Is This The Real Life? (59 page)

Stepping away from the machine would take time. The Q+PR European tour was followed by eight UK arena dates. In July, a show at London’s Hyde Park, where the group were to be joined by flamboyant UK rockers and Queen fans The Darkness, was postponed by a week after fears of a terrorist attack. Brian May revealed that John Deacon had been due to attend the gig, though only as an observer. ‘John gave us his eternal blessing,’ said Taylor. ‘But you could say John kept his mystery … Though I don’t know where he’s keeping it right now.’ Taylor’s waggish aside could have referred to Deacon’s recent run-in with the press. In January, the
Mail on Sunday
revealed the bassist’s affair with a 25-year-old dancer he’d met in a London strip club. ‘He suffered from depression after Freddie died,’ suggested one old friend, ‘and I’m not sure he ever got over it.’ Naturally, Deacon refused to comment.

If Paul Rodgers had intended to return to his solo career, then he was forced to shelve any plans for the remainder of 2005. In October, Q+PR played three sold-out US dates, including the Hollywood Bowl. It was their first American tour under the Queen brand name since 1982. Billy Squier, their friend and support act on that last tour, was in the audience. ‘Paul Rodgers is one of the all time great rock ’n’ roll singers, and he brought it all to the stage … but ultimately they fell short of the mark. It was kind of a no-win
situation, because no one can replace Freddie, and Freddie was just too big a part of Queen to be replaced.’

Meanwhile, EMI’s old MD Bob Mercer was struck by how little had changed, despite Mercury’s absence. Mercer had squired some of Queen around New Orleans during a night of Hallowe’en madness in 1978. But Queen always minded their manners. ‘They used to call me “Mr Mercer” for God knows what reason,’ he laughs. ‘Years and years after I’d worked with them, I went to see them at the Hollywood Bowl with Paul Rodgers, and I bumped into Brian May in the elevator in the Chateau Marmont hotel … and what’s the first thing he says? “Oh, hello, Mr Mercer.”’

Encouraged by the sold-out shows, Q+PR returned to America for a further twenty-three dates the following spring. But not every date sold well, especially in some southern states where Queen’s popularity had never been high. A Q+PR live album and DVD,
Return of the Champions
, put them in UK Top 20 but would do little in the US. Yet, despite these setbacks, there still seemed to be a genuine rapport between the players. The tour ended on a high. ‘The last show we did was in Vancouver,’ said Rodgers. ‘Normally by the end, everybody is ready to go home, but we weren’t. We’d just played what we all felt was the best gig on the tour. We were gobsmackingly together. We all turned around and said, “We have got to do something else.” The next logical step was to go into the studio.’

‘We couldn’t become our own tribute band,’ insists Roger Taylor. ‘I don’t want us to be thought of as a golden oldies act.’ It is summer 2008 and Queen’s drummer has taken a trip back to Queen’s good old bad old days: wincing at a mention of his first solo album,
Fun in Space
, praising
The Game
and chuckling about high times in New Orleans and Munich. Now, though, he is ready to talk about Queen’s future. ‘If we were going to keep doing this,’ he adds. ‘We had to have some brand-new stuff to play.’ On 5 September 2008, Queen + Paul Rodgers released the ‘new stuff’.
The Cosmos Rocks
was the first album of new studio material to appear under the Queen
name since
Innuendo
. In the great tradition of Queen albums, it had not come together easily.

No sooner had Rodgers stepped off the road with Queen than he had gone back out to play his own shows. Meanwhile, Brian May completed
Bang! The Complete History of the Universe
, a book written with astro-physicist Chris Lintott and astronomer Sir Patrick Moore (‘Wow! A rock star who knows something about real stars,’ gushed one review). At Moore’s encouragement, May then went back to Imperial College, spending nine months conducting extra research to complete the PhD thesis he had abandoned thirty-three years earlier.

‘I kept all my notes,’ he told
The Times
, ‘and was able to find them in my loft and start working on them again.’ May would receive his PhD the following summer, firmly cementing his reputation as the world’s most highly educated rock star. ‘I am utterly amazed that Brian was able to do go back and do that,’ says his old schoolfriend Dave Dilloway. ‘To survive with your brain unscrambled after all those years in the rock industry is remarkable. He did try and explain radio velocities and cosmic dust to me over dinner, but I said, “I’m sorry, Brian, I have no idea what you’re talking about …”’

By summer of 2007, though, May, Taylor and Rodgers cleared their schedules to start work at Taylor’s home studio. The most obvious difference between
The Cosmos Rocks
and every other Queen album was the absence of John Deacon. Had he been asked? ‘If you call him, you don’t always get an answer,’ said Taylor. ‘He’s turned into a recluse.’ ‘Deakey doesn’t speak to anyone, except Queen’s accountant,’ elaborated one unnamed source. ‘He just wants to spend time with his family and play golf.’ Instead, it fell to May and Rodgers to play bass.

On April 2008, Queen + Paul Rodgers broke cover to appear on
Al
Murray’s Happy Hour
, a TV chat show hosted by comedian Murray in the guise of his alter ego, the Pub Landlord. Queen purists winced at the sight of the trio in Murray’s ‘Green Room’, where May told the host they ‘were going to play something completely new’. They chose their next single, ‘C-lebrity’, which was still four months away from release. The song had a dizzying heavy metal riff and sounded just like a cross between Free and early Queen, but the
lyrics – griping about the hollow concept of celebrity in the twenty-first century – suggested Queen were shooting at fish in a barrel. Viewers breathed a collective sigh of relief when the band got stuck into ‘All Right Now’, even with the Pub Landlord on shouty backing vocals.

‘C-lebrity’ was released as a single in August. ‘It’s to do with celebrity culture,’ explained Taylor, who’d written the lyrics, ‘the desperation to get your face on the telly.’ In a world awash with rubbish reality TV shows, Taylor had a valid point. But his comment in
Classic Rock
magazine that ‘It annoys me that there are so many famous, useless people,’ sounded a little churlish. ‘C-lebrity’ made it to number 33, before disappearing. With the singles market now in terminal decline, this was no great shock. There was still the album to come …

Asked about the making of
The Cosmos Rocks
, Rodgers saluted his bandmates, while offering an outsider’s view of Queen’s working practices. ‘Brian is a revelation when it comes to harmonies,’ he said. ‘He’d tell us he had an idea for a harmony, troop us into the studio, and there it is. It’s like he’d been carrying the whole thing fully formed in his head.’ Taylor, meanwhile, was reassuringly bullish: ‘We know some people will moan, “Oh, Freddie’s not on it!” Of course he’s not, you dickhead. If they want to know why we’re bothering to do this, it’s because we’re still alive.’ May, on the other hand, was his usual cautious self, telling
Mojo
that while making the album ‘there had been some arguments, where we all had to go off and have a think.’

The Cosmos Rocks
turned out to be a strangely inoffensive rock album. ‘Say It’s Not True’ had been played on the Q+PR tour, and a live version had already released as a free download in 2007. It was the kind of pomp-and-circumstance ballad on which Queen’s reputation had been built. ‘Surf’s Up (School’s Out)’ sounded like a vintage Roger Taylor rocker, but, despite being better than the hackneyed opening track, ‘Cosmos Rockin’, was buried away at the back end of the album. There was another welcome flashback to the past with the ‘boom-boom cha!’ of ‘We Will Rock You’ reprised on ‘Still Burnin’.

Rodgers had already been playing two of the songs on his solo
tour. ‘Warboys (A Prayer For Peace)’ and the Bad Company copycat ballad ‘Voodoo’. They sounded like Paul Rodgers songs with Brian May playing guitar and Roger Taylor on drums. What they didn’t sound like was Queen. Once again, the name was the sticking point. Even Rodgers seemed to think so: ‘I was as wary of calling it Queen as anyone else. At first I thought we would use May, Taylor, Rodgers, like Crosby, Stills & Nash …’ The trouble was, Queen albums had always dealt in the unexpected – white funk, gospel, disco, ragtime jazz – however much that may have upset some fans and certain band members.
The Cosmos Rocks
lacked the unexpected. Taylor’s statement that we’re ‘doing this because we’re still alive’ was heartfelt and honest. But both he and May were unavoidably in competition with their own past.

‘The worst thing on earth would be for it [
The Cosmos Rocks
] to come out with a whimper,’ said Taylor. Yet that was exactly what happened. The album spent a fortnight on the UK charts, peaking at number 5, before slipping away. It was a similar story in Europe where it made the Top 10 in Germany, Holland and France (even reaching number 2 in Estonia) before disappearing. In America, it scraped to number 47, a better showing, at least, than
Made in
Heaven
. But this was not the comeback of all comebacks.

In the press, reviews ranged from
Mojo
’s prudent thumbs-up (‘Without Freddie’s decorative flourishes, the onus is on straight-shooting heavy rock’) to the
Guardian
decrying
The Cosmos Rocks
as terrible, but not as terrible as the musical,
We Will Rock You
. But EMI were also guilty of a very poor campaign. At the time, like much of the record industry, the company was in a state of flux. EMI had been bought by private equity firm, Terra Firma, in 2007; a move that had prompted Paul McCartney to leave the label in protest. A year later, Tony Wadsworth, EMI’s chief executive of twenty-five years followed suit. Queen’s new record seemed to get lost along the way. ‘I think the record company did an absolutely shockingly bad job on our album,’ grumbled Taylor later.

There would be no follow-up single to ‘C-lebrity’ and no more TV appearances. Instead, the band did what they did best, and went back on the road. Queen + Paul Rodgers would spend three
months on tour, playing arenas across Europe. Tracks from
The
Cosmos Rocks
were thrown in alongside the standards. Rodgers gamely told the press that ‘Killer Queen’ was one of the few Queen songs they couldn’t do ‘as the harmonies are so spot on’. Some wished he’d added ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ to that list. Rodgers struggled manfully with the song, but it just didn’t suit him. Others noticed that he kept forgetting the words to ‘Radio Ga Ga’. Yet with a setlist that now featured Free’s ‘Wishing Well’ and Bad Company’s ‘Seagull’ alongside ‘Hammer to Fall’, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, ‘Love Of My Life’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ … it was a crowd-pleasing greatest hits set, even if Queen + Paul Rodgers had become what they’d always feared: their own tribute band.

In November, the tour headed to the southern hemisphere for five shows in Chile, Buenos Aries, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. On 8 March 1981, Queen had played their first South American show at Buenos Aires’ Vélez Sársfield. May had played there since with his own group, but this was Queen. The shows were a triumph, but at a press conference on Argentinian TV, it seemed that the questions were only directed at returning heroes Brian May and Roger Taylor, not Paul Rodgers. ‘Paul would be Freddie’s choice to sing with us,’ Brian May told one TV reporter. ‘He would be laughing … I think he is laughing.’ ‘Freddie had a great time here,’ added Taylor with a knowing grin. ‘He’d be very pleased to see us here now …’. ‘He was great with the one-liners, Freddie …’ chipped in May. With their new singer standing just feet away, both men looked and sounded wistfully nostalgic for their absent friend.