Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (27 page)

Brian and Freddie joined Roger and John in Montreux, where work proceeded apace. That summer, EMI Records received the Queen’s Award to Industry for export achievement, one of the UK’s most coveted distinctions for manufacturers. To mark the occasion, EMI pressed a commemorative blue vinyl edition of “Bohemian Rhapsody”: two hundred hand-numbered, limited-edition copies pressed on seven-inch blue vinyl. The edition had been intended as a purple and gold presentation, to reflect the band’s original colors as seen on
Queen I
. But according to then general manager of EMI’s International Division, Paul Watts, things didn’t quite go according to plan.

“We decided upon a maroon and gold sleeve, and a single in purple vinyl,” recounted Watts. “But when the record came back from the factory, it wasn’t purple at all, but blue! . . . The blue vinyl was a cock-up. As we only had two hundred [1,000 or 1,500 being the usual minimum run], it wasn’t worth changing it.”

The award was presented to EMI directors and management in July 1978, in the Cotswold Suite of London’s Selfridge Hotel. It was attended by neither Queen nor Her Majesty. The ironically tax-exiled band were having one of their riotous parties for Roger in Montreux on the day, which happened to be his twenty-ninth birthday.

The first four of those framed, limited-edition blue vinyls were dispatched to the band members in Switzerland. Select EMI executives received the next batch. Press kit copies came packaged with the luncheon’s two invitations. The remainder were presented as gifts to some of the lunch guests, while others received a pair of commemoratively etched champagne glasses or a special EMI silk scarf. Only the lucky few walked away with all three items.

This disc remains one of Queen’s most collectible, not to mention one of the most highly sought-after items of rock memorabilia in the world.

Recording progressed to another studio, Superbear in Nice. This was also for tax reasons, the Queen machine now being obliged to get about. They could not risk recording an entire album in one country for fear of incurring tax liability in yet another territory.

Freddie’s thirty-second birthday party was held in exquisite St. Paul de Vence in the South of France, where Rolling Stone Bill Wyman kept a home. The riotous bash culminated in Freddie and Straker harmonizing drunkenly on Gilbert and Sullivan arias. Two days later the band were raising a glass to the memory of Who drummer Keith Moon, who had overdosed on Clomethiazole in Harry Nilsson’s apartment in Curzon Place, Mayfair—the same flat in which Mamas and Papas star Cass Elliot had died of a heart attack four years earlier.

Queen’s next single release was “Fat-Bottomed Girls,” a double A-side with “Bicycle Race,” inspired by the Tour de France passing through Nice while they were recording there. To promote the single they hired Wimbledon Stadium in London and paid sixty-five naked girls to stage a bike race. Hilarious footage ensued. The bikes were on loan from cycle retailer Halfords, who insisted that Queen pay for the replacement of the sixty-five used leather saddles. The single rose to Number Eleven on the chart, but not without controversy: the bare race-winning bottom on the record sleeve was deemed offensive. Further copies featured scanty black knickers scribbled in.

By October they were touring again in the US. On Halloween night in New Orleans, Queen hosted what could only be described as an orgy with which to herald the release of their next album,
Jazz
. The 400-strong guest list featured press representatives from all over America, South America, Britain, and Japan. A hotel ballroom was converted into a steamy, overgrown swamp, teeming with dwarfs and drag queens, fire-eaters and female mud wrestlers, strippers and snakes, steel bands, voodoo dancers, Zulu dancers, hookers, groupies, and
grotesques, some performing unimaginable and possibly illegal acts on themselves and on each other in full view of revelers. One model arrived on a salver of raw liver. Others writhed in cages suspended from the ceiling. The madness made headlines around the world and further confirmed Queen’s status as the most debauched party givers in rock.

All this, and Tony Brainsby was back. Their old PR was handling the band’s publicity again, and was in his element. Brainsby wasted no time in assembling a posse of bloodthirsty hacks, whom he chaperoned from London to Louisiana for the night.

“Wild,” was his in-a-nutshell assessment. “We went from the airport to the party and the party to the airport, without having been anywhere near a bed, as it were. I’d seen parties in my time. But never like that. Some of the journalists’ eyes were hanging out by the time it came to leave. Freddie was signing his name on a stripper’s buttock—and that was the very mildest thing I witnessed. Took me the best part of a month to get over it.”

But the American backlash had started. Disapproval was rife at the inclusion of a poster in the
Jazz
album sleeve of the nude bicycle race. The poster was denounced, and in some states banned, as “pornography.” From then on, copies of the album came complete with an application form, enabling fans to send off for the offending item. Queen had thought it harmless fun and were genuinely taken aback by so much objection. However, it didn’t stop them bringing a bevy of bike-riding, bell-ringing girls onto the Madison Square Garden stage during “Bicycle Race.”

Back home, the
Jazz
album went in at Number Two and remained on the chart for twenty-seven weeks. Now, they needed to top that. What could they come up with for the next album? Then the next one? Then what after that? The band, it seemed, had forgotten how to relax.

14

I like Munich. I was there so long that after a while the people didn’t even consider that I was around. I have a lot of friends over there and they know who I am, but they just treat me as another human being, and they’ve accepted me that way. And that to me is a very good way of relaxing. I don’t want to have to shut myself up and hide. That’s not what I want. I’d go spare. I’d go mad . . . even quicker.

Freddie Mercury

He was unashamedly sexual, which was a breath of fresh air. Few people were, back then.

Carolyn Cowan, Freddie’s makeup artist

R
oger, Brian
, and John had settled down and were now toeing the line as committed family men and fathers—when they were not on the road, at least. Brian had already managed to fall in love with a girl called Peaches down in New Orleans. John, generally mindful of his domestic commitments, had taken up with the bottle. Roger was always the life and soul of anyone’s party, rarely knowingly alone between midnight and breakfast. Freddie, mind you, was out there eclipsing the lot of them, hurling caution into the hurricane as never before. If the band were no angels on tour, Freddie was the devil incarnate. As their circus
thundered across Europe for a mammoth twenty-eight dates early in 1979, including two first-time performances in what was then still Yugoslavia, their front man indulged himself like it was going out of vogue. Queen’s twelfth single, “Don’t Stop Me Now,” emerged in January, with a zestful music press onside. Then it was back to Montreux to toil on tapes recorded throughout the tour for the double album
Live Killers
. Always at home on the shores of Lake Geneva, and content to be working in Mountain Studios, the band jumped at the chance when their accountants suggested acquiring the studios outright, which would alleviate their complicated tax situation. David Richards, Mountain’s resident engineer who would become Queen’s producer, joined their team. An invitation from producer Dino De Laurentiis (
Barbarella, Death Wish, King Kong, Hannibal, Red Dragon
) to compose and record a sound track for sci-fi movie
Flash Gordon
, based on the comic character, settled another long-standing collective Queen ambition.

Back in Japan for further live dates, more mayhem and adulation ensued, after which the band spent the summer months of 1979 at the now-defunct Musicland Studios in Munich, famous as the hub of producer Giorgio Moroder’s disco-era success. Still recording abroad for tax reasons, Queen would work with a fresh producer, the acclaimed German maestro Reinhold Mack, who had cocreated Musicland with Moroder. Marc Bolan, Deep Purple, and the Rolling Stones had all recorded there. For Mack, Queen were not the easiest bunch of musicians he had ever taken on.

“They were set in their ways, like pensioners,” Mack recalled. “Their credo was ‘this is how we are used to doing things’ . . . I had the advantage of being a fast decision maker compared to the band. I would always try things while people were pondering delicate details.”

Mack’s relationship with Queen throughout was “quite relaxed,” he said.

“The band came off a tour of Japan, and had some time to spend before going back to England . . . right time, right place. The project did not start out as an album [although it would later become
The Game
].
It was a bunch of one- and two-week sessions. The first track we attempted was ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love.’ Freddie picked up an acoustic guitar and said, ‘Quick! Let’s do this before Brian comes.’ About six hours later, the track was done. The guitar solo was an overdub later on. Brian still hates me for making him use a Telecaster for the part. It was released as a pre-album single, and went to Number One. That obviously helped a great deal to inspire confidence and the working relationship tremendously.”

As far as actual songwriting went, Mack remembered it as complicated.

“There were two camps of songwriting: Freddie and Brian. Fred was easy. We thought along similar lines, and it took him fifteen to twenty minutes to come up with something absolutely brilliant. Brian, on the other hand, would come up with a great idea but get completely lost in insignificant details after the first rush of creativity.”

Munich’s motto when Queen came to stay was still
“Weltstadt mit Herz”
—“cosmopolitan city with a heart.” (Since 2006 it has been
“München mag Dich”
—“Munich likes you”—but that’s another story.) Their sojourn was to have a profound and even destructive effect on all four members of the band, particularly Freddie, who quickly became addicted to its more dubious delights. Anyone else on an extended stay in a major European cultural center would have immersed themselves in its rich history and diverse architecture, enjoying the many attractions it has to offer. The city had flourished culturally since the eighteenth century, and was a colorful place during Germany’s between-the-wars Weimar period. Mozart, Wagner, Mahler, and Strauss, writer Thomas Mann, and expressionist painter Kandinsky were all attracted to this hypnotic rainy town.

But Munich’s main attraction, for Freddie, was its effervescent gay scene. This was concentrated in a small, central area known as “the Bermuda Triangle.” The enclave had become a haven for homosexuals from every country in Europe, just as New York’s Village and San Francisco’s Castro district had attracted gay refugees from all over America. The
Munich scene was laid-back and relaxed. Freddie felt able to experiment openly without hungry hacks doorstepping him and headlining his every move. Another thrill, for the whole band, was that Munich’s disco club scene was then in its heyday. Gay bars were abundant, all heaving with bodies seven nights a week. Nightlife could be a sordid trip taken at breakneck pace, within the dark, deafening confines of clubs like the Ochsen Gardens, the Sugar Shack, New York, and Frisco. Few took much notice of openly outrageous gay behavior in the Triangle, because people were enjoying themselves too much—straight men and women as well as gays. As Mack would later recall, “Freddie loved to be around a real mix of people. He never liked the purely gay world. He was a private person and never behaved outrageously out of context. He didn’t thrust homosexuality in your face. He would never cause a scene, and always behaved impeccably in mixed company. His attitude was very much “everything in its place.’ ”

As Brian later explained in official Queen biography
As It Began
, “Munich had a huge effect on all our lives. Because we spent so much time there, it became almost another home, and a place in which we lived different lives. It was different from being on tour, when there would be an intense contact with a city for a couple of days, and then we would move on. In Munich, we all became embroiled in the lives of the local people. We found ourselves inhabiting the same clubs for most of the night, most nights. The Sugar Shack in particular held a fascination for us. It was a rock disco with an amazing sound system, and the fact that some of our records didn’t sound very good in there made us change our whole perspective on our mixes and our music. In retrospect it’s probably true to say that our efficiency in Munich was not very good. Our social habits made us generally start work late in the day, feeling tired, and (for me especially, and perhaps for Freddie) the emotional distractions became destructive.”