Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (4 page)

“They were obviously drifting,” confirms Spike Edney. “Times had changed, we were into a whole new musical genre. It was all New Romantics, Spandau Ballet, and Duran Duran. There’s no accounting for success or failure—and no guarantees. Things had been going a bit awry for Queen for a while, especially in America. There was shit going down with their US label. Their confidence was knocked. Maybe they did take it out on each other a bit. Who wouldn’t?”

“Hey, people fight,” reasons their close friend, keyboard maestro, and former Strawb and Yes-guy, Rick Wakeman.

“Band members argue. It’s understandable: in how many other jobs are you flung together all the time? Out on the road, you eat breakfast together, travel to work together, have every meal together. The only time you are alone is in bed—and not always then. No matter how friendly you all are, there comes the day when you say to yourself, “If that guy scratches his head one more time, I’ll stick a knife in him.” You have to learn to give each other space. Provided you make the right music, it doesn’t matter if one gets pissed, one goes to a drugs den, one makes it to the arena to practice, another nips off to a football match. Get a band of four or five people together, extreme creatives who do wondrous things with their minds, hands, and voices, and there’s all the potential for fireworks. In that respect, Queen were no different from the rest of us.”

After touring to promote their bewilderingly dance-y, guitarless 1982 album
Hot Space
, Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor, and
John Deacon had effectively disbanded to concentrate on solo pursuits—notably Brian with Eddie Van Halen on the Star Fleet Project, and Freddie on his own album. In August 1983, they regrouped in Los Angeles to collaborate on
The Works
, their tenth studio album and debut CD. “Radio Ga Ga” was the first single.
The Works
also featured hard-rock number “Hammer to Fall,” the plaintive ballad “Is This the World We Created. . .?,” and the controversial “I Want to Break Free”—its outrageous cross-dressing video loosely based on a domestic scene from British TV soap
Coronation Street
. While the single proved hugely popular in the UK and other territories, it had offended conservative Middle America and upset many fans.

Worse, Queen had recently broken the United Nations cultural boycott, as had Rod Stewart, Rick Wakeman, Status Quo, and others, to perform in apartheid South Africa. Their October 1984 shows at Sun City, Sol Kerzner’s casino, golf, and entertainment resort in Bophuthatswana, earned the band widespread criticism and saw them fined and blacklisted by the British Musicians’ Union. For an African-born musician—which Freddie was—this was a travesty. The situation was not solved until racial segregation fell in 1993, a year before Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa. Queen would become major and active supporters of Mandela in later years.

“I stood up for Queen totally when they went to South Africa,” retorts Rick Wakeman. “I, too, performed a concert in the middle of apartheid, with an orchestra made up of black Zulus, Asians, and whites.

“I did
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
down there, and got crucified by the British press. I tried to explain, but they wouldn’t listen. Music isn’t ‘black’ or ‘white,’ it’s just an orchestra, a choir. To play there wasn’t supporting the apartheid regime. George Benson went there. Diana Ross went there. How come people of color could perform, but not whites? That’s racist in itself. Shirley Bassey went down, saying, ‘For fuck’s sake, I’m half-black and half-Welsh, how bad can it be?’ So when Queen went to South Africa, I thoroughly applauded it. They threw a
spotlight on the stupidity of it all and drew attention to the fact that music has no sexual, cultural, or racial barriers. It is for everyone.”

Live Aid’s “global jukebox” would be staged in two vast venues on 13 July 1985. Wembley Stadium and the John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia were booked. Organization proved a logistical nightmare.

“When Bob first came into my office to discuss this event, I thought he was joking,” remembers promoter Harvey Goldsmith. “In 1985 there weren’t fax machines, let alone computers, mobile phones, or anything else. We were working on Telex and landlines. I remember sitting in my office one afternoon with a big satellite map and a pair of old callipers, trying to map out where the satellite was going to be at certain times. Also, when we went to the BBC, Bob was thumping the table and saying, ‘I want seventeen hours of television’—that was revolutionary. Once the BBC had committed, we could use that as leverage to persuade broadcasters all over the world to do it. It was the first time that had ever happened. It was my job to pick up the pieces and make it work.”

Then came the challenge of persuading rock’s biggest names, some of whom had already contributed to the recording of the charity singles, to perform and help raise further money for the dying. This was to prove a fantastically blatant retaliation by the music fraternity at governments around the world that had failed to act.

As Francis Rossi of Status Quo puts it, “This was the dickheads in rock ’n’ roll, just getting on with it. It does make me angry, when I look back. I believe that if everyone had pulled together—if we’d understood then the magnitude of what could have been achieved—we could have got the oil companies, the BPs and Shells and whoever else, to do their bit. We could have made twenty times whatever it was we raised. Don’t tell me the government couldn’t have legislated to get round the issues with advertising and so on. All big businesses could have got involved, and the result would have been mega. At the time, it was virgin territory. We think about Live Aid differently today. But still, all credit to Bob. He pulled together something which precious few could have achieved.”

How did Geldof get Queen involved?

“Bob asked me to ask the band if they’d be up for it, which I had the opportunity to do when Queen were on tour in New Zealand,” says Spike Edney. “To which they replied, ‘Why doesn’t he ask us himself?’ I explained that he was afraid they would turn him down. They didn’t sound that convinced, but said they might be prepared to consider it. I told Bob, and he approached [Queen manager] Jim Beach officially.”

Geldof later explained how he’d persuaded them.

“I traced Jim all the way down to . . . some little seaside resort that he was staying at, and I said, ‘Look, for Christ’s sake, you know, what’s
wrong
with them?’ Jim said, ‘Oh, you know, Freddie’s very sensitive.’ So I said, ‘Tell the old faggot it’s gonna be the biggest thing that ever happened—this huge mega thing.’ So eventually they got back and said OK, they would definitely be doing it, and I thought, Great. And when they did do Live Aid, Queen were absolutely the best band of the day. Whatever your personal taste was irrelevant. When the day came, they played the best, they had the best sound, they used their time to the full. They understood the idea
exactly
—that it was a global jukebox, as I’d described it. They just went and smashed out one hit after the other. It was just unbelievable. I was actually upstairs in the Appeals box in Wembley Stadium, and suddenly I heard this sound. I thought, God, who’s got
this
sound together?”

Geldof had no way of knowing, and nor did anyone else at the time, that just ahead of their 6:40 p.m. appearance, Queen’s sound engineer James “Trip” Khalaf went out front to “check the system,” and fiddled surreptitiously with the limiters.

“We were
louder
than anyone else at Live Aid,” confessed Roger Taylor. “You’ve got to overwhelm the crowd in a stadium!”

“I went outside,” said Geldof, “and saw that it was Queen. I looked down over this crowd of people just going crazy, and the band were amazing. I think they were delighted afterwards—Freddie in particular. It was the perfect stage for him: the whole world. And he could ponce
about on stage doing ‘We Are the Champions’ and all that, you know? How perfect could it get?”

“We didn’t know Bob at all,” remarked John Deacon in a rare interview. “When ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ was out, that was a lot of the newer acts. For the gig, he wanted to get a lot of the established acts. Our first reaction was, we didn’t know—twenty minutes, no sound check! When it became apparent that it was going to happen, we’d just finished touring Japan and ended up having a meal in the hotel, discussing whether we should do it . . . and we said yes. It was one day that I was proud to be involved in the music business. A lot of days you certainly don’t feel that! But the day was fabulous, people forgot that element of competitiveness . . . it was a good morale booster for us, too, because it showed us the strength of support we had in England, and it showed us what we had to offer as a band.”

“There was nothing very magical about the way we put the set together,” admits Spike Edney.

“We all sat around discussing which songs to play, and eventually hit upon the idea of playing a medley of hits. No great mystery to it—if you’ve got a bunch of songs and you can’t choose, it’s the obvious thing to do. It was all very matter-of-fact, perfect timing notwithstanding, of course. Every member of that band is a nightmare perfectionist . . . and a good thing, too. On the day, it turned out to be amazing.”

“Queen had rehearsed really hard at the Shaw Theatre on [London’s] Euston Road for a whole week, while others just went on and busked it,” remembers Peter “Phoebe” Freestone, Freddie’s personal assistant.

“That’s why they were the best on the day. I remember Freddie being stunned when he launched into ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and saw thousands of hands start going. He was dazzled by that, having never seen anything quite like it before. They had only ever performed that song in darkness.”

Spike Edney remembers things somewhat differently, however, insisting that Freddie was in “full-blown bring-it-on mode,” and that he
and the band took proceedings completely in their stride. From what I saw, I have to agree with him. This was Queen’s ultimate moment, towards which they had been building their entire career.

“It was all organized chaos behind the scenes,” Spike recalled. “Everyone backstage was exceedingly engaging and open. No one was being bitchy or trying to outdo each other. Until Queen came on, it was all a bit of a nice summer picnic. Which is not to say that Queen were being calculating and cunning. They just did things the way they normally would, expecting everyone else to do the same. I was stunned to hear certain artists belting out their latest single: that’s not your audience out there! Queen didn’t do that. They just did what Bob demanded. The ‘greatest rock performance of all time,’ as it’s often referred to nowadays. What does that really mean? What it was, actually, was a band at the top of their game doing what they did best and surprising the fuck out of everybody.”

“No one was ready . . . except Queen,” recalls Pete Smith, the show’s worldwide event coordinator and author of
Live Aid
. “I saw the set on the monitors backstage. The BBC had installed TV monitors all around the artist area. With the many clocks that Harvey had ordered, these TVs kept everyone aware of what stage in the proceedings we were at. Queen tore up the rule book and then rewrote it in twenty minutes flat. The effect was palpable. Live Aid was now cooking on gas.”

At their brilliant best both musically and technically—there was no more professional rock band in existence at that point—Queen’s reputation on the world stage was confoundedly on the wane. Their popularity had slipped due to a plethora of miscalculations, mishaps, and a general, wide-sweeping change in musical tastes. Queen were beginning to feel that they’d had their day. A permanent split was in the cards. They’d talked about it. Thanks to Live Aid, all this was about to change.

Yet why were people so amazed by their electrifying performance? Spike Edney for one couldn’t fathom it.

“This was what Queen were about!” he laughed. “They were well known all over the planet for putting on a terrific show, for giving it all
they’d got. They were veterans at stadium gigs, they weren’t exactly novices. This was their natural habitat, and the bigger the audience the better. They could practically do this stuff in their sleep. Queen were surprised that everyone else was surprised, frankly! To them, it was another day at the office. Having said that, we knew when we came off that we’d done it. After Live Aid, Queen found that their whole world had changed.”

Bernard Doherty masterminded publicity for the event, taking care of all the media on the day.

“We knew we had to keep the press sweet, to ensure maximum coverage. I had only eight triple-A laminate passes, but hundreds of press. We had to share them around. One by one I said to everyone: ‘Right, you’ve got forty-five minutes in there, get what you can, get back out. See you in the Hard Rock Café,’ of which there was a ‘branch’ backstage. Backstage was a wagon-train-style scenario, with all the artists’ Portakabins pointing inwards, and Elton cooking a barbecue somewhere in the thick of it all because he didn’t fancy the offerings of the café. David Bailey set his photo studio up in a stinky little corner; he wasn’t proud. Nobody’s conditions were ideal. It was all thrown together on the fly. But somehow it happened. Everyone got in the spirit of the thing, most people left their egos at home, and it worked.”

At the time, Doherty had David Bowie as a client, and was obliged to take care of his needs, too.

“Always a little nerve-racking when you are looking after your artist and doing two jobs at once. In my case, that day, about eighteen jobs. There wasn’t much love lost between David and Elton—they’d obviously fallen out. David came out of his performance OK. Elton did all right. The one musician David was genuinely pleased to see was Freddie. They really were delighted to be together again. They stood chatting, as if they’d only seen each other yesterday. The affection between them was tangible. David was wearing an amazing blue suit, and looked incredibly sharp and healthy. Just before David went on, Freddie winked at him and said, ‘If I didn’t know you better, dear, I’d have to eat
you.’ No wonder David went out on stage with such a big smile on his face.”