Freddie Mercury (15 page)

At first, Freddie didn’t think too much of the idea, thinking it was just another of those self-aggrandizing manoeuvres for publicity purposes. After a short period of time when news filtered through of the actual scale and importance of the show vis-a-vis the huge worldwide television coverage involved, the band wholeheartedly agreed to participate. You have to remember that at this point they weren’t really into doing anything as Queen.

The band were given a twenty minute slot just like everybody else. Then the hard part came trying to decide what to perform to give the very best of Queen in twenty minutes when one of their shows which obviously showed the band at its very best normally took anything up to two hours. They decided on the content and running order of the set and stuck to that throughout rehearsals even though, as we all know, Brian and Freddie came on again later in an auxiliary spot to sing ‘Is This The World That We Created?’

I think the reason that Queen came off best from that concert on the day was due to their professionalism and their instinctive realisation that even for a twenty minute set, extensive rehearsals are a hundred per cent necessary. It would never have occurred to them not to rehearse.

The band hired the Shaw Theatre on Euston Road and rehearsed
solidly for a week. It was a mini-tour atmosphere which was created, their appearance having brought back so many of the tour crew like Gerry Stickells from America as well as Trip Khalaf and Jim Devenney, taking care of the outfront sound and stage monitors respectively as well as the sound and lighting crew the band already knew.

The resulting publicity from the Live Aid appearance made the band aware that they were still wanted and brought about a change in their thinking regarding their future as Queen. So, while it wasn’t exactly as reported in the press that the band thought they would ‘cash in’ on their renaissance, it certainly became the platform for a new adventure and got their creative juices flowing.

‘One Vision’ was the first track, which was subsequently used on the film
Iron Eagle.
I imagine the inspiration came from the Live Aid experience because ultimately, Freddie’s original opinion on the gig was worn away and he actually appreciated what the whole project was about. Freddie was always of the opinion that there were at least two motives for anything; he was a cynic in the true sense of the word. The band really loved getting back to work as Queen, instead of just fulfilling their solo ambitions.

‘One Vision’ was begun in Munich at Musicland Studios and the association with the cinema was continued when ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’, ‘Gimme The Prize’, ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’ and ‘Princes Of The Universe’ were used in the hugely popular film
Highlander
starring Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery.

This album also furnished another of the band’s crowd-pleasing anthems, namely ‘Friends Will Be Friends’. The co-composition credit on this track and on ‘Pain Is So Close To Pleasure’ was merely because John Deacon insisted that Freddie’s contribution be recognised and acknowledged. John’s honesty and integrity would not have allowed him to do otherwise.

It appears that all bands travel the recording road with one producer for a while until the ideas from their collaboration have been exhausted and so after five albums, Dave Richards took over the role of nanny, which is basically what the co-producer on any of the Queen albums had to do for the band.

After
A Kind Of Magic
and the tour promoting that album, once again Queen as a collective went their separate ways to pursue their individual projects.

I really don’t know when Freddie and Dave Clark first met but
word came to Freddie that Dave Clark would like to have Freddie involved in a project that he had initiated. His show,
Time
, was already a hit in London’s West End at The Dominion Theatre, starring Cliff Richard. Dave wanted an album made of the songs but had decided not to make it one of the routine ‘cast albums’ because these were usually made on a Sunday, the cast’s day off and the quality tended to suffer a little.

Dave hit upon the idea of having guest singers of celebrity status to participate in the recording of the show’s songs. Freddie was approached and performed three songs one of which was pronounced so good that it was released as a single, entitled ‘Time’ on the EMI label. It wasn’t the first time Freddie had contributed a couple of songs to the soundtrack of a show. A couple of years earlier in 1984, Freddie had been approached by Giorgio Moroder, Mack’s partner who successfully persuaded him to sing two tracks on his new musical reworking of Fritz Lang’s classic film
Metropolis
which was re-released to cinemas in its newly colourised state. Although there was an album released of the
Metropolis
soundtrack, Freddie’s contributions, one of which was called ‘Love Kills’ were never included by him anywhere else. Freddie was not usually one to show interest in singing other people’s songs. He had to have a personal involvement as well.

It was during these
Time
sessions with Dave Clark that Freddie started what was to become his close musical partnership with Mike Moran. Other than being associated with Lynsey de Paul and the Eurovision Song Contest, Mike was celebrated for having originally been associated with Blue Mink, the famous Seventies band of top session musicians which included Messrs Greenaway and Cook and Madeleine Bell. Mike is one of the music world’s gentlemen. He is also an amazing technician, can play keyboards like you wouldn’t believe and has his feet planted firmly on the ground. He has been professionally involved with just about all of the luminaries of the London musical stage and has created a lot of music for use on television and, when Freddie met him, was playing keyboards for the
Time
sessions at the Abbey Road Studios of EMI.

For all Freddie’s talents and ability, he found working entirely on his own very difficult. He had to have a sounding board. Perhaps it was that he didn’t have enough self-confidence in his own abilities? All the songs he had created before now had always been the result of collaboration with the rest of Queen, except of course for his own
album,
Mr. Bad Guy.
That was the way they worked. He wasn’t a hundred per cent sure of his own judgements. But, as has been shown, given the right set of circumstances, the most amazing work could be produced. It’s like Freddie was the firework that needed to be lit but which once up in the sky explodes into all those glorious colours. You know the one, always the biggest one at the climax of the display.

In the relationship with Mike Moran, there was outwardly no boss. I think that both parties admired each other for different talents and abilities. Freddie, amongst the rest of the world, found it difficult to believe what Mike Moran could do with his fingers. For those who have not been fortunate enough to be a witness in my position, I can only confirm that given any keyboard, Mike Moran can play up a masterpiece. For one of Freddie’s birthdays, Mike gave him a cassette on which was written simply, ‘Happy Birthday’. However, on the tape he had taken the familiar ‘Happy Birthday’ theme and then created half-a-dozen variations in the styles of different composers. Quite superb. Freddie just threw up his arms in joy as he listened to it. I think Freddie really enjoyed this collaboration because the end results were achieved without confrontation whereas so much of Queen’s work, although superb, was coloured with the memories of confrontation and conflict. It was because of the prospect of argument and disharmony that on occasion Freddie would refuse to go to the studio.

Freddie and Mike had been in the music business for approximately the same amount of time and they were equals. While Freddie had the more meteoric rise, Mike Moran had been a mainstay and continual presence behind more famous artists than himself. Mike was also quite content to allow Freddie to do the shining in public.

So, it should not come as any great surprise that the next product of this burgeoning partnership was one of Freddie’s great joys, ‘The Great Pretender’. This was recorded in early 1987 in Mike’s studio in his old house in Radlett in Hertfordshire. Freddie went off with Peter Straker late one morning with Terry driving them without really letting us at the house in on ‘the secret’.

Much later that night, he came back, obviously thrilled, pissed out of his brain, clutching a copy of his day’s work and played us the rough mix of ‘The Great Pretender’. I don’t know that the original plan was ever to release it as a single, but over a short period it became apparent from the comments from everyone who heard it that this
version of the song had prospects. Perhaps one of the main reasons it was released was because Freddie already had his idea of what was to happen in the video and so, obviously, the only way to make a video practical was to release a single. Even Freddie, while having enough money to do it, wasn’t silly enough to spend a huge amount of money to make a video just to make a video. That vain he wasn’t! By March ‘The Great Pretender’ had reached number five in the national charts.

In the context of studio recording, I have to mention Scrabble. Whenever boredom threatened to raise its ugly head, the Scrabble board was brought out and anybody available was press-ganged into playing. Freddie didn’t care how many people played just as long as the game was in progress. Quite often there would be four teams with two or three people on each team. He insisted no one was left out from tape-op to other superstars. I suppose it must have been the boarding school upbringing again but he was quite ruthless when playing and also, if truth be known, wasn’t the most gracious of losers. Dictionaries were only ever used, however, after the fact. Just to check. Having said all this, Freddie wasn’t on the losing team very often. He had a very good mind, not only for the words themselves but also for their most advantageous placing. We started to take Travel Scrabble with us at one point but the flights weren’t really long enough – especially Concorde ones – for him to get bored.

Whenever he caught me playing solitaire or patience in the studio, he regarded it as a waste of time and that other things should be being done with that time. He himself was entirely uninterested in card games. Any games. Anything where memory was a requirement. With Scrabble, everything was in front of him, not unlike the elements and intricacies of a studio’s sound desk and the contents and whereabouts of all the tracks. It was, after all, only a matter, like Scrabble, of configuring your assets to greatest advantage.

We now progress to what I believe was the pinnacle of his solo work. It is in recounting the recording of his
Barcelona
album that I can go into greatest detail about Freddie and the way he worked because it is unalloyed by any overall Queen consideration or involvement. This album above all others was something he and only he wanted to do. He didn’t do this album to rake in a fortune. It was done purely for his own delectation and where it led, he didn’t care. As you will see, it was an entirely different recording process to any he had previously encountered. It was almost as though he was growing
up. If Queen were his childhood playmates,
Mr. Bad Guy
and ‘The Great Pretender’ were his rebellious teenage, then
Barcelona
was the final flowering of the grown man and it’s the grown man who then went on to record
The Miracle
and
Innuendo.

It must also be borne in mind that although nobody else knew, perhaps Freddie was getting an inkling that all was not well with his health. In hindsight, he often said that he had thought that
Barcelona
might be his last work and so of course he was thrilled when he made it through
The Miracle.
He never even dreamed that he would see
Innuendo
completed.

Barcelona
was his essence. Because it was a record he desperately wanted to make, he was determined that it was to contain the best of Freddie Mercury he could offer. After all, it could have been his memorial.

Although a great deal of Freddie’s work had been considered as operatic, he in fact knew very little about opera and even less about opera singers although by the time
Barcelona
came about, I could recognise many similar traits between the diva of the opera stage and the diva of rock’n’roll.

For the following recording I am prepared to accept either the blame or the praise. Up until early 1981, Freddie had a passion for the voices of operatic tenors, mainly Luciano Pavarotti. He was always taken aback at the control that tenors maintained over their voices, the only operatic vocal range in which at that point he had any interest. He realised that this was the culmination of years of training for most of them and was fully appreciative of the result, particularly the way some could produce high notes extremely softly. Now, that was control as far as he was concerned.

Until January 1981, he had only heard Pavarotti’s voice on disc or tape or perhaps, occasionally, on television and so as I became aware of Pavarotti’s appearance at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden that month, I persuaded Freddie to put his money where his mouth was and Freddie subsequently bought some tickets for the opera.

As we took our seats all dressed to the nines in evening clothes, I gave him a rough outline of the plot of
Un Ballo In Maschera
by Giuseppe Verdi. He was excited at the prospect of hearing his hero live. Freddie was used to recording and then going out on tour to reproduce the recordings live. With Queen in particular, they tried to
ensure that the live version was easily recognisable and comparable with the studio version. Freddie now wanted to see if that was the same in opera. The lights went down and in this particular opera, the tenor has his first big aria in the first scene. Freddie really enjoyed it. During the scene change, I explained to him the action moves to a Gypsy Fortune Teller’s camp where the heroine makes a brief appearance trying to find some herbs to make her fall out of love.

“Well I certainly don’t need any of those, do!?” piped up the voice beside me. The scene began and the soprano made her unheralded entrance. While the piece that she sings is only a small trio, this soprano certainly made her presence felt. Freddie watched and listened spellbound. The soprano sailed and soared through the trio which exploited much of her talent and range and power. At the end when the heroine slips away, Freddie’s jaw had dropped and he applauded wildly. Once the applause stopped, he broke all opera house tradition and started talking, asking me, “Who
is
this woman… What’s her name?… Tell me…” His words almost tumbled out, so excited had he been. I looked in the programme just to double-check. It was indeed, as I had thought, Montserrat Caballe.