) and showman drummer Cozy Powell, with May as lead guitarist and lead vocalist. ‘I’ll never be Freddie – he was the ultimate stadium rock singer,’ he explained. ‘A few years ago, I don’t think I would have even tried to front a band. It would have been too intimidating. My role now is to be me.’ May fought through his nerves and proved an able frontman. The tour’s penultimate gig found them opening at Buenos Aires’ Vélez Sársfield, where Queen had headlined their historic Argentinean show in 1981.

In death, though, as in life, it seemed as if Freddie Mercury would have the last word. With May on tour, EMI released
The Freddie
Mercury Album
, a compilation of remixed solo tracks. The album and a remix of ‘Living On My Own’ would put the late singer back into
the UK Top 5 singles and albums charts. Another live album,
Queen
at Wembley Stadium
, went to number 2. With a VHS release for the Freddie Mercury Tribute concert also out in time for Christmas, and a brief Smile reunion at London’s Marquee club, 1992 became one of Queen’s busiest years yet.

May’s need to keep working found him back on the road the following February. The Brian May Band had been booked for a US tour, but some theatre shows were badly attended. Drafted as a support act to Guns N’ Roses, May found himself playing bigger venues, but at the mercy of the headliners’ volatile lead singer. After a contretemps with their sound engineer in Birmingham, Alabama, Axl Rose flounced off and refused to finish the gig. The next few dates were immediately cancelled.

When the tour resumed, The Brian May Band would often arrive onstage to rows of empty seats, as fans, slurping on soft drinks and chewing hot dogs, drifted in and out. In March, they played the Boston Winter Gardens; a venue in a city that Queen had once owned. ‘For the first time in twenty years, I’m going out in front of people who really need to be shown what I do,’ said May. ‘It’s a question of being very patient, which is very, very different from what I’m used to.’ Brian was insistent that he didn’t want the gigs to be a ‘re-hash of a Queen show’. But he faced the same problem encountered by the likes of Robert Plant and Mick Jagger before him: how to escape the shadow of his former band. As the
Boston
Globe
reported: ‘Although some of the new material has a nice kick to it, it was the Queen classics, “Hammer to Fall” and “Now I’m Here”, that fared best.’

In May, the band returned to headline throughout Europe and the UK, including two nights at London’s Brixton Academy, which would be recorded for a live album. Barely pausing for breath, May led them back to North America in October for another headline tour. Between shows, he graciously fielded questions from the press about Freddie Mercury, while revealing more about his personal life than he’d ever done before: how the end of Queen as a touring band, the death of his father and the break-up of his first marriage had left him ‘very unhinged’. If playing live was, as he put it, ‘a great therapy’, there were still drawbacks. The Brian May Band were not
Queen, and The Danforth Music Hall in downtown Toronto was not the same as the city’s Maple Leaf Gardens, where Queen had once headlined two nights. Smaller audiences, smaller venues, even smaller dressing rooms … It was a sobering experience.

More than a year after his death, the posthumous Freddie Mercury/Queen industry rolled on.
The Five Live
EP, featuring George Michael and Queen’s version of ‘Somebody to Love’, raced to number 1; Mercury’s childhood stamp collection, once pored over by his first English friends at Isleworth Polytechnic, was sold at Sotheby’s auction house for £8,000, while India heralded Freddie as ‘The First Asian Pop Star’; a role he had, frankly, never acknowledged in his lifetime.

There was still one other unresolved issue. There was enough material in the vaults for Mercury’s bandmates to consider releasing another Queen album. A prescient Roger Taylor referred to the dormant Queen album as ‘the difficult child’. Interviewed on Virgin Radio in June 1993, Brian May told the DJ Richard Skinner that ‘there is a bit of material, but probably not enough for a whole album’, admitting that the whole issue of another Queen record was ‘something we don’t find it easy to agree about at the moment’. Not for the first time, May would insist that ‘there cannot be a Queen without Freddie’.

However, in September, with May away on tour, Taylor and John Deacon had played together at a charity gig at West Sussex’s Cowdray Park. In the New Year, the pair booked a studio and began sifting through Queen’s leftover songs. At some point they began adding drums and bass to the material. At which point, Brian May stepped in. ‘The remaining new material is very precious stuff,’ he said in spring 1994. ‘The most important consideration is that this final collection must be worthy of the name Queen, so I’ve been delving very deep.’ Later, May would admit: ‘I took the tapes off them [Deacon and Taylor], felt that they’d done it wrong, and spent months putting it all back together.’ It was a process that would carry on until the early part of the following year. But May had relented: there
would
be another Queen album.

In May 1994, BBC radio listeners voted ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ number 1 in their All-Time Top 100 Songs. In the same month,
Roger Taylor released a new solo single. The track, ‘Nazis 1994’, was unlikely to make even the staunchest fans’ All-Time Top 100 Songs. ‘I thought at my stage in life I might as well write about something I believed, that meant something,’ he explained, adding, ‘You can’t write pop songs all your life.’

‘Nazis 1994’ was an attack on Holocaust deniers and the recent rise of far right politics. However good its intentions, it was hamstrung by some extremely poor lyrics, and open to misinterpretation. Asked what he thought of the song, Brian May was guarded. ‘You have to be clear what signals you put out,’ he said. ‘If you say a word like “Nazis”, people’s ideas are triggered. You can’t make subtle statements like that in our market. It’s a pity because Roger’s message was the opposite from how it was perceived.’

In September, Taylor followed the single with another solo album,
Happiness?
, recorded in his newly built home studio, Cosford Mill. Taylor’s concerns ranged from fascism, to the starving poor, to personal alienation. Like Brian May’s ‘Nothing But Blue’, one song, ‘Old Friends’, was inspired by Mercury, while ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’ was a tirade against the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose newspaper the
Sun
had been among Mercury’s most ardent pursuers. Sales were encouraging, and
Happiness?
shifted more copies than any of The Cross albums, persuading Taylor to go out on what would be his first solo tour, playing Europe, the UK and Queen’s old stronghold Japan. Songs from the new record would be mixed with ‘A Kind of Magic’, ‘Radio Ga Ga’, ‘I Want to Break Free’, ‘We Will Rock You’ … And it was that back catalogue which always drew the biggest applause of the night.

In the summer of 1995, after months of speculation, Queen announced their plans to release another album. ‘It has not been easy,’ confessed John Deacon. ‘As Roger, Brian and myself see things differently, and coming to an agreement between us takes time.’ Queen immediately invited members of their fan club to suggest titles for the album. Roger Taylor’s friends from Cornwall, Pat and Sue Johnstone, had started Queen’s fan club in 1973. Since 1982, the club had been run by Jacky Smith (née Gunn), who had co-authored with Queen expert Jim Jenkins, the group’s semi-official biography,
Queen: As It Began
.

In the end, the album would be titled
Made in Heaven
, after one of its songs. But the title also seemed like a mawkish acknowledgement of the circumstances in which it had been made.
Made in
Heaven
would run to thirteen complete songs, with one track, ‘Yeah’, lasting just four seconds. ‘It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle,’ May told
Q
magazine. ‘But I wouldn’t have put my seal of approval on it if I hadn’t thought it was up to standard.’ The jigsaw had been assembled from more than a decade’s worth of material by a crack production team of Queen, David Richards, Justin-Shirley Smith and Joshua J. Macrae. The oldest song, ‘It’s a Beautiful Day’, was a relic from 1980’s
The Game
; the newest, ‘Mother Love’, had been from Mercury’s final recording session, and was an incredibly assured vocal performance from what had been a dying man. The song’s closing seconds were said to include sped-up snippets of every Queen song ever recorded

Ultimately, it was Mercury who saved the day. Even the weakest material was salvaged by that voice. The Mercury-sung versions of Roger Taylor’s ‘Heaven for Everyone’ and May’s recent hit single, ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’ knocked both originals into a cocked hat. The rest of the album was a tribute to his bandmates’ and producers’ diligence. Somehow, they had laboriously stitched it all together to make a coherent record. ‘It was a huge job,’ admitted Brian May. ‘Two years of my life finding a way of developing the songs, but at the same time using the limited input we had from Freddie. Sometimes there was just a complete first-take vocal, while other times there were no more than three or four lines.’ May also admitted: ‘It took a couple of weeks to get over the sound of Freddie. The worst thing were the little spoken ad-libs between the takes.’ The album included a final, hidden track: an instrumental, near-ambient piece of music that lasted for over twenty-two minutes on the CD version, and ended with Mercury’s voice uttering the single word ‘Fab’. The front cover artwork showed a silhouette of sculptor Irena Sedlecka’s statue of the singer, which was officially unveiled at Lake Geneva the following year. In the absence of conventional promo videos, Queen had also commissioned directors from the British Film Institute to produce short films to accompany each track.

Released on 6 November 1995,
Made in Heaven
emerged just weeks before The Beatles’ posthumous single, ‘Free as a Bird’; a John Lennon demo that had been completed by his bandmates and producer Jeff Lynne. Queen would enjoy less of the goodwill extended to The Beatles in what
The Times
called ‘the battle of the bands with dead singers’. Of the music papers,
NME
was the most visceral in its criticism: ‘
Made in Heaven
is vulgar, creepy, sickly and in dubious taste.’ It was the circumstances of its creation, the sleight of hand and what
NME
called ‘the multi-tracking like mad’ that made some reviewers uncomfortable. ‘The immediate question must be: what manner of tasteless, barrel-scraping are the surviving members of Queen involved in now?’ asked
Q
magazine, before praising
Made in Heaven
as ‘a better album than
Innuendo
.’

There was, however, something almost relentless about Queen’s latest campaign. Barely a week after the posthumous collection came another box set,
Ultimate Queen
, presented in a wall-mounted case for those fans with especially deep pockets and questionable judgement in home furnishings. On top of this came the Queen video documentary
Champions of the World
, a Channel 4 documentary about Queen, and a BBC Radio 1 special. Showing great foresight, though largely unreported at the time, Queen also launched their own website in November.

Whatever doubt critics and fans may have had about
Made in
Heaven
, the evidence suggested that, to quote Spinal Tap at the Mercury tribute concert, ‘Freddie would have wanted it.’ Interviewed in German
Rolling Stone
, co-producer David Richards insisted, ‘If he [Freddie] wouldn’t have wanted this album so badly, he wouldn’t have recorded so many songs. The fact that Freddie wanted this album finished gave us strength.’ Brian May followed the same partyline. But with some reservations. ‘The last album is one of the most ridiculously painful experiences creatively I have ever had,’ he told Radio 1. ‘But I’m sure the quality’s good, partly because we did have those arguments. Whether it’s healthy for life or not is another matter.’