Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (17 page)

Queen bit the bullet and got on with the disjointed business of recording their first album that summer. Not with John Anthony, however. Day-job commitments to recording with Al Stewart, and unable to withstand round-the-clock pressure indefinitely, Anthony collapsed in the studio one night. After his doctor signed him off with EBV, a debilitating illness causing chronic fatigue, Anthony disappeared on extended holiday to Greece and left Queen in the capable hands of Roy Thomas Baker.

Thomas Baker, a former trainee classical engineer at Decca, had joined Trident in 1969, where he’d already contributed to such hits as Free’s “All Right Now” and T. Rex’s “Get It On.” His relationship with Queen was challenging, and the eventual “finished” album lacked shape. On his return from Greece, and during Thomas Baker’s absence, Anthony went to Trident to listen to it, and described what he heard as “schizophrenic.”

“So Freddie, Brian, and I came in, and we remixed most of it . . . I wanted it to show the balls and the energy of Queen’s live show,” Anthony said.

The remixes and fine-tuning exhausted all concerned—as one engineer involved in the project remarked of Freddie, “it was quite nerve-racking working with a born superstar.” Thomas Baker and John Anthony then started doing the rounds of labels. Still nobody wanted to know. It was baffling. A common criticism was that Queen’s sound was too obviously reminiscent of bands such as Yes and Led Zeppelin, despite the fact that those who had actually worked on the album agreed that the Queen sound was unique. The band still lacked a record company to press their efforts onto vinyl and release their LP into the
market. They fared better with regard to their song publishing, a deal for which was secured with B. Feldman & Co. The Sheffields, meanwhile, had brought in Jack Nelson, a vigorous American record industry executive who had honed his act at the sharp end, to help find Queen a record deal and a manager. Excited by what he heard but puzzled by the lack of interest from labels and managers, Nelson would assume the role of Queen manager himself.

“It took me over a year to get Queen a deal, and everyone turned them down,” said Nelson. “I mean everyone. I won’t name names . . . but they know who they are, every one of them.”

Nelson himself was blown away by Queen’s talent. As he would later remember, “Queen reminded me of the makeup of the Beatles. Each guy was so totally the opposite of the others, the four points of the compass. Freddie . . . composed on keyboards and was classically trained. Very complex guy. Incredibly talented. Brian was a rock ’n’ roll guitarist and he brought that influence. Incredibly talented. Scatter-brained. Focused. He had a degree in infrared astronomy. John was the bass player. He brought the solid bit, as bass players do. Grounded them. He had a first-class Honours degree in electronics. Roger, the drummer, had a double degree. They were probably the smartest band in the business. And totally diverse personalities—we could get into an airport and one would stop, one would go right, one would go left, and one would go straight ahead. But it made a great creative force. When they got together in the middle, with the stacked vocals, that center was amazing.”

Each was first among equals. No one would ever emerge as leader of the pack. Too intelligent to gang up on the others, Freddie and Roger remained partners in crime in terms of their friendship, although Roger would later remark that he felt he had more in common with Brian when the band first got together.

“We haven’t always got on, but we’ve come to realize that we need one another,” he told
Q
magazine in March 2011.

“Brian is my enduring mate, but I was very close to Fred. I think we were the naughty ones.”

Brian took almost everything too seriously, was long-suffering, introspective, and stubborn, and rarely conceded control.

“We had quite a complex, sort of multiway interaction,” he told
Q
. “That’s why it worked, really. I was very close to Roger in some ways because we’d already been in a band together. We were—and we are—kind of brothers. We were so close in our aspirations and the way we looked at music, but of course so distant in so many other ways. Like any pair of brothers, we sort of loved and hated each other . . . in a way, I was very close to Freddie, particularly in the songwriting area. Some of my best times were producing a vocal out of Freddie, sort of coaxing him in various directions.”

What did he and Roger argue about most?

“Anything you care to name. Once we got into details with the music, it was in there as well. We would argue for days over one particular note.”

John commented little but contributed much, in particular to supervision of Queen’s financial affairs. Not for some years, however, would bad humor over songwriting credits subside. Whoever’s name was on the single (including whoever had written the B-side) got the royalties. Only when all four musicians agreed to credit all songs to the band as a whole, so that everyone would earn equally from every release, did animosity on that subject evaporate. They wished that they had thought of this much earlier. Freddie later commented that it was one of the best decisions the band ever made. Not only is this the most democratic method, but it resolves conflicts before they arise. Many a band and a friendship have been destroyed by squabbles over who gets how much—as Freddie’s old friend Tony Hadley discovered to his cost. In 1999, he and fellow Spandau Ballet members John Keeble and Steve Norman decided to sue main songwriter Gary Kemp for what they said was their fair share of past royalties. They lost, and the band fell out of touch for ten years. They put their differences aside eventually to regroup on a major comeback tour in 2009.

Each member of Queen brought diverse and complementary
influences to the table. Each was musically gifted. While Freddie and Brian were regarded as the “main” songwriters, with what appeared at times to be colliding styles, Roger and John would also write some of the band’s greatest tracks. Uniquely for a rock band, all four would compose Queen hits (Freddie’s included “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Killer Queen,” “Somebody to Love,” and “We Are the Champions”; among Brian’s were “Tie Your Mother Down,” “We Will Rock You,” “Hammer to Fall,” and “Who Wants to Live Forever”; Roger wrote “Radio Ga Ga,” “One Vision,” “It’s a Kind of Magic,” and “These Are the Days of Our Lives,” and John contributed “You’re My Best Friend,” “I Want to Break Free,” and “Another One Bites the Dust”).

“Most bands are a front man and the rest,” comments music publicist Bernard Doherty. “There are not many bands in which four guys hit the stage and you go ‘wow, wow, wow, and wow.’ ”

“Freddie and Brian were completely complementary,” explains Paul Gambaccini. “They didn’t overlap, so there was no cause for jealousy within the group. Just admiration. They also freed each other from any responsibility of having to do what the other did. Brian May was not a showman. Not in the way that Freddie was. So how convenient for him that Freddie was. Brian could just stand there, do his job, and let Freddie do the rest. At the same time, Brian doesn’t just stand there thinking I’m a guitar god. He focuses on what he’s doing, and it’s incredible to see. Brian was also very good-natured about the relative popularity of the singles that Freddie, Roger, and John had written. Compare that to a group such as Bread, in which David Gates had all the hits and the other writers didn’t happen with the public (antagonism between Gates and the late Jimmy Griffin caused Bread to disband in 1973). But with Queen, Brian seemed nothing but grateful that Freddie’s songs were successful. It made for balanced albums and, from that perspective alone, was genius.”

In November 1972, having signed their contract with Trident, Queen showcased for the industry at the Pheasantry, a trendy hangout on Chelsea’s King’s Road, from which Bob Geldof would later
mastermind his Live Aid campaign, and which, at the time of writing, is a branch of Pizza Express. Everyone involved had called in favors, borrowed and pinched address books, filched numbers, phoned round, and begged support from every music business contact they could think of. Despite all this effort, the gig was poorly attended and a miserable night was had. Equipment sagged, the band flagged, you name it. Not a single A&R man showed up.

Five days before Christmas, Queen played the fabled Marquee Club on Soho’s Wardour Street, which in its original incarnation on Oxford Street had staged one of the first live performances by the Rolling Stones, in July 1962, and which had hosted the greats: the Yardbirds, the Who, Jimi Hendrix. An improvement on their disastrous night at the Pheasantry, still it yielded nothing resembling a recording deal. There was one glimmer of hope in the shape of Jac Holzman, MD of Elektra Records in the United States. He had been given tapes of the complete Queen album by Jack Nelson.

“I listened to them first through the speakers, then through headphones,” Holzman later recalled. “It was so beautifully recorded and performed. Everything was there: like a perfectly cut diamond landing on your desk. I was knocked out. ‘Keep Yourself Alive,’ ‘Liar,’ ‘The Night Comes Down’—all great songs in a sumptuous production that felt like the purest ice cream poured over a real rock ’n’ roll foundation. I wanted Queen.”

After interminable negotiations, Jack Nelson arranged for Jac Holzman to attend the gig at the Marquee.

“I flew to London,” Holzman remembered, “listened to them at the gig Jack had set up and was dreadfully disappointed. I saw nothing on stage to match the power I had heard on the tape. But the music was there. I wrote them a long memo, four or five pages single-spaced, with my thoughts and suggestions.”

It is true that Freddie’s camp performance style was at that point still random and not to everyone’s taste. Holzman, an American, may have expected a live delivery that was more macho and more recognizably
rock ’n’ roll. It is unlikely that he had anticipated ballet shoes, feather boas, and leotards. All that balletic posturing and preening was at first glance at odds with how the band came across on tape. It simply did not illustrate Queen’s recorded sound the way Jac Holzman had perhaps imagined it would.

Shortly afterwards, however, Holzman had second thoughts. He was beginning to see what he had heard after all. Yes it was different and off-the-wall, but it was growing on him. He agreed to sign Queen to Elektra in America. Despite the fact that they were about to share a highly respected American label with the Doors, the band still couldn’t get arrested by a UK label. Their unsatisfactory arrangement with Trident would rumble on.

9

“Keep Yourself Alive” was a very good way of telling people what Queen was about in those days.

Freddie Mercury

Only two artists spring to mind who, when you first met them, you just knew they were stars from the word go. One was Phil Lynott, the other was Freddie.

Tony Brainsby, Queen publicist

D
espite the
many frustrations that led to its creation, Queen’s eponymous debut album, completed by January 1973, was a masterpiece. The following month, they recorded a session for John Peel’s progressive radio show. This was a coup in itself, since it was virtually unknown in those days for Radio I to record an unsigned group for broadcast. A further stroke of luck occurred when Queen’s song publishing company, B. Feldman & Co, was bought out by EMI Music Publishing, to which, by default, the band suddenly found themselves signed. This brought them one step closer to the dream.

*   *   *

“EMI was the ultimate record label in the seventies,” recalls former promotions executive Allan James, who worked for the label during the seventies before becoming one of the industry’s most celebrated record
pluggers. In his time, “Jamesie,” known to his artists as “the Man in Black,” has looked after Elton John, Alice Cooper, Rick Wakeman, Kim Wilde, Eurythmics, and countless others.

“Warner and CBS were American,” Jamesie points out.

“Pye, Decca, and the other UK labels were also-rans. EMI Manchester Square
was
the music business. It was also the British filter for American alternative labels at the time, such as Capitol and Motown. EMI had signed the Beatles, had all the pop hits, and owned every major artist from Vera Lynn to Cliff Richard. It was the greatest record label in the world in those days, and Queen aspired to be signed by them.