Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (32 page)

Argentina had been world football champions since claiming the trophy for the first time, on home turf, in 1978. Soccer was sacred. Maradona was a national god, and Queen had long admired him. As Brian once wrote of him in a letter to me, “The spirit of the pursuit of excellence lives in the man.”

Freddie met Maradona at a party in Castelar outside Buenos Aires and invited him to appear on stage during Queen’s final Buenos Aires show. Maradona accepted readily.

“Freddie hadn’t really known who he was, as he was not what you could call a football fan,” laughed Peter Freestone. “Footballers” thighs, maybe. Rugby players’ thighs, even better!”

Still, Freddie could not help but be amused by the young soccer star. To some extent, he could identify with him: they shared modest stature and an unquenchable thirst for success. Maradona duly appeared to ecstatic applause, where upon the footballer peeled off his Number 10 team shirt, and swapped it for the rock star’s “Flash” T-shirt. He then introduced “Another One Bites the Dust,” and retreated, as Queen tore in to one of Argentina’s all-time favorite rock numbers.

Perhaps the
Pelo
journalist was not so stupid when he quizzed Freddie at the
asado
. He put it to Freddie that the shirt-exchange moment with the nation’s greatest sporting idol had been a “demagogic act.” Freddie, incensed by the implication, denounced the suggestion as “ridiculous.” He declared it to have been a friendly gesture, nothing more.

“If the audience thinks it’s OK to do such a thing, and appreciates it for what it is, I don’t give a damn what the press might think,” he retorted. “I’m going to do what I like, regardless of whether the press label it ‘demagogic’ or wrong.”

The South America experience was not thrills all the way. Followed and harassed by both media and fans, who would congregate around him in a flash, Freddie spent more time legging it from madding crowds than he would have liked. Recognized wherever he went, he found peace and quiet only behind the locked doors of his hotel suite. He slept more than usual, rarely leaving his room before two p.m. He would occasionally ask to go for a drive around the city, but his favorite off-duty pastimes were eating and shopping. His entourage were run ragged trying to arrange a different restaurant every evening, even though Freddie ate next to nothing when he got there. At least his shopping trips were fruitful. On one excursion alone he purchased 25 pairs of socks, 10 identical T-shirts, and 20 pairs of matching trousers. His bodyguards wondered why he bought so many of each. They were surprised when he explained that, as a teenager, he never had the opportunity to just be a kid and to wear exactly what he wanted. This, he told them, was his way of making it up to himself.

“Now and then he would have a childish turn, such as the day we visited the Japanese Garden in Buenos Aires,” reported one bodyguard.

“It had a nursery, pathways, and little bridges. Freddie found it enchanting. He said that he wanted to create a similar garden in London. At one point, he climbed to the top of a waterfall to take a picture. The Japanese guard saw him and ordered Freddie down. I had to explain who Freddie was and persuade the guard to let him stay up there to take
photos. Freddie would only come down when he was ready, when he fed the koi carp and left two autographs in the visitors’ book.”

Queen’s elation at their historic tour of Argentina was deflated by news that their ambition to perform at Rio’s most famous stadium had been dashed by red tape. The fabled Maracanã had a capacity of 180,000, making it the biggest in the world at the time. The technical, legal, and political difficulties encountered by Queen’s promoters in Brazil could hardly be overestimated. The governor of Rio de Janeiro refused them permission to play at the stadium, declaring that it could only be used for sports, religious, and culturally significant events. The Pope had appeared there the year before. So had Frank Sinatra, but it was a puzzling “no” to Queen.

The show must go on. They settled for the Morumbi stadium in São Paulo further south, where they performed for 131,000 people. It was the largest paying audience for a single act anywhere in the world. The following night, another 120,000 turned up to witness the magic, hemmed in by mounted riot police and with armed plainclothes officers moving among the crowd. Again, in a city where few spoke English, the sight of more than a hundred thousand fans singing along to “Love of My Life,” Queen’s anthem to South America, was spectacularly moving. Over two nights, 251,000 people watched Queen play live. It was a greater audience than most artists can expect over an entire career.

The unrivaled success of Queen in South America was the brightest feather in the cap of lawyer-turned-business-manager Jim Beach, now known to the band as “Miami.” Having spent five months convincing authorities in both countries that all would benefit from Queen’s pioneering rock adventure, he was vindicated.

“In seven concerts, Queen have been seen by over half a million people who were totally unfamiliar with rock concerts,” said Beach in Brazil. “The actual costs of appearing down here are so enormous that the profit margin for the band is quite small. But the promotion is marvelous. During our last week in Argentina, every one of Queen’s ten albums filled the top ten positions in the charts. Before we came,
everyone said that no group could play successfully in South America, but we have proved that they can.”

“We had no idea how they were going to react to us,” added Brian.

“In Europe and America, we know what to expect. But for these fans down here, it was a completely new phenomenon. In Argentina, where they are relatively more sophisticated, they did have some idea of what to expect, but for the Brazilian fans everything was totally new. One of the most exciting moments in my life was when I looked out and saw a hundred and thirty thousand people waiting for us.”

The critics got provocative. Did Queen not have a moral obligation to shun performances in oppressed countries with volatile political climates such as Argentina? Were they not, by default, supporting the very regimes of which the world disapproved? Jim Beach was unrepentant: “If we took that attitude,” he said, “then there would be very few countries in the world outside Western Europe and North America where we would ever be able to play at all.”

Freddie kept quiet, having learned the hard way that a dignified silence in the face of criticism was advisable.

“He doesn’t talk anymore because he’s a little tired of Queen and himself being misrepresented,” commented Brian. “I think anybody who meets Freddie would be in for a bit of a surprise. He’s not quite the prima donna you’d imagine. Obviously, he’s a positive character, but so are we all. When all is said and done, he works damned hard and puts on a good show.”

Where would the restless Queen spirit take them next?

17

Barbara Valentin fascinated me because she’s got such great tits! Barbara and I have formed a bond which is stronger than anything I’ve had with a lover for the last six years. I can really talk to her and be myself in a way that’s very rare.

Freddie Mercury

It was all a crazy time, far better and worse than anyone could ever imagine.

Barbara Valentin

W
ith Queen’s
scheduled
Greatest Hits
album put back until the end of the year, April 1981 became Roger’s month.
Fun in Space
, his first solo album, had been recorded in Montreux the year before, and was all set. He had found the process exhausting, he admitted, being used to the presence and support of the three musicians he had worked with nonstop for ten years. But breakout was inevitable, after such an intense and all-consuming decade together.

“There were certain things I wanted to do which weren’t within the Queen format,” he said. “It’s like flushing out your system. Until you’ve done it, you just don’t feel fulfilled.”

The other members of Queen, in their own time, would follow suit.

After Brian’s daughter Louisa was born in May, he joined Freddie, Roger, John, and Mack in Montreux to work on
Hot Space
. In July, tranquil Montreux prepared itself for the masses, who descended for Claude Nobs’s annual jazz festival.

“I was living above Montreux at around the time Queen bought Mountain Studios,” says Rick Wakeman, who had gone there in 1976 to record Yes album
Going for the One
, having rejoined the band. There, he met Mountain Studios assistant Danielle Corminboeuf, for whom he left his wife Ros.

“Switzerland is a very staid country,” says Rick, “but there was always an element of acceptance for what you were. The locals were thrilled that Queen owned the studios. Nobody gave a monkey’s toss what you did behind closed doors. The press in Switzerland didn’t give a toss either. So, a great place for rock musicians to live and work.

“There was one pub on the main street called the White Horse, which we called the Blanc Gigi (still at Grand Rue 28). It was the place where everybody working at Mountain Studios would congregate. If a couple of bands overlapped, or if Queen were in, the Blanc Gigi was where we’d end up. I’d hang out there mainly with Roger and Brian, but Freddie would often turn up, invariably with a young French boy, but so what. He wasn’t openly out, of course, but nobody said anything. Those were different times. Queen loved Montreux. To have their own studios made good business sense. Plus, they got to go and stay there whenever they wanted.

“Bands back then were essentially bone-idle. You’d rock up at the studio costing thousands a day. One would be off skiing, one would be in bed pissed from the night before. Jon (Anderson) and I might turn up, write a bit of a song, toddle off down the pub, and then finally get down to it at about seven p.m. It was rare for anyone ever to do a full day’s work. What should have taken five or six weeks was taking five or six months. The studios were making a fortune. You couldn’t record like that now. With today’s technology, you can just about make an album in your bedroom.

“My neighbor there for years was David Bowie. It was on one particular night when David wandered into the pub, had dinner with the Queen lads, and then went back with them to the studio, that things kind of turned into history.”

Mountain Studios’ engineer David Richards, who was working on the Yes album, had earlier assisted producer Tony Visconti on David Bowie’s 1977
Heroes
album in Berlin. Bowie was booked in with Richards at Mountain Studios to record the track “Cat People (Putting Out the Fire).” He wandered into the studios after the pub and found Queen mid-session.

“An extremely long night,” said Brian.

“We were playing other people’s songs for fun, just jamming,” said Roger.

“In the end, David said, ‘This is stupid, why don’t we just write one?’ ”

The result was their coproduction “Under Pressure”—initially entitled “People on Streets.”

“It came about by pure chance, my dears,” explained Freddie later.

“We began to dabble on something together, and it happened very spontaneously and very quickly indeed. We were both overjoyed by the result.

“It may have been a totally unexpected thing, but as a group we are all strong believers in doing things which are unusual, not expected of us, and out of the ordinary. We never want to get into a rut or become stale as a band, and there is a danger of doing that when you have been together as long as we have. There is a danger of resting on your laurels and just getting lax.”

David was “a real pleasure to work with,” said Freddie. “He is a remarkable talent. When I saw him play in the stage version of
The Elephant Man
on Broadway, his performance fueled me with thoughts about acting. It is something I may do in the future, but right now I’m looking at other projects to do with Queen. We never want to stay still. There are so many vistas still to explore.”

Brian remembered the recording differently.

“It was very hard,” he said, “because you already had four precocious boys and David, who was precocious enough for all of us. Passions ran very high . . . I got so little of my own way. But David had a real vision, and he took over the song lyrically.”