Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (20 page)

“The folks who owned the club fortunately took my word for it that the bands I chose were right, so I had kind of a free rein. The audience were late teens, early twenties. It was a mixed bill that night: Queen were to play alongside some other seriously good rock acts, including Status Quo, Wishbone Ash, the Grateful Dead, and Canned Heat. Radio Luxembourg had planned to record this concert for future broadcast. But the equipment failed, and there is no record of it, sadly. Queen were loud and self-assured. A class above the rest, even in those early days.

“I remember we went back to Freddie’s hotel room with their plugger, Eric ‘Monster’ Hall, after the show. We stayed up until very late, talking about everything and anything. Freddie was very chatty and friendly, and a great host. Nothing was too much trouble.

“I liked them as people,” adds Jensen. “I wrote a piece about them for
Record Mirror
. They flew in the face of some critics, by whom they were not immediately loved, and I admired that. They weren’t just sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, although they did all that. There was an air of intellectualism about them. They would all, I thought, have been successful at almost anything they chose. I remain very grateful to Queen, who actually helped me and my show. I was able to play them late at night on Radio Luxembourg, and they won me huge popularity.”

Their profile rising all the time, the warm-up gigs they played for
Mott the Hoople’s tour were a smash with fans. At last Freddie had what he had always craved: guaranteed audiences, adulation, crowds baying for more. Rave reviews in the music press were still few and far between, the consensus still being that Queen were little more than “Emperor’s New Clothes.”

“Fuck them, darling, if they just don’t get it,” retorted Freddie to a baffled Tony Brainsby.

Tony, so often on the receiving end of Freddie’s wrath and frustration when faced with unfavorable reviews, couldn’t help but notice the dramatic effect that fan worship was having on his charge.

“In spite of the bad press, Freddie’s confidence soared. But I could see that he didn’t enjoy doing interviews. In time, we stopped using him more or less altogether, unless it was for an album or a tour. Freddie’s deliberate elusiveness only made him appear more mysterious, of course, which rather appealed to him.”

As Freddie saw it at the time, “I think, to an extent, we’re a sitting target because we’ve gained popularity quicker than most bands,” he said, rewriting history and conveniently forgetting what a long, arduous and frustrating ride to the almost-top it had been. The self-deception was perhaps forgivable after so much agony.

“We’ve been talked about more than any other band in the last month,” he went on, “so it’s inevitable. I think it would be wrong if all we got were good reviews. But it’s when you get unfair, dishonest reviews where people haven’t done their homework that I get annoyed.”

Denis O’Regan, the award-winning rock photographer who made his first forays into the business snapping Bowie at Hammersmith Odeon with a camera borrowed from his uncle, would one day tour the world with Queen as their official lensman. Watching them open for Mott at the same venue in 1973, he could only marvel at the “pretentiousness and confidence” of the lead singer.

“Freddie was throwing the shapes and going through the poses even then—as a mere support act,” remembers Denis.

“He talked a bit to the audience between numbers, introducing the
songs. Brian May was fantastic. I’d never heard of Queen, but in those days one tended to go along and watch the support as well as the main act. I turned to my friend George Bodnar (who also went on to become a major name in rock photography but who tragically lost his battle with cancer in December 2011) and said, ‘Who does that prat think he is?’ I found out why, of course, a year or so later, once the whole world had got used to the idea of Queen. I only got into the music after hearing them on the John Peel show. I’ve been a big Queen fan ever since.”

“For me,” Joop Visser later observed, “it was only after Queen toured with Mott the Hoople that they really got it together, and I mean got it frighteningly together. They scared Mott the Hoople at the end of that tour, because they were stealing the shows.”

Meanwhile, the press reviews were improving. “Atmosphere electric.” “Band sensational.” Queen concluded a turning-point supporting the band 10cc in Liverpool.

Asked to comment on the tour which began as Mott’s and wound up as Queen’s, Freddie responded: “The opportunity of playing with Mott was great. But I knew damn well the moment we finished that tour, as far as Britain was concerned, we’d be headlining.”

*   *   *

EMI, no longer able to cope with the deluge of Queen fan mail and photo requests, attempted to hand the responsibility to Trident Studios. Trident couldn’t, or wouldn’t, cope either. There was only one way to solve the problem. By the end of 1973, Queen had launched their own official fan club, run by two old friends of Roger’s from Cornwall, Sue and Pat Johnstone. While it has changed hands down the years, the band remained closely involved in the club. Not only does it exist to this day, but the fan club still organizes and hosts a well-attended annual Queen Convention.

With album sales healthy, EMI stepped up the international campaign. A promotional trip to Australia was booked for January 1974. Disaster struck when, following a routine travel inoculation, Brian developed gangrene in his arm so acute that amputation was feared. His condition improved rapidly enough for the trip to proceed as planned.
Then it was Freddie’s turn. During the flight to Sydney, his fear of flying first manifested itself, and he became agitated almost to the point of panic. His anxiety was exacerbated by a painful ear infection, resulting in a temporary loss of hearing. Freddie would remain aerophobic for life. The trip seemed jinxed. Neither Freddie nor Brian was up to performing, and the gigs were lukewarm.

At least things were looking up back in London. In the
NME
Readers’ Poll, Queen were voted second most promising newcomers—without a single hit under their belts. In America, Elektra released a second album track as a single, but it sank without trace. Still undeterred, EMI scheduled a further single release; and when a slot became vacant last-minute on
Top of the Pops
on 21 February 1974—because David Bowie’s promo for his new single “Rebel Rebel” wasn’t ready—Queen were rushed to the BBC studios to mime “Seven Seas of Rhye” before that single had even been released.

“I remember Freddie running along Oxford Street to watch their appearance on a set in a shop window, because he didn’t own a telly,” said Brainsby.

The single was rush-released that week, and the tide continued to turn. The band’s second album,
Queen II
, was now good to go, and they were planning their first headlining UK tour. Kicking off in Blackpool on 1 March, it would close four weeks later at North London’s Rainbow Theatre. The venue, on the corner of Isledon Road and Seven Sisters Road, was built as a cinema in the thirties, and is now Grade II-listed and used as a Pentecostal church. In the interim, it was an important music venue: where Jimi Hendrix first set light to his guitar in 1967, where the Beach Boys recorded their
Live in London
album, and which echoed with the encores of Stevie Wonder, the Who, Pink Floyd, Van Morrison, the Ramones, and David Bowie.

Rehearsals for the tour began in earnest at Ealing Studios. According to Brainsby, it was Freddie’s idea to get acclaimed young fashion designer Zandra Rhodes to create their flamboyant tour costumes, having seen some of the confections she’d come up with for Marc Bolan. The
others agreed readily. EMI, not so readily, to the eye-watering invoice for £5,000, although even they had to concede that Zandra’s silk batwing tunics were “very Queen.” Only now did Freddie feel confident enough to kiss the Kensington Market stall good-bye.

“Seven Seas of Rhye” went straight in at Number Forty-five, four days after the Blackpool show. Three days later,
Queen II
was released, making it to Number Thirty-five on mixed reviews. The tour was marred by a number of incidents, including violence north of the border, after a fight broke out among Stirling University students, and two fans were stabbed. Although the band managed to lock themselves in a kitchen, two roadies were injured and hospitalized. The following night’s show in Birmingham was subsequently canceled, but the damage was done. Queen again found themselves the subject of negative headlines in the music press. The surge of bad publicity continued after their Isle of Man gig at the end of March. Despite all this, that gig was celebrated in dramatic style by both band and entourage, raising the bar for post–Queen gig revelry for years to come. At another date on that tour, while waiting for the band to come on, the audience began singing “God Save the Queen.” The serenade would be a given at Queen gigs from then on.

With
Queen II
now at Number Seven on the album chart, increasing numbers of fans were picking up on the first album. That, too, charted for the first time at Number Forty-seven, about the same time as Elektra released it in Japan, where it was received ecstatically. Little did Trident, EMI, or the band themselves realize how big Queen would be in Japan.

There was a price to pay for success. There always is. As Freddie’s temper wore thin and he took to flaring at the most minor mishap or inconvenience, Job-like Brian began to lose patience. Their bitchy scraps, exhausting for all, usually resulted in a petulant Freddie flouncing off in a huff, while the others stood around shrugging. As they saw it, time wasting was pointless when there was so much work to get through. Years later, commemorating Queen’s fortieth anniversary in an interview with British music magazine
Q
, Brian and Roger both recalled Freddie as the peacemaker:

“I think that’s an odd juxtaposition with Freddie’s image of being a prima donna. Actually he was the great diplomat, and if there were arguments between us, Freddie was usually able to sort them out.”

Hindsight, that wonderful thing. According to Freddie, Queen had always “argued about everything—even the air that we breathe.”

Their confidence boosted by the success of their own debut tour, Queen were pleased but not surprised to receive an invitation from Mott the Hoople to support their upcoming US outing, which would open in Denver, Colorado, and take in several nights in New York. Despite Freddie’s aerophobia, he was first on the plane on 12 April. They would arrive to news that Elektra had taken advantage of the band’s imminent arrival by releasing
Queen II
ahead of schedule. They could not have been more thrilled at the prospect of their first American tour, having worked towards that goal for so many years. By now, the band were attracting the interest of America’s own flamboyant artists.

“We thought we were unusual,” commented Brian, “but a lot of the people that came were surprising, even to us—a lot of transvestite artists, the New York Dolls, Andy Warhol—people that were creative in a way that appeared to trash everything that had gone before.”

It was not to be plain sailing. Disaster struck again when Brian collapsed in New York, having never quite recovered from his infection in Australia. The band were told to forget about playing Boston. When Brian developed hepatitis, it became obvious that they would have to pull out of the rest of the tour. His disappointment and guilt at having to let the band down was immense.

Back home, despite the fact that Brian was still quite ill, Queen relocated to the Welsh Rockfield Studios near Monmouth in the Wye Valley, to start rehearsing songs for their third album. Rockfield was the world’s first residential recording studios in the sixties, and has hosted a huge range of artists over the past forty years, including Mott the Hoople, Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Simple Minds, Aztec Camera, the Manic Street Preachers, the Darkness (who were almost a Queen tribute band), and Nigel Kennedy. It was a studio which would become dear to
their hearts. On 15 July 1974, they began recording back at Trident, collaborating again with producer Roy Thomas Baker. Baker, by now referred to as “the fifth Queenie,” had been a Decca engineer in the early sixties, and had worked with the Rolling Stones, T. Rex, Frank Zappa, and Eric Clapton. He had also masterminded recordings by Nazareth, Dusty Springfield, and Lindisfarne, among many, making him one of the most respected producers of the day. Recording, which was divided between several London studios other than Trident, namely Air, Sarm, and Wessex, was soon halted when Brian was rushed to hospital again: this time with a duodenal ulcer. A further American tour scheduled for September had to be scrapped. Brian became acutely depressed, fearing that Queen would seek a replacement guitarist. He needn’t have worried. The rest of the band pushed on, recording what they could and leaving room for Brian’s guitar sequences to be added later.

Compensation came in the form of a music industry silver disc, awarded for sales in excess of 100,000 copies of their album
Queen II
. True to form, Brainsby organized a cunning stunt for the presentation ceremony at London’s Café Royal, in the form of comely actress Jeannette Charles. Miss Charles made her living doubling for Her Majesty and had become a national TV institution. She was an inspired choice, especially given that Queen had been perfecting an inoffensive rock rendition of the British National Anthem, with which they planned to close their future live shows.

“Killer Queen,” the band’s third single, and taken from the forthcoming third album
Sheer Heart Attack
, was released in October 1974.

“ ‘Killer Queen’ is about a high-class call girl,” said Freddie at the time. “I was trying to say that classy people can be whores as well,” he added, as if alluding to himself. “That’s what the song is about, though I’d prefer people to put their own interpretation upon it—to read what they like into it. People are used to hard-rock energy from Queen, yet with that single you almost expect Noël Coward to sing it. It’s one of those bowler hat, black suspender numbers,” he added, in homage to his favorite film, Liza Minnelli’s
Cabaret
. “Not that Noël Coward would wear that!”