Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (41 page)

The Works
tour nailed, Brian remained in Australia with his family for a holiday, John and Roger repaired to Roger’s new home on Ibiza, and Freddie made a beeline for Munich, for more mirth and misdemeanors with his lovers.

Thank God for Live Aid.

*   *   *

“We were shite,” shrugs Francis Rossi of the UK supergroup Status Quo, recalling their valiant opening of the London leg on 13 July.

“Really bad. Underrehearsed. Not rehearsed at all, truth be told. If we’d taken it on board a bit better, what it was all about and the fact that
we’d have a global audience, we’d have rehearsed. Queen, of course, had just been out on tour, and were as slick as can be.
And
they rehearsed.

“Maybe Bowie was good, but no one else stands out much in the memory. Bono jumps off the stage, so fucking what. It was Queen’s day, no question. What you have to remember is that, at that point, no one realized it was as big as it turned out to be. Bob was this loud upstart Irish bloke mouthing off about what he was going to do. And he pulled it off. It’s tricky to keep your ego out of it completely, of course. Because we’re stars, darling. But there wasn’t too much of that going on, on the day.

“When we got to Wembley that day for the show, Freddie put me straight about a lot of things, if I can use that expression,” Francis goes on.

“I remember we were moved to this holding area for artists, and we were all messing about. But then something happened. I don’t have any problem with gay guys: how could I? I have two gay cousins and a gay son. But I had always been one of those straight guys who believed that gays aren’t as manly as the rest of us. How wrong could I be? Freddie and I were engaged in a little bit of a tussle, having a laugh, when suddenly he had me in a half nelson and I just couldn’t fucking move. He was so strong. So much information went flooding through my brain at that point. It was the steepest learning curve. I can see the expression on my face even now—
and
on his. I froze. I stared up at him. He was the strongest person I’d ever met in my life. ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ he said with this wicked laugh, ‘if I wanted you, I could have you,’ just like that.

“I know a lot of people think that homosexuals—I prefer the word ‘faggots,’ actually, none of this pussyfooting about—can’t fight. These schmucks who get on telly and pontificate about why we shouldn’t have gays in the army: what do they
think
we’ve always had? Our industry’s full of gays. I find camp people marvelously entertaining, and a lot of the time easier to deal with than the rest. Rick (Parfitt) used to camp it up loads, in the good old days. Lots of us did. I’ve often thought that gays are better adjusted than the rest of us. They have to be, coping with
what they have to deal with in the first place. No one was better than Freddie at that. He knew who he was; at least he did by then. Live Aid was definitely his day, no one else’s. I fucking loved him for it.”

“Credit must go to all of them for that phenomenal performance,” says Paul Gambaccini. “When Queen went on I was backstage, interviewing artists for the TV broadcast. You could feel the frisson. All the artists stopped talking among themselves, stopped doing whatever they were doing, and turned towards the stage. Everyone knew, as it was happening, that Queen were stealing the show. Freddie was doing his dance with the cameraman, in what was a blatant sexually charged performance. They were rehearsed, they were ready, they were utter professionals. We thought, oh my God, this is as good as a live rock performance gets. Queen were the best. When you think back to who else was on that bill, that’s just incredible. Queen were over. They’d had their day. Yet here Queen were, reinventing themselves and going again before our very eyes. It still takes my breath away when I think about it. Freddie Mercury delivered the greatest front-man performance anyone had ever seen.”

Uplifted by the Live Aid experience, Queen had soul-searching to do. Perhaps they had been bracing themselves for a natural conclusion to their mostly phenomenal career. They couldn’t go on indefinitely, could they? Bands that do run the risk of diminution into caricature. Legendary status is achieved by quitting ahead. Each member of Queen had sidetracked into solo projects, with mixed results, and only Freddie with a modicum of success. Now forced to accept that they were better off sticking together than stalking separate paths, particularly at their time of life, they resolved to defer oblivion and to go again. Live Aid had gifted them a second chance. No rock act worth its stash would pass that up. Queen couldn’t wait to get back on the road. Europe 1986 would be the most ambitious tour of their career.

But first, Freddie’s thirty-ninth birthday party, an excessive £50,000 black-and-white ball at Henderson’s, one of his favorite Munich clubs. The party would be combined with a shoot to create a video for “Living
On My Own.” It featured 300 friends, including Barbara Valentin and Ingrid Mack, wife of Reinhold. Many of the extras were flown in from London and most were in drag—except Freddie, who wore harlequin tights, epauletted military jacket, and white gloves, and Mary Austin, who came as a St. Trinian’s schoolgirl. Brian was a witch, Peter Freestone a gypsy. The resultant video was an acid trip—hedonistic, hallucinatory, bare-buttocked, throbbing—and was never screened in the United States. In Britain, the single only managed a chart position of Number Fifty.

Barbara Valentin organized the party’s black-and-white cuisine.

“Caviar and mashed potato—Freddie’s favorite—a cake in the shape of a grand piano, and magnums of Cristal champagne, which people carried away under their arms. Everybody stole from Freddie.” She sighed. “Even two containers of his birthday presents went missing.”

Next came a commitment to Russell Mulcahy, partner of David Mallet and Scott Millaney in MGMM, to create music for his forthcoming film,
Highlander
, starring Christopher Lambert. Again, Queen managed to incur the wrath of the press, with the release of the single “One Vision.” Denounced for having “cashed in on their Live Aid success” with this “blatantly themed” Top Ten hit, Queen were incensed. The song was in fact inspired by civil rights leader Martin Luther King’s famous 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and not by Live Aid, retorted Roger, the song’s composer. The track stands out for its reversed vocals at the beginning, which convey comprehensible lyrics when played forwards: “God works in mysterious ways . . . mysterious ways . . .”

In defiance, they agreed to make a mini–Queen documentary to use as a promo video for the record. This was the first time they worked with Torpedo Twins Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, but by no means the last. In 1987 the Twins completed a visual anthology of the band’s career entitled
Magic Years
.

At Fashion Aid for Ethiopia at the Royal Albert Hall on 5 November 1985, featuring eighteen of the world’s top fashion designers, including
Yves St. Laurent, Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, and Zandra Rhodes, Freddie played gracious groom to actress Jane Seymour’s blushing bride. Each wore an outfit designed by David and Elizabeth Emanuel, who had created the wedding dress of Lady Diana Spencer for her marriage to the Prince of Wales. Freddie then put himself at the disposal of his friend Dave Clark, the former singing drummer with sixties group the Dave Clark Five. Dave was writing and producing an inventive new stage musical destined for the Dominion Theatre on Tottenham Court Road. Entitled
Time
, it would star Cliff Richard as well as Sir Laurence Olivier, the latter appearing as a hologram. Freddie collaborated on a couple of tracks for an album which also featured Stevie Wonder, Dionne Warwick, and Julian Lennon, and made a one-off stage performance. EMI, meanwhile, were reaping rewards with a luxury boxed set of Queen albums (with a few glaring omissions). Still Freddie was not enjoying the solo success he had longed for. “Love Me Like There’s No Tomorrow,” the fifth single from
Mr. Bad Guy
and the ballad he had written for Barbara, didn’t even chart.

Queen’s sound track for
Highlander
would now be combined to form their new album. After appearing at the Montreux Rock Festival, rehearsals began for the European tour. Kicking off in Stockholm, it would peak at Wembley Stadium and at Knebworth Park, earning more than £11 million over twenty-six shows. The tour saw Queen break the UK’s all-time attendance record, performing to more than 400,000 fans. Did they somehow have an inkling this would be their last chance to experience the Freddie magic live?

21

I want to go to places I’ve never been. To me, it’s all about people. Music should go all around the world. I want to go to Russia and China and places I haven’t seen, before it’s too late—before I end up in a wheelchair and can’t do anything. I’ll still be wearing my same tights, too. I can imagine them wheeling me on stage in a wheelchair, up to a piano, and still singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Freddie Mercury

I rather liked the surrealism of going to the Hungarian embassy for a rock ’n’ roll party, knowing that they were more accustomed to welcoming a completely different kind of Queen.

Peter Hillmore

A
Kind of Magic
, Queen’s fourteenth album and the
Highlander
sound track, was released at the end of May 1986 to mark the start of their European tour. As expected, it soared to Number One. At dawn on Wednesday 4 June, 13 huge trucks of equipment rumbled out of London to begin an odyssey across 11 countries. Queen would perform 26 concerts for a million fans in 20 cities, including Stockholm, Paris, Munich, Barcelona, and Budapest. Each city was chosen, for personal reasons, by the band.

Denis O’Regan, now in big demand, was hired by Jim Beach through Queen’s latest publicist, Phil Symes, to act as the tour’s official photographer. He says he was nervous, but not about taking pictures.

“I’d heard about what they got up to. Tony Brainsby, their first PR, told me he’d once found Freddie in a garbage can behind the Embassy Club.

“Roger, John, and Brian were the lads. Pretty easygoing. Freddie was the most enigmatic. There were often times when he couldn’t keep up with what he was thinking. His brain would be doing nineteen to the dozen, and his mind raced ahead of his mouth. He’d say things like “What I want to get is the flow of the, um . . . oh, fuck it!” He’d have whole conversations in which it was just ‘fuck it, fuck it!’ because he couldn’t get his lips round what he wanted to say.”

No rock tour virgin, even Denis was taken aback by how hard this band enjoyed themselves—as if on a mission to parody what a rock ’n’ roll supergroup was meant to be like.

“There were parties in brothels, Roman baths, Turkish baths. More lesbian strippers backstage at Wembley, and all those naked women painted to look like they were wearing uniforms at the Roof Gardens party, after the Wembley show. Not to mention the outrageous goings-on in the toilets.”

It wasn’t all fun. Indeed, the crew seemed to live the dream better than the band most of the time. From what he witnessed at close range, Denis could not help but sympathize with Freddie for his loathing of life on tour. But contractual obligations dictated the pace. Make an album, tour to promote it: the pattern back then was set in stone.

“Freddie was not happiest on the road,” Denis admits. “He once told me that he enjoyed performing, but
hated
touring. He seemed so vulnerable. Not at all what I’d expected. He could be dainty and sweet, like a little child. He’d sit at the end of the table clapping his hands and getting all excited about some dinner or other. Everything had to be just so. It was so cute. He was quiet, reserved, and quite introverted a lot of the time. But he’d go from one extreme to the other in a flash. Considering
what a big strong guy he looked on stage, he seemed petite and sometimes effeminate behind the scenes.”

Although Denis did not find him difficult to photograph, he was surprised to note how shy Freddie was.

“He would never really pose, as such. He would clown around, or ignore me and just be ‘himself.’ He might appear at the door wearing a crown, and throw a few shapes, knowing I was there—but not specifically inviting me to take photographs. He always knew what he was doing, of course.”