Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (21 page)

“It was the turning point,” Brian later remarked. “It was the song that best summed up our kind of music, and a big hit, and we desperately needed it as a mark of something successful happening for us. We were penniless, you know, just like any other struggling rock ’n’ roll band. All sitting around in London bedsitters, just like the rest.”

“Killer Queen” tore to Number Two, but was kept off the top slot by blue-eyed heartthrob David Essex, whose hit was ironically entitled “Gonna Make You a Star.” In a bizarre twist of fate, Queen’s next UK tour would be promoted by premier rock impresario Mel Bush, who had made a star of none other than . . . David Essex. The tour promised to be more ambitious and elaborate than anything Queen had attempted before. The music papers were now forced to concede that this unique group could not be written off. Not only did
Sheer Heart Attack
receive dazzling reviews, but all three Queen albums to date were now simultaneously on the UK chart.

The album sleeve artwork, another Mick Rock creation, was a departure from the look of
Queen II
.

“We want to look like we’ve been marooned on a desert island,” was Freddie’s instruction to Rock, who took him at his word. Smearing their faces and naked torsos with Vaseline, then spraying them with water, Rock arranged them lying down, in a circle, and shot them from above. The album’s musical content was equally surprising, wowing critics and fans alike.

“In 1974 my dad went out and bought
Sheer Heart Attack
, recalls eighties pop sensation Kim Wilde, daughter of fifties rock ’n’ roller Marty Wilde. Kim would dominate the music scene herself during the eighties, her debut single ‘Kids in America’ shooting to Number Two.

“I was fourteen years old, and a huge pop fan, having just started buying records of my own. I loved Slade, Sweet, Mud, Elton John, and Marc Bolan. Not forgetting the Bay City Rollers—well, I
was
fourteen!

“
Sheer Heart Attack
still stands as one of the most exciting albums I have ever heard. It was later the first album I downloaded on iTunes when the world ‘went virtual.’ I loved Freddie’s soaring vocals, his
harmonies and humor. I also loved Brian’s guitar playing, with its intense energy and passion, and I had the hots for Roger Taylor. John Deacon seemed to be the glue holding it all together. What a band!”

At the end of October, they ventured out on another UK tour, ending with a single London night at the Rainbow Theatre, which had to be extended to 19 and 20 November after tickets sold out in a couple of days. Both performances were filmed and recorded for posterity and future release. At Queen’s debut end-of-tour party, held at the Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn and markedly respectable by future standards, promoter Mel Bush presented the band with a plaque in recognition of them having sold out the whole tour. Their first European dates, in Scandinavia, Belgium, Germany, and Spain, were scheduled for the end of November. Continental album sales were through the roof, with most of the gigs a sellout. In Barcelona, a city with which Freddie fell instantly in love and to which he would return again and again, the 6,000-seat venue was sold out within twenty-four hours.

By December, Queen decided that their position with Trident was untenable. Although their wages had risen from the initial £20 a week to £60 with the success of
Sheer Heart Attack
, it still wasn’t enough to live on. Worse, despite projected royalties, Trident refused to give them an advance. John Deacon wanted to buy a modest house for him and his pregnant girlfriend, Veronica Tetzlaff, but Trident declined to lend him the £4,000 deposit. Freddie wanted a new piano, and Roger, a small car. All requests for cash were flatly refused. So strained had relations become that it was deemed necessary to appoint a specialist music business lawyer to unravel the mess. Thus began Queen’s relationship with Henry James “Jim” Beach, the senior music partner at law firm Harbottle and Lewis. In 1978 he would become their manager: a position that Beach retains to this day. It would take him nine months to negotiate Queen out of their various signed agreements with Trident, who understandably wanted to hang on to the band. Meanwhile, with both the single “Killer Queen” and album
Sheer Heart Attack
having broken into the American Top Ten, they were deemed ready to tackle their own major US tour.

On 18 January 1975, John married Veronica, with whom he would go on to have six children. On 5 February the band embarked on their big US adventure. Again, despite enthusiastic backing from their American label Elektra, they encountered problems, with critics comparing them unfavorably to Led Zeppelin. Freddie experienced his first vocal problems, having developed—or not, according to conflicting diagnoses—nonmalignant throat nodules. Defying doctors’ orders to remain silent for three months—preposterous!—he strode out in full voice in Washington the following night. With his condition improving one moment, worsening the next, Queen had no choice but to cancel many scheduled US shows. What had started to become apparent was that Freddie was giving too much on stage. His performances were more than his body and vocal cords could stand. Time off from touring and recording was vital for him to recover. Some time elapsed before Freddie and the band would take this on board.

There were other lucky escapes. While on the road in the States, Queen agreed a meeting with the fearsome Don Arden, the former Brixton-based, vaudeville-era nightclub singer and comedian Harry Levy, with a view to him becoming their manager if he could extract them from their crippling Trident deal. They must have felt desperate. The late music manager and agent, who famously masterminded the careers of the Small Faces, ELO, and Black Sabbath, was dubbed “the English Godfather” on account of aggressive and illegal business dealings. Arden was known for resorting to violence when negotiations failed to go his way. Legend had it that he even dangled artists from upper-floor windows to persuade them to sign on the dotted line. When his daughter Sharon married Black Sabbath’s front man, Arden became Ozzy Osbourne’s father-in-law. To think that Queen could have found themselves under the control of the Al Capone of rock . . . would any of them have lasted as long?

11

“Bohemian Rhapsody” was something that I’d wanted to do for a long while, actually. It wasn’t something I’d given much thought to on previous albums, but I just felt that when it came to the fourth album I was going to do it.

Freddie Mercury

“Bohemian Rhapsody” was groundbreaking on so many levels, and it has never dated—which is true of every milestone track in history. Like “I’m Not in Love,” 10cc: another track which broke all sonic production barriers, and is still as fresh as a daisy. The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”; you could put it on right this second, and it would sound as good as when you first heard it. Phil Spector’s “Be My Baby”: the moment you hear that opening beat, you want to dance . . . A mark of great record production is that it stands this test of time. Every good record has to start with a good song. But you can’t separate the song from the production. To an extent it’s that gargantuan production which echoes in our heads, even if we hear the song played without all that.

Steve Levine, record producer

Q
ueen were
unprepared for the “Beatlemania” which awaited them in Tokyo in April 1975. More than three thousand hysterical fans crammed into the arrivals hall of Haneda international airport,
many of them brandishing homemade banners and Queen discs. With
Sheer Heart Attack
and “Killer Queen” both at Number One, and every Japan gig sold out well in advance, their heroes’ welcome should have come as no surprise. Perhaps it didn’t, to Freddie, who rose majestically to the occasion, waving and smiling happily. One reporter joked that he probably felt so at home there because he didn’t have to hide his buck teeth—so many Japanese fans appeared to have them, too. Not only did he warm instantly to their legions of fans, he was intoxicated by the place itself. What better than an ancient, far-flung land to ignite his dormant sense of the exotic—especially to someone removed and estranged from his own? Everything fascinated him, from Japan’s history, traditions, and culture to its advanced technological lifestyle. He would soon become an avid collector of Japanese porcelain, paintings, and other works of art.

The country and the man had plenty in common. Like Freddie, Japan was a mass of contradictions: an old curiosity with a complex, multifaceted personality. To him, the names of her thousand islands echoed like magic spells: Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku. He was drawn to the gentle and stoical Japanese, who had survived centuries of feudal oppression to rise with such serenity from the Second World War. Freddie rushed about, soaking up everything. He feasted on sushi and sake, bartered for dolls, silk kimonos, and lacquer boxes. He frequented the infamous bathhouses and the
kage-me-jaya
(“teahouses in the shadows,” popularized by American GIs), and hung with the geishas—both kinds. He befriended Akihiro Miwa, a beautiful drag queen who produced and directed his own cabaret on the Ginza (Tokyo’s equivalent of the Parisian Pigalle or London’s Soho). After Freddie’s first visit, Miwa (at seventy-five still sporting bright yellow shoulder-length hair), took to performing Queen songs in tribute to his new pal.

“The only place Freddie was ever a classic tourist was Japan,” his PA Peter Freestone would later remember. “Things Japanese were an all-consuming passion for him, whereas everywhere else he stayed in the world was merely a bed for the night.”

Queen’s first and last shows on the tour, at Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan Hall, were unforgettable. Not even the bulk of their Sumo wrestler security guards was enough to hold back a 10,000-strong throng of hysterical teenaged girls. At one point during the opening show, Freddie was forced to halt proceedings to beg the fans, for the sake of their own safety, to take deep breaths and calm down. It was the same story in every city they played.

*   *   *

Good news and bad news on their return to the UK. Now the toast of the exasperatingly fickle British media, with an Ivor Novello and a Belgian Golden Lion Award for “Killer Queen” to their names, the band were still weathering the Trident storm. From the Sheffields’ point of view, they had invested more than £200,000 in a new band.
Sheer Heart Attack
alone had cost £30,000 to make—peanuts when compared to today’s recording costs, but exorbitant at the time. Now that they were having hits, they had expected to start turning a profit, but to their dismay found that they still owed Trident a relative fortune. That they appeared to the outside world to have made it, but were still broke, Queen found unbearable. Their only option was to knuckle down and get on with writing yet more songs for yet another album. The process was not without tension as they began to take out their frustrations on each other, fueling rumors that they’d decided to disband. Such gossip was just what Queen needed to make them see sense and call a truce. They were in this together. Agreement with Trident was reached, in which the band would be released from their contracts in return for a compensatory £100,000 one-off payment and a 1 percent royalty on the next six albums. Not that they had the cash to settle this at the time. They were now, however, able to sign new deals with EMI Records UK and Elektra USA. They’d get by with a little help from their friends.

*   *   *

August 1975 saw Queen rehearsing tracks at a rented house in Herefordshire for their fourth album,
A Night at the Opera
. The title was taken from a comedy film by the Marx Brothers, which had been a hit in
1935 and which Queen adored. They then decamped back to Rockfield, which would acquire legendary status as the studios used for the backing track of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” When Freddie pitched up with it, recalled Brian, “He seemed to have the whole thing worked out in his head.”

The song, an epic undertaking comprising an a cappella introduction, an instrumental sequence of piano, guitar, bass, and drums, a mock-operatic interlude and a loaded rock conclusion, at first seemed insurmountable.