Is This The Real Life? (44 page)

On the one level, Queen’s decision to play South Africa could be regarded as another example of their wilfully contrary streak. Even now, there’s a suspicion that the visit was partly driven by being told they
shouldn’t
play, as well as the band’s insistence that they would play music to anyone, anywhere. Brian May would deliver an impassioned speech to the Musicians Union General Committee, insisting that the group were opposed to apartheid but defending Queen’s actions. ‘The general reaction was, at least, “Thanks for coming, we understand why you did it now,”’ he said. ‘But they fined us anyway because we’d broken the rules.’

A year later, Bruce Springsteen’s point man ‘Little’ Steven Van Zandt set up the musical collective Artists United Against Apartheid. Their single ‘(Ain’t Gonna Play in No) Sun City’, was a protest against those that had played the resort, including Rod Stewart, who followed Queen to Sun City in January 1985. ‘I’m sure a lot of people still feel we’re fascist pigs because of it,’ May admitted to
Q
magazine. ‘Sorry, there’s nothing I can do about that. We have totally clear consciences.’

Queen saw out the year with a video release for ‘We Will Rock You’, the concert film shot in Canada on the
Hot Space
tour, and a seasonal single, ‘Thank God It’s Christmas’. It could have been interpreted as a comment on what had been a difficult year. If so, none but the staunchest Queen followers would go out and buy it. By the time Christmas rolled around, the song had left the Top 20. Instead, Christmas 1984’s number 1 song would be Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ Forced to act after seeing the TV news coverage of the Ethiopian famine, The Boomtown Rats’ frontman Bob Geldof and Ultravox’s Midge Ure had corralled the likes of Boy George, U2’s Bono, Phil Collins and Sting into forming a charity supergroup and cutting a record to raise money for family relief.

‘We would have loved to have been on the Band Aid record,’ insisted Mercury. ‘But I only heard about it when we were in Germany.’ Inevitably, some muttered that Queen had been
deliberately excluded for playing Sun City. Fully aware that Band Aid included the thirty-something Phil Collins and half of the similarly vintage Status Quo, Mercury jumped in with a now familiar joke. ‘I don’t know if they’d have had me on the record anyway,’ he said disingenuously. ‘I’m a bit old.’

Despite Queen’s harrowing experience on the Gluttons for Punishment tour, South America continued to exert a curious pull on the band, and vice versa. ‘Under Pressure’ had been at number 1 in Argentina in May 1982, when Argentina and Britain had gone to war over stewardship of the Falklands Islands. Immediately, the Argentinian leader General Galtieri banned Queen’s music from the country. A year later, the Queen office were back in negotiations with promoters to play more shows on the continent, including Rio’s coveted Maracana Stadium. Once again, though, the deal fell through. ‘Everything was set up,’ explained Roger Taylor. ‘But the promoter went broke virtually the day before.’

Somehow, in January 1985, the money transfer was completed and Queen were booked for the headline slot on the opening and closing nights of the ten-day Rock in Rio festival. The show would be staged at 250,000-capacity venue in Barra de Tijuca, purpose-built for around $11 million, funded by a Brazilian advertising mogul. Other headline acts included AC/DC, George Benson and Queen’s old sparring partners, Yes and Rod Stewart. But even the acts lower on the bill now read like a Who’s Who of eighties rock: Iron Maiden, Whitesnake, Scorpions, Ozzy Osbourne … It was estimated that some three million people would attend the festival over the course of its ten days, immediately earning Rock in Rio a place in
The Guinness Book of Records
where it deposed 1973’s Watkins Glen Summer Jam, which had seen a mere 600,000 show up to see The Grateful Dead and The Band. As an additional financial sweetener, Brazilian TV station Globo was granted the rights to broadcast the festival, including Queen’s performance. Rock in Rio subscribed to Queen’s favoured policy of ‘bigger, better, more’. They were made for each other.

Booked into the presidential suite of the Copacabana Beach Hotel, where his entourage included both Barbara Valentin and Winnie Kirchberger, Mercury ran on what one tour insider called ‘Freddie time’. On the first night Queen didn’t arrive onstage until the small hours. Behind the scenes, it was claimed that Brian May had been taken ill with flu, which, according to the
Sun
, led to Queen being helicoptered onto the site ‘at the very last minute’. It all added to the melodrama, though Queen hardly needed it. As
Record Mirror
’s Robin Smith observed, Queen’s ‘operatic grandeur and style drive the lusty Latins wild’. Playing a re-jigged version of
The Works
tour setlist, the show was comfortably loaded with hits. Determined to stay visible in front of over 300,000 people, every band member dressed in white. Taylor rocked up in a Katherine Hamnett T-shirt calling for worldwide nuclear disarmament, Mercury fashioned crotch-hugging tights with a red lightning bolt motif on the thighs, while May’s white spandex trousers were offset with an orange sash. The setlist was foolproof: ‘Under Pressure’, ‘Keep Yourself Alive’, ‘Radio Ga Ga’ …

Then came ‘I Want to Break Free’. Presuming that what had worked in front of an audience in Britain and Europe would work anywhere in the world, Mercury re-appeared to perform the song in a woman’s wig, pink jumper and what
People
magazine called ‘huge plastic falsies’. As Brian May recently said, ‘It was wonderful to have a singer with no compunctions whatsoever. There was nowhere Freddie wouldn’t go.’ According to
People
, ‘a near riot erupted when the crowd of 350,000 began tossing stones, beer cans and other missiles …’ Interviewed at the time, festival interpreter Maria Caetano explained that ‘the song is sacred in South America because we consider it a political message about the evils of dictatorship.’ Unknown to Queen, ‘Deakey’s golden egg’ had indeed acquired a deeper message in South America. Video footage from the event disproves the theory of a ‘near riot’, but there was enough animosity from some of the crowd for Mercury to realise that he’d misjudged the mood. ‘It surprised him,’ recalls Peter Hince. ‘They couldn’t work out what was going wrong, so they had this chilling flashback to Mexico.’

The singer reappeared for ‘We Will Rock You’, arms outstretched,
wearing a flag as a cape, displaying the inside lining with the red, white and blue of the Union Jack, before turning to face Roger Taylor and showing the crowd the orange and blue Brazilian emblem on the back. He was forgiven. Interviewed after the event, Mercury, typically, brushed it aside. ‘They [Rio] were a wonderful audience, and I love their displays of emotion,’ he said. ‘They get over-excited sometimes but I can bring the whip down and show them who’s in control. I don’t know why they got so excited about me dressing as a woman; there are a lot of transvestites here.’

A day later, EMI threw a party for Queen at the nearby Copacabana Palace Hotel, where band members schmoozed with Rod Stewart, Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp and half of Duran Duran. Supposedly, Mercury and Stewart became embroiled in a game of rock-star one-upmanship by pretending not to notice each other. Others, however, claim that Mercury refused to attend, or put in the briefest of appearances, again fearful of what his friend David Evans described as ‘loss of control’: it was not his party, it was
for
him, which meant all the old insecurities would come to surface. Meanwhile, a troupe of topless samba dancers were forced to perform with a reduced breast count after some of the dancers were sent home for being too drunk to stand. In a rare display of public tomfoolery, Brian May would be the first to throw himself fully clothed into the hotel swimming pool. Outside the party, besotted fans congregated on the beach, where they spelt out the band’s name in the sand using 1,500 candles. May went down to meet them, and, tellingly, spent more time there than he did among the liggers and beautiful people at the EMI bash.

Interviewed in Rio, Mercury, supposedly flanked by models, praised the ‘beautiful brown bodies’ around him and delivered the now much-quoted line: ‘I’m just an old slag who gets up in the morning, scratches his head and wonders who he wants to fuck.’ During Queen’s stay in Rio, Mercury and his entourage would explore the local gay club scene, though the need for security guards and the hysteria that accompanied any public appearance made the logistics of even leaving the hotel difficult. It was easier, others said, to bring the party to Freddie Mercury. Later, one of Rio’s ‘taxi’ boys,
the name given to young male prostitutes in the city, would reveal how he and other males were invited by Paul Prenter to Mercury’s hotel suite. There, they were given cocaine and would, it was claimed, each have sex with the singer, who assumed a passive role in the proceedings. The impression given was of a soulless encounter with a moneyed rock star, who had grown bored of having everything and anything on offer, and was merely going through the motions, though Prenter was cast as the instigator. ‘Paul’s appetite for sex, drugs and alcohol was phenomenal,’ cautions Peter Hince. ‘And he liked to brag about it, especially when he was drunk: “Oh, I had seven boys today!” He could be a nasty piece of work, especially when he’d been drinking.’ Mark Malden once joined Mercury’s entourage on a visit to a gay bar in Toronto. ‘There was Fred, myself, Dane Clarke and Paul Prenter. It became apparent to me that we were not there for Fred or Dane and certainly not for me. We were there for Paul. It was Paul who directed the limo driver. It was Paul who picked up a man there, not Fred. Paul led things. Paul controlled things. Freddie was very strong when it came to his music, but not as strong in his personal life.’

When Queen returned to Barra de Tijuca to play the last night of the festival, Rio had been subjected to several days of torrential rain, and the site was awash with mud. Filmed by Globo TV, Queen showboated through the same set as a week before. But when it came to ‘I Want to Break Free’, Mercury had left the wig and plastic breasts back at the hotel. He performed the song stripped to the waist and with a towel draped over his shoulders instead. With more than 600,000 people watching the band across two nights, Queen’s ubiquity was assured. In a candid moment, Freddie admitted South America was ‘a tremendous market. If you crack it here, the amount of money you can make is tremendous.’

Back in London, John Deacon would spend some of that money on a new Porsche. Driving back from a Phil Collins show at the Royal Albert Hall, Deacon was stopped by the police and breathalysed. He failed the test, was fined £150 and banned from driving for twelve months. Just days later, Brian May guested on DJ Roger Scott’s Capital Radio show, playing some of his favourite records. May chose Stevie Wonder’s ‘Don’t Drive Drunk’, offering
a waggish dedication to ‘John, whom some of you may know has had a little problem with his car recently.’

There seemed less to smile about when Queen flew to New Zealand for the first of a nine-date tour, taking in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. NZTV reporter and music journalist the late Dylan Taite conducted a television interview with all four before the first night at Auckland’s Mount Smart Stadium. Mercury did most of the talking, May had his head down and studied his fingernails, Taylor kept his sunglasses on throughout, and all of the band, bar May, cradled a cigarette. Deacon, in particular, struggled to suppress a knowing smirk when Taite raised the subject of money. ‘We are all extremely wealthy,’ said Mercury. ‘But this is a very delicate question and you’d have to ask us individually … Wealth brings a lot of problems and we all have different problems. The money we make brings a lot of problems.’