Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (42 page)

Denis hadn’t expected Freddie’s temper.

“He would frequently get angry, and could be very dismissive. He was always saying, ‘Tell them all to fuck off!’ But he was pretty apologetic, too. Freddie’s magic was all down to the live performance. I think you have to be born with that kind of star quality. Not being ‘straight,’ if you like, he almost didn’t have as much to prove up there as the rest of them. He’d go on stage and take the piss out of an audience, where the others might have felt they couldn’t risk it. He had clearly been a really wild party animal in his day. Most of that was well out of his system by 1986.”

Spike Edney, master of keyboards on the Magic tour, agreed.

“The mad partying scene had quietened down tremendously. Making a point of two camps staying in separate hotels wasn’t relevant anymore,” he said, referring to the band’s sometime habit when on the road of dividing their accommodation into “homo” and “hetero” territory. In Munich, for example, when the band first arrived, and bunked down at the Munich Hilton, there had been the “PPP” (“Presidential Poofter Parlor”) and the “HH” (“Hetero Hangout”).

“By the time of the Magic tour, we were all staying together in one place,” said Spike. “Fred was much more settled. He didn’t have the taste for going out clubbing and staying up all night, the way he used to. Also, he was really looking after his voice. We’d often end up back in his suite, drinking champagne and playing Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit. I can remember several occasions still being up at nine a.m., just me and Fred, finishing off a game. Or playing Reverse Scrabble, where you have to
take the letters off but still leave complete words. Previous Queen tours had been about sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. By the mid-eighties, it was Scrabble.”

This new measured, middle-aged pace notwithstanding, there was one final party-to-end-all-parties left in Queen. The invitation of the season was to their post-Wembley celebration at the Roof Gardens club that July. London’s oldest and finest roof garden is there to this day, a hundred feet above Kensington High Street, on top of what was once Derry & Toms department store. During its brief tenure there, Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba emporium attracted a million customers a week to its themed retail floors and Rainbow Restaurant, where the public mingled freely with rock stars and celebrities. It was special to Freddie for a very personal reason, being the place where he had first set eyes on Mary Austin.

Oh what a night. Excess all areas. Dwarfs, drag queens, bottomless, topless—talking of which, Page Three girl Samantha Fox, who in the eighties in the UK was as famous as Kim Kardashian is in the United States today, took to the stage with Freddie in an impromptu set, and belted out Free’s 1970 hit “All Right Now.” She wasn’t bad.

“Absolutely OTT,” agrees lensman Hogie, “the party to end all parties. If you went in innocent, you came out wide-eyed. Naked, body-painted people. A vast fish tank with nothing in it except nudes sprayed to look like stones and reptiles, all lying on top of each other. Even coming up in that tiny lift, where were you supposed to look? Naked nipples and belly buttons everywhere. Queen did rock ’n’ roll parties the way they should be done.

“Freddie adored Sam Fox. She had an amazing, er, personality. Whatever she did was in the papers, and she was just breaking into pop singing. That night, Freddie was enchanted by her boobs. All he wanted to do was pick her up and shake her, to see if he could get those puppies out. He was so excited. ‘Ooh look, fresh meat! A plaything!’ Sam was game, she went along with it. He did get hold of her and threw her around like a rag doll. Those great pictures made all the papers next day, which didn’t do either of them any harm.”

“There will never be another band quite like Queen,” commented James “Trip” Khalaf, the American sound engineer who had bigged up Queen’s volume on Live Aid day.

“They were always ready for wretched excess. The parties were always bigger, the women always had larger breasts, the entire thing was on such a stupendous level that I could hardly keep up with it most of the time.”

As long as Trip had known Freddie, he never ceased to find him “a strange person.”

“He was lovely, but he wasn’t one of us . . . Fred was just a star. What else could he have been but this huge, bombastic rock star? The sonofabitch did a great job.”

On 9 August, Queen performed an open-air gig to more than 120,000 fans in the grounds of Knebworth Park, Stevenage. The stately home gave Queen their biggest-ever UK audience, and they celebrated into the night. The only person missing was Freddie: he had retreated discreetly at the end of the show, arm in arm with Jim Hutton and Peter Freestone. As Peter explained, Freddie had never enjoyed “that kind” of party: “He especially hated record company dos. No offense, but he didn’t want to hang about making small talk with employees.”

Perhaps Freddie sensed that Knebworth would be his final curtain. We all wish we’d known.

In the chopper conveying him back to the Battersea heliport that night, Freddie was informed of the fatal stabbing of a fan during the show. The crowd had proved impossible to penetrate. Officials had tried but failed to get an ambulance through to the scene.

“Freddie was very upset,” said Jim. “He was still subdued the next morning, as friends arrived for Sunday lunch. There was great coverage about the concert in the newspapers, which did seem to cheer him up a bit. But that fan’s death preyed on his mind. He only ever wanted his music to bring happiness.”

If the good times had to stop rolling, at least the memories are preserved. Of all the shows on the last tour Queen would ever play with
Freddie, one remains etched on the minds of all who were fortunate enough to be there.

*   *   *

Queen’s appearance at the Népstadion (People’s Stadium), Budapest, on Sunday, 27 July 1986 was more than just a gig. While Elton John, Jethro Tull, and Dire Straits had performed modest concerts in Hungary, this was to be the first open-air stadium concert by a Western rock group staged anywhere behind the Iron Curtain, then still in place. It attracted 80,000 fans, both Hungarian and from neighboring states. Tickets cost the equivalent of about £2 each, which for many was more than a month’s wages. Even so, promoters were fielding overwhelming demand, to the tune of more than a quarter of a million applications.

The Hungarian press went berserk as the big day approached. Newspapers even hinted at “lenient restrictions on audience behavior,” from which we assumed that they were going to be allowed to clap. They would certainly not be drunk, drugged, disorderly, nor aggressive, the venue being patrolled by submachine-gun-toting police. The only booze available was orange squash. Even smoking was banned from the field. A sedate, well-regulated occasion was anticipated. Thank God for the backstage pass.

Queen’s primary press officers—Roxy Meade and Phil Symes—bombarded we journalists with facts and figures. Seventeen cameras would film at the Népstadion, one of them operated by Gyorgy Illes, seventy-one, a veteran cameraman and revered tutor at Hungary’s Film Academy. Illes was famous because his pupil Vilmos Zsigmond had earned an Oscar for his work on Spielberg’s 1977 movie
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. Queen and crew would cruise down the blue Danube from Vienna to Budapest on Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s official hydrofoil. Other Magic tour fact sheets informed us that the stage measured up to 6,000 square feet, depending on indoor or outdoor venue; that the entire performance area would be carpeted in gray Axminster; that 8.6 miles of cable would be used on each date to connect
instrumental, sound, lighting, and other stage equipment to five full-power generators providing 5,000 amps; and that the sound system would be powered by more than half a million watts, with revolutionary delay towers. You didn’t get that kind of press release from Michael Jackson or Elton John.

Queen’s appearance was now being hailed as a giant step for East-West relations. Chargé d’Affaires David Colvin, acting British ambassador to Hungary, rose to the occasion, hosting a pre-gig reception at a different kind of Embassy club from the one we were used to, for the band and cautiously selected special guests.

Our evening at the Hungarian Embassy assembled an incongruous mix of English expats, Eastern bloc musicians, Western rock stars, Her Britannic Majesty’s press corps, and the usual smattering of hangers-on. Freddie, while appearing bemused by it all, confessed that he would “rather have gone shopping” than be standing there listening to people “boring the pants off” each other with the ins and outs of Eastern European history. He had long maintained a dignified apolitical stance. While his private views bordered at times on imperialist, he knew better than to be drawn into sociopolitical discussions in public. An international celebrity, he said, was better off “leaving politics to the chaps who are paid to do the job, dear.”

“That was Freddie to a T,” said Peter Freestone. “He even considered U2 too political. He knew he was where he was because he was an entertainer. He wasn’t there to lead people in their political beliefs.”

A few days later, Freddie gave the British press an elegant party in his presidential suite at the Duna Intercontinental hotel. “Presidential” was an understatement, despite his blasé dismissal that “all suites are equal.”

“Well, this one’s a fucking sight more equal than mine,” retorted Roger, when he stopped by to check it out.

The gracious host, Freddie shook hands and exchanged platitudes as he welcomed us. Smaller than his stage persona, more muscular and fitter-looking than plenty half his age—he was less than two months off
his fortieth birthday—he was scrubbed, fragrant, and sporting a bright floral shirt and tight pale denim jeans. His impeccably groomed hair revealed a small, threadbare patch just beginning to shine at the crown.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. “Have you people been having a good time?” His voice was quiet, his half-smile polite, as he beckoned crystal goblets of champagne.

Freddie nodded and chuckled quietly as we related our Budapest adventures: taking the waters at the Gellert baths, submitting to carbolic massage by gelatinous “Sumo-women”—although we later agreed that Freddie must be an old hand at all that. He wanted to know if we had “bought” anything. We described our quirky purchases with gush.

“Very good, very good,” he smiled, waving us through a further reception room towards a sumptuous buffet heaving with lobsters, prawns, caviar, sugared fruits, and exotic ice creams. At a gleaming grand piano, a tuxedoed musician sat fingering lobby tunes.

The sliding glass windows of the suite were drawn back, giving access to a balcony as wide as the room. In the indigo distance loomed silhouettes of famous tourist attractions: Fishermen’s Bastion, the citadel on Gellert Hill, the soaring, floodlit spire of Matthias church. Mary Austin stood chatting quietly with Jim Beach, perhaps discussing, offered some wag, the wisdom of more fiber in the diet. Jim Hutton kept a limbo dancer’s profile in the corner, as did Brian, Roger, John, and a few of the crew.

Come Sunday, plastered with Access All Areas passes, we coached it through concrete suburbs to the Népstadion. Hungarian folk dancers in red, white, and black costumes twirled handkerchiefs to music to psych us for the main event. It was a tidal wave when it came. Pomp, circumstance, billowing smoke, and blinding lights, the deafening, all-encompassing experience of Queen.

What lingers in the memory? Brian, keener than an audition novice, frantic fingers tearing a sixpence plectrum through the strings of his fireplace guitar. His rendition, with Freddie, of popular Hungarian song “Tavasi Szél Vizet Áraszt”—“The Spring Wind Makes Waters Flood.” The crowd roaring their appreciation that the rockers had gone to so
much trouble to learn their ditsy folk ballad, hardly noticing Freddie checking the lyrics every few seconds, which he had scrawled phonetically in pen on his left palm. The audience belting out “Ga Ga” word-perfect, their synchronized handclapping a vision for sore eyes. The grand semifinale: Freddie, stripped to the waist, leaking sweat into the seams of a vast Union Jack; and his flamboyant about-turn, moments later, revealing the broad horizontal red, white, and green stripes of the Hungarian national flag.

It was not all. For his dramatic final appearance, Freddie sailed onto the stage draped in designer Diana Moseley’s regal
pièce de résistance
, an ermine-edged velvet cape and train, and sporting a Coronation-style crown. Brian’s inimitable take on “God Save the Queen” ripped through the stadium in accompaniment, to tumultuous applause. That sequence, first recorded for the band’s fourth album
A Night at the Opera
in 1974, and which had been performed as an outro at virtually every Queen gig since, was hardly unexpected. But it sounded somehow more majestic than ever in that corner of a foreign field.

“That was our most challenging and exhilarating gig ever,” Brian told us backstage afterwards.

We the hacks? We’d seen it all before. We were too blasé, God knows. We hadn’t even paid for our tickets. What we’d seen, we knew the next morning, once the champagne had worn off, was just another knock-out Queen concert. We had been taking their brilliance for granted for years. Why stop now? The wonderment, the ambience, that Christmas morning–like magic, had emanated entirely from the Hungarian audience. To those fans, some of whom had handed over four weeks’ wages for the privilege, it will still be the most phenomenal spectacle of their lives.

Rock’s greatest front man had triumphed again. It was, if only we’d known, a hollow victory. The irony of the tour’s title was just beginning to dawn. For Freddie, the writing was on the wall. The magic that night thrilled everyone but him.

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