Is This The Real Life? (7 page)

If, as they freely admitted, 1984 was ‘always small-time’, during Brian May’s final months in the band, they were lurching closer still to their musical idols. Dave Dilloway’s course at Twickenham had introduced him to trainee technicians at Thames Television’s studios in Teddington. The studio had invested in new equipment
and needed a group to test it. Dilloway offered 1984. On 31 March, the group spent a day playing musical guinea pigs (minus the MU rates the studio would have had to pay a professional band) and recording a handful of songs, including Cream’s ‘NSU’, Sam and Dave’s ‘Hold On I’m Coming’, Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’, and Eddie Floyd’s ‘Knock On Wood’. Heard now, it’s May’s guitar playing and Staffell’s voice, loose and soulful like a wannabe Steve Winwood, that most impress. Tellingly, Staffell sounds more at ease on the soul numbers than he does on ‘Purple Haze’, which, naturally, gives May the chance to cut loose.

The differing tastes of 1984’s singer and its lead guitarist would become a sticking point later on, but in 1967, Tim and Brian were sufficiently in tune to start writing songs. Also recorded that day were two versions of a May/Staffell composition titled ‘Step On Me’. ‘I didn’t know then that Brian wanted to explore songwriting or that he even had ideas,’ admits Dave Dilloway. ‘I don’t think the rest of us had those aspirations. “Step On Me” was our one original number in all the time 1984 played live.’ With its dainty melody and subdued guitar solo, its overriding feature is the exquisite harmonies; like an early test drive for the sound May would explore fully with Queen.

Just weeks later, Brian was back in the studio, helping out his old Hampton Grammar schoolmate Bill Richards. Two years earlier Richards had put together a band called The Left-Handed Marriage and in January 1967 issued a privately pressed album. Two months later, Richards signed to EMI’s music publishing wing, Ardmore and Beechwood, as a songwriter. Richards wanted May to help beef up the group’s sound. May joined the group at a recording studio in Twickenham, playing on four songs for a planned EP. The EP was never released, but Ardmore and Beechwood stumped up for another more prestigious recording session two months later. This time, Dave Dilloway joined May, deputising for The Left-Handed Marriage’s absent bass player. ‘We got taken down to Abbey Road to do it,’ says Dave. ‘This was at the height of The Beatles’ era, so it was tremendously exciting.’

Bill later recalled that an A&R man present at the session was unimpressed by Brian’s playing. But, undeterred, a third session
with May took place at London’s Regent Sound, in July. With singer Henry Hill’s enunciated vocals, The Left-Handed Marriage merged elements of The Kinks, while his co-singer Jenny Hill brought a folkier slant to the music. In the end, Bill’s career as a songwriter never took off. But in 1993, the final Regent Sound sessions were included on a Left-Handed Marriage album called
Crazy Chain
, giving Queen fans the chance to hear their guitar hero in his youth; the Red Special splashing colour on a set of whimsical mid-sixties pop songs, miles away from the pomp of Queen.

In between the recording sessions, May also came within touching distance of his idol. On 13 May, 1984 were booked on the same bill at Imperial College as The Jimi Hendrix Experience, the day after the band released its debut album,
Are You Experienced?
‘Brimi’ was in his element. But there would be no communication between the two; only Jimi’s question to Tim Staffell as he loped down the corridor from the dressing room: ‘Which way’s the stage, man?’ Also in Hendrix’s entourage that night was Brian Jones, soon to be expelled from The Rolling Stones for too much drinking and drugging. Dave Dilloway glimpsed the ghost-like Jones tagging along behind Hendrix on the walk to the stage looking sicker than anyone he had ever seen before. Jones would be dead in less than two months.

A September 1967 booking for 1984 at the London School of Medicine would be the catalyst for another date with Jimi, after talent spotters took a shine to the band. ‘To this day I have no idea who they were,’ laughs Dilloway, ‘but there were these three guys who fancied breaking into the music business and were looking for a band to manage. We were doubled up on the bill with another group at the London School of Medicine. I think they came to see this band, and decided to go with us instead.’

John Garnham and Richard Thompson are similarly baffled as to the identities of these ‘couple of characters’. Nevertheless, their new patrons watched the band rehearse and told them they needed to sharpen up their image. Early photos of 1984 found most of the group sporting the skinny-trousered, Chelsea-booted mod look of the day, with Tim Staffell and John Garnham taking turns to wear a pork-pie hat. Curiously, it’s Brian May that looks the most ill at
ease; very much the suburban schoolboy, clutching his guitar like a comfort blanket and wearing a cardigan. As Tim ruefully explained, ‘I never perceived Brian as having the dangerous image which was necessary at the time.’

But the band was tentatively embracing fashion. Staffell would later claim to hate the flowery-shirted ‘Summer of Love’ look, but he, like the others, moved with the times. On 9 September, after a boutique shopping trip, the group showed up for a battle-of-the-bands competition at Croydon’s Top Rank Club looking very much the pop stars in waiting, even Brian.

The contest had been sponsored by Scotch tape, and the proviso for entering was that groups had to submit songs recorded on a reel of Scotch. 1984 submitted two tracks: The Everly Brothers’ ‘Crying in the Rain’ and Marvin Gaye’s ‘Ain’t That Peculiar?’ On the night, they played two sets (the first as backing group to an unknown singer named Lisa Perez) and won the contest hands down. ‘It was a joke, though,’ laughs Dave. ‘Nothing ever came of it.’

Instead the winners were gifted with a reel of Scotch tape and an LP for each band member, deteriorating in quality from Simon and Garfunkel’s
The Sound of Silence
(blagged by Tim Staffell) to an album by Irish bandleader Tommy Makem, for which Dave Dilloway drew the shortest straw. ‘That’s all we got,’ says John Garnham. ‘These crappy LPs.’

Still, the winning band were photographed that night, preserving an image of 1984 that year. Twenty-year-old Brian May had a regulation Beatle hairdo and Hendrix-style military jacket. Much to his chagrin now, Tim Staffell was wearing a shirt with pink polkadots.

A similar so-called competition found the band piling into the back of Richard Thompson’s works van and trekking over to East London’s Forest Gate to play to one of their biggest audiences yet at the Upper Cut Club. ‘It was a club run by Billy Walker the boxer,’ remembers Thompson. ‘The Who had opened the club, and I don’t know if there even was a competition. I think it was just an excuse to get people over there. We played to a couple of thousand people that night.’

The aspiring managers disappeared as quickly as they arrived.
Still, their hustling skills were enough to secure the group a slot at the ‘Christmas on Earth Continued’ extravaganza. Held on 22 December at the chasm-like Kensington Olympia, ‘Christmas on Earth Continued’ was an all-night musical love-in starring fifteen acts, which included Pink Floyd, The Who (who never showed), The Move, Soft Machine and headliner Jimi Hendrix.

Before the gig, the band’s benefactors sent them out to buy some new outfits. ‘My memory is that Tim and Richard went to Carnaby Street and bought us stuff to wear,’ recalls John Garnham. ‘I was presented with this black shirt with a silver front.’ Though Tim Staffell recalled: ‘Our manager bought us velvet guardsman jackets and put us in make-up. We looked terrible.’ Newly groomed, the band drove to the Olympia, parked their cars in a side street and started unloading their gear.

Inside the arena, they were told that they would be going on ‘very late’. The band set up camp in the artists-only gallery overlooking the stages. The hours dragged by as they watched interminable soundchecks and, later, sets by The Move and Pink Floyd. For a change of scene, they de-camped to Olympia canteen, where they again spotted Jimi Hendrix. ‘I remember thinking, “Oh, we are going up in the world,”’ says John Garnham, continuing, ‘At 1 a.m., we were about to go on, when this guy rushed over and said, “No, no, no … So it was back to waiting for another few hours.’ In the end, depending which of the band members is telling the story, 1984 went onstage sometime between 4.30 and 6 a.m. on 23 December. ‘Everyone was drunk or stoned and lying around, and we bounced on,’ said Tim Staffell. ‘I think they’d had enough by then,’ adds John. ‘We just plugged in and hoped for the best, and, thankfully, didn’t get booed off.’ ‘Because we were an unsigned band and it wouldn’t cost them anything, I think a snippet of our set was shown on TV,’ recalls Dave Dilloway. ‘Looking back, it was mediocre but very loud.’

There was worse to come. When the band returned to the dressing room, they discovered their money had been stolen. Then, when they left the Olympia, re-emerging into a frozen December morning after some fifteen hours inside, they found their cars had been towed away. According to Dave Dilloway, the
band members were still in their garish stage clothes ‘all tarted up in make-up’, making the four-mile hike to the police compound in Hammersmith even more uncomfortable. Having paid to retrieve their vehicles, the exhausted band members spent the rest of the day in a haze, trying to buy last-minute Christmas presents. While the Olympia show had been their most prestigious gig yet, it was, in its own way, the beginning of the end.

Just a few months into the New Year, Brian May quit 1984. In the final year of his course, he felt compelled to knuckle down to his studies. It was an amicable decision. ‘We weren’t out to change the world,’ shrugs Dave Dilloway, ‘and I didn’t know that Brian May wanted to set the world on fire.’ The band pressed on with Tim stepping up as lead guitarist and vocalist, but before long, he would be enticed back into playing music with Brian.

Away from the stage and the recording studios, another even more important connection had been made. One of Staffell’s new chums from Ealing art college had become a regular at 1984 gigs. ‘He was Tim’s mate and he was mad about Hendrix. He just loved the scene,’ explains Dave Dilloway. ‘He used to get into the gigs for free by being our roadie. He never asked to sing or play so I had no idea he was even musical.’ Their roadie’s name was Freddie Bulsara.

Former Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum likes to tell a story about Queen’s Roger Taylor. In the late 1970s, the fifteen-year-old Sorum and his friends would while away their evenings on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip. One night, the gang saw a Rolls-Royce pull up outside a Hollywood nightclub. The car door opened and Roger Taylor emerged. The drummer was wearing black sunglasses, a snow-white suit and was managing to hold a glass of bubbly in one hand while a beautiful girl hung off the other. From that moment on, said Sorum, ‘I wanted to be Roger Taylor.’

Fast forward to 2005 and Taylor is sitting in the deserted upstairs bar of the Dominion Theatre, where the Queen musical
We Will Rock
You
is halfway through its third year in London’s West End. He strokes his white goatee and offers a rather bashful smile. ‘I always
felt it was my job to have a good time,’ he nods, then laughs. ‘Oh, God, am I a cliché?’ Queen, the band, are about to go on tour again for the first time in nineteen years. Except Queen is now just Taylor and Brian May, with Freddie Mercury’s place taken by Paul Rodgers, once the lead singer of sturdy blues-rockers Bad Company and, before them, Free. Rodgers is telling critics that, unlike his predecessor, he will ‘not be wearing tights’. It is fair to say that Queen fans and critics are eyeing the planned union with varying degrees of concern. Taylor is, just as he was at the beginning of Queen’s career, utterly gung-ho about the tour and eager to shout down any naysayers. ‘To be the darling of the critics is the kiss of death,’ he offers. ‘Which is probably why we are still alive.’