Freddie Mercury (12 page)

I was initially surprised that even at this point in their career seldom would all four members of the band be in the studio at the same time. When they were, it was often for a band meeting. We would joke that Queen must be the only band in the world who would pay a thousand pounds to have a band meeting; the most expensive in the world, maybe? Even though they had a perfectly good office headquarters, the chances of getting all four together around a boardroom table were vastly less than catching them all together in the studio.

Other than for these band meetings, Jim Beach was an infrequent visitor even though he lived and worked in Montreux, although Paul Prenter, then the band’s personal manager, would be in attendance all the time. I would be there as well as Freddie’s current beau, friends of the other band members and the usual quota of hangers-on. There could be upwards of a dozen people floating around. On creative sessions, there were no standard personnel combinations. It wasn’t a Freddie and Roger only or Brian and Freddie next arrangement. The daily roll call depended very much on the degree of excess of the activities of the previous night. It was up to the producer / engineer and the tape operator to always be promptly behind the recording desk for a two o’clock start. The presence of the production team was the only certainty as they waited for their charges to arrive. Rheinhold Mack was the producer and engineer on
Hot Space.
Mack, as he was always known, lived in Munich and
worked frequently with Giorgio Moroder in Munich’s Musicland Studios which Moroder owned.

With Queen, although the recording day generally started about two o’clock in the afternoon, there was an open-ended finishing time to the day’s session. In other words it could, and often did, go on all night into the early hours of the following day. Depending on the output, the working week could often last the full seven days. Queen took to recording like a flock of ducks to water although they took to composition as easily as blood being wrung from a stone. For this reason, there is, contrary to a lot of anticipation, not a large treasure haul of previously unheard tracks waiting to be unearthed in some studio vaults.

Because composition came hard and recording was often fraught, the length of sessions was unpredictable. For example, the first of the two sessions for ‘Under Pressure’ was twenty-four hours and the second, a couple of weeks later and four thousand miles away in New York when Freddie and Bowie finished off the track at the Power Station, was a session which lasted another eighteen hours.

‘Under Pressure’ came about purely spontaneously. Bowie, who was living in Montreux, heard that Queen were in town and just called round to the studio. Roger and Bowie got on very well anyway, although the lyric and title idea came from Freddie and David’s collaboration.

The impromptu jam session soon assumed the twenty-four hour marathon shape I’ve described. I was overjoyed in New York when Freddie took up my suggestion of the two octave vocal slide which I had noticed being so successfully used on another current chart disco track.

But not all tracks took shape as quickly as ‘Under Pressure’. Generally speaking – although with Freddie and Queen as with any band there are always exceptions – a typical Freddie track came together something like this. As an example, the creative process which marked the emergence of the strangely autobiographical ‘Life Is Real’ started thirty thousand feet up in the air over the Atlantic.

We were flying back from New York to London on our way to Switzerland, paying no particular attention to anything when Freddie turned round and said, “Where’s your paper and pen? I’ve just come up with some words.” I always had to ensure that I carried with me, wherever we were, paper and pen for just such an occasion as this.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Cunt stains on my pillow,” he replied
sotto voce
with that naughty grin. I think my face must have given away something because he then turned round and said, “D’you think that’s too much?”

He then changed the words to, “Cum stains on my pillow?”

To which I replied, “Next!”

To which he replied with a giggle, “Oh, really! This is
too
much!”

I can see us now, reclining on the first class chairs at the front of the plane. He thought about it for another couple of minutes and finally came up with what is now the classic line, “Guilt stains on my pillow!”

For the next hour or so, Freddie’d come out with phrases, not necessarily sequential but always following the same concept. We therefore disembarked in Montreux with several pages of entirely unconnected lyric lines for a song without a title. Freddie often took the opportunity himself to jot down a couple of lines which had come into his head. On my pad there is a sheet where he has written: “Please feel free, Strain all my love from me…”

To the best of my knowledge, this couplet was wisely filed away for future use…

When we finally got into the studio from the airport, he sat down at a piano and just started playing. He would let his fingers play over the keys until a tune with which he was happy was finalised. Tape was always rolling in case a gem should get away. Perhaps he might just play chords and then progressions from those chord bases. The rhythm was dictated by the feeling and mood of the lyrics of the song and the time signature and beat dictated by the metre of the dominant lyric lines. Every song had a working title although the final choice would not be made until the end. Everyone would throw ideas for song titles into the arena. Only the fittest survived.

Once Freddie had decided on the tune, he started on what he thought of as ‘the hard part’ of the song, getting the lyrics into an understandable structure which made sense. Often, when I hadn’t heard all that had gone on in the studio that day, Freddie’d come home at five in the morning and he’d say, “Come on. Listen to this!”

He’d then read out the lyrics and he might say, “Look there are just three words that don’t fit.”

We could then spend a couple of hours trying to find other words that both rhymed and scanned that meant the same things as the words
with which he was unhappy. And I mean a couple of hours. At least. It would often be daylight before he’d go to bed satisfied.

What started off as one idea might end up being the starting point of a better and different idea. He was completely pragmatic. Nothing was sacred. Everything was there to be used.

As I’ve said previously, he was very much the perfectionist. He would spend hours making sure that there was no better way of constructing the song, no better tune to express the feeling that he wanted to put over. His music first and foremost was for himself. It gave him the chance to express his feelings and be himself. Being a musician, he was in a position where other people could enjoy the results of his expression. Of course it mattered what the fans thought, but he wouldn’t let anything pass muster that he wasn’t a hundred per cent satisfied with himself. Although he was well aware that there were many different ways to say musically what was in his mind and that his end result might not be to the taste of others, it was his perfection he was seeking, not other people’s. And after all, it was his music.

Once he’d got the tune sorted out in his mind, he’d put it down, record it, using the piano and then everyone else would listen to it. The rest of the band would then begin, under Freddie’s supervision, to put their own contributions to the song down on tape on other tracks. This would start with Roger recording what Freddie called the ‘click’ track, the backbone of the song which was the basic beat against which Freddie would polish his initial piano track. Freddie always used to say that although drum-machines are
supposed
to be infallible, Roger could be
guaranteed
never to miss even one single beat.

Once this basic structure was sorted out, Freddie would begin the whole process of assembling all the other necessary components to achieve the song. No overall vision of how the song would ultimately sound ever arose before the very basic skeleton had been assembled. So often, the end result would bear little resemblance to the original concept. A prime example of this was ‘Radio Ga Ga’ which sounded to me when Roger played his initial tape more like the Ave Maria from Verdi’s
Otello -
but that’s to come. Incidentally, titles of tracks often changed between conception and fledging. ‘Radio Ga Ga’ on one of the original cassette boxes is called ‘Radio Ca Ca’.

Freddie always liked the input from the rest of the band. He never
believed his was the only, perfect way. Each Queen track is the result of four people’s input even though it might be formally accredited as a composition to only one person. Of course, from
The Miracle
onwards, all tracks were credited to Queen collectively except on
Made In Heaven
but, again, that comes later.

Freddie never knew anyone better at working out harmonies than Brian and always relied on him for the end results where musical harmony was concerned. John was always John. Freddie knew John was like the proverbial rock and could always be relied on. The bass line was put on very close to the beginning after which the guide vocal track was laid down around which the other instrumental colouring and harmonies would be created.

This whole process could take months. Just because the band had started on a track didn’t mean that they would carry it through to the end in one fell swoop. There would be times when they’d get fed up with a track and it would be left on the back burner. Any time a new and exciting idea was brought into the studio, small developments were made to it so that the original thoughts wouldn’t be lost and the band would always be in a position to come back to it. If for any reason at all, it was forgotten about, then the original idea couldn’t have been much good anyway. Over the years, there were quite a few examples of ideas gathering dust on the shelves. Where these substandard and rejected ideas are now, who knows?

The atmosphere in the studio varied. It was often never the same two days in a row. Sometimes, you could sense the tension and the excitement when those who were there were really thrilled with an idea and other days, it could feel like a dull day at the office. You have to remember all the way through that the studio was their place of work. This was Queen’s office.

There would always be at least three members of the road crew there. The three personal roadies (now called Technical Crew, ‘Teks’ for short), Ratty, Jobby and Crystal. Respectively, Peter Hince looked after John and Freddie’s instruments, Brian Zellis was there for Brian May and the ubiquitous Chris Taylor was always there both for Roger and a good laugh! Crystal could always sense when tension was building up and would always be able to defuse most potentially explosive situations with a joke which brought a laugh. He also knew when not to be around, as did the rest of us. One learned very quickly. Of course there were the times when the explosions happened. One
such being in Munich when, I forget which album, Brian was being very particular about his guitars and the stereo sound. It was something about not being loud enough because volume seemed to be the root cause of most of the arguments between the band members whether in the studio or on stage. Freddie on this occasion reached a point where he decided he couldn’t take Brian’s fussiness any more and he exploded. I think he must have seen a
Fawlty Towers
episode in the near past for he exclaimed: “What the fucking hell do you want, hey? A herd of wildebeest charging from one side to the other?” I believe with that, he turned on his heel and walked out. Collecting Freddie’s utterances and sayings became a habit in the household and we would write them down, an example on my pad being: “…the diva of rock’n’roll and a mouth to gobble the Volga.”

I have to emphasise that whoever their personal responsibility might be to, all these three foundation crew members were very fond of Freddie. I remember when the infamous Bill Reid was the boyfriend in attendance for one of the sessions in Montreux. Nobody liked him and nobody less than Crystal, Ratty and Jobby. Reid’s very presence put their backs up to the point where they took great enjoyment winding him up. Bill Reid had a penchant for cocaine which was in extremely short supply in Switzerland. It was actually unobtainable. The lads used to make an obvious show of passing little packets to each other when Reid was in their vicinity and in the end he was convinced that they were excluding him from what he perceived was their enjoyment of an illicit drug. Matters then escalated to the point where he could stand being taunted no longer and complained to Freddie about his crew’s cruel behaviour towards him.

Freddie, knowing nothing was going on because nothing could go on, was immediately dismissive. “Oh! Don’t be so stupid!”

Another wheeze the lads dreamed up was that each time that Bill Reid was anywhere near any of them, they would start singing the Alfred Hitchcock theme. This came about because they thought Bill looked not unlike the cartoon caricature seen at the beginning of the television series
Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

In Montreux, everyone including the tape-op made teas or coffees or large vodka-tonics as the band members required. The studios themselves were very quiet. For this reason, contradictorily, the band were not comfortable recording there all the time in the early days of
their ownership of the place, precisely because of the complete lack of excitement. However, in the latter days, all the band, and especially Freddie, loved recording there precisely because it was so quiet and there were no distractions; no one there to come and ogle, stare and point at him. More often than not, food would be sent out for or they would all go out and have dinner before returning for a late session. In Musicland in Munich there was a fixed kitchen and on more than a few occasions my culinary skills were called upon to rustle up a simple little three course dinner for ten!

In Montreux, we stayed at the Montreux Palace Hotel which was at the opposite end of the town to the studios and it took us a good ten minutes to walk there. This gives you a good idea of both the size of Montreux and how quiet it was. Imagine Freddie walking for ten minutes across the centre of London! He did once try walking from Garden Lodge to Mary’s flat in Phillimore Gardens but actually only managed to get part way up the top end of the Earls Court Road before he had to turn back and come home because even in that short distance, people had started to come up and ask him for autographs. He was never allowed to make it.