Is This The Real Life? (28 page)

Interviewed in New York for American TV, though, it was Mercury that answered the questions while the rest of the band sat mute beside him. ‘Is this the future? Is this where rock is going?' asked his interviewer. Fussing with his hair, the singer fired back: ‘There's no message, I'm not trying to put anything across.' He grinned. ‘It's just rock 'n' roll.'

Queen had acquired two Elektra/Asylum support acts for different legs of the tour. Both Southern soul duo The Cate Brothers and Detroit rockers Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band were quite unlike the headliners. The US press was bemused by the ‘Jekyll and Hyde pairing' but the tour progressed without bloodshed or a repeat of the previous year's spat with Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Onstage, Mercury showed no reticence whatsoever. ‘I'm going to sing until my throat is like a vulture's crotch,' he forewarned one reporter. Between songs, he threw thornless roses into the throng and toasted them with champagne. At one show, a female fan rushed to the front and began waving at him between songs. Eventually, Mercury sidled over and asked haughtily, ‘Yes, my dear, what do you want?' When it became apparent that she just wanted to touch him, he took the teenage girl's hand daintily before whispering, ‘For you, a gentle touch.'

Closing with four nights at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and a final show at San Diego Sports Arena, the press applauded Queen's ‘purist hard rock' and predicted that the band would be filling 10,000-seaters next time round. By the end of the tour, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody' had made its way into the Top 20, ultimately reaching number 9. But America's love affair with the song would never equal Britain's, at least not until it was re-released following Mercury's death.
Rolling Stone
's Steven Turner marvelled at the overdubs and lyrics that were ‘simultaneously violent and mystifying', but there was still a suggestion that Queen were a European phenomenon and that Mercury's ‘queenly stage demeanour' could hold them back in America.

In the UK, Queen's concert film from the Rainbow began playing in cinemas across the country, just as the band began another eight-night tour of Japan. Greeted with even greater adulation than on their first visit, the trip gave Mercury the
opportunity to indulge in some retail therapy. ‘The Japanese call it “crazy shopping”,' he explained. ‘I walk around like the Pied Piper with hordes of people following me, shouting out, “You crazee shopping!”' Accompanied by the Japanese promoter's wife, Mercury's spending sprees would be conducted in empty department stores which had been left open for his pleasure. It would then fall to Pete Brown to freight the antique chairs, clothes, artworks and Japanese woodcuts back to England.

‘Pete was a fantastic tour manager,' explains Caroline Boucher. ‘But he was also massively dyslexic. How he managed with all those sheets of paper and itineraries and timings … especially in Japan. Apparently, he used to memorise the shapes on each of the band's hotel keys as a way of knowing whose room was whose.'

Gary Langan witnessed a similar episode of ‘crazy shopping' in London. ‘I think Queen had finally got their royalty cheques out of Trident,' he recalls. Mercury had raided Harrods before moving onto Christopher Wray on the Kings Road and acquiring a set of Tiffany lamps. ‘When he came back he said, “Darlings, I couldn't spend another penny more!”

‘Fred did enjoy his money,' agreed Roger Taylor. ‘But he also exaggerated about his spending, because he knew that it would get right up people's noses. He did it on purpose.' After years of scraping by, every
objet d'art
, every Louis XIV chair purchased was a riposte to the critics, the Sheffields, the doubters at Ealing art college.

With just a week to get over the jet-lag, Queen followed Japan with a short tour of Australia in April. It would be their first visit to the country since the ill-fated Sunbury Festival two years earlier. At that gig, Mercury had told the audience that when Queen returned to their country they would be the biggest band in the world. While not quite the case, both ‘Bohemian Rhapsody' and
A
Night at the Opera
had sold well in Australia and New Zealand.

Queen had also sold out the majority of the shows in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane. But before their first gig at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney, Mercury threw an extraordinary tantrum. An annual fair was taking place in the grounds of the venue, making it inaccessible by car. When the band was advised to
make the short trip through the fairground to the venue on foot, Mercury refused. Instead, his limousine nudged its way through hordes of people, while Freddie sat in the back seat, sipping champagne and ignoring the insults and catcalls from those outside. Inside his dressing room, the singer, in a rage, grabbed a mirror and smashed it over Pete Brown's head, supposedly showering the room with glass. Recounting the incident in 1996, Brown simply explained: ‘He just had to take it out on someone, and that time it was me.' Peter Hince remembers the incident, but points out that had it been a full-size mirror, Brown would have been seriously injured: ‘I do believe that Freddie made Pete sweep up the glass afterwards.'

‘Pete Brown could have a pretty short fuse at times,' offers Caroline Boucher. ‘But I think he was good at keeping it in check around the band. But both he and his brother Steve, who was Elton John's first producer, came from a Salvation Army background. That must have taught him an enormous amount of patience and fortitude.'

In May, during a three-month break, Brian May married girlfriend Christine Mullen at St Osmund's Roman Catholic church in Barnes. By now, he had left the dismal Earls Court bedsit and bought a modest semi-detached house for the couple in Suffolk Road, Barnes. His bandmates' living conditions had also finally improved. Deacon, his wife Veronica and son Robert had their own Victorian semi in Putney. Roger Taylor, soon to become flush from the royalties for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody' and its B-side ‘I'm in Love With My Car', had rather more money at his disposal, and moved into a house in upmarket Fulham, later adding a Surrey country-house to his property portfolio.

By the end of the year, Mercury and Mary Austin's relationship would change for ever. Freddie moved out of their shared flat and in to another at 12 Stafford Terrace, Holland Park. As a parting gift, Mercury later bought Mary a £30,000 flat nearby. But as she explained, ‘I could see Freddie's own flat from my bathroom. I thought, “Oh, I'm never going to get away.”' Mary would also go on to work for Mercury in his newly formed production company Goose Productions.

Mercury and Austin's relationship would outlast almost all of the singer's relationships with men. Their friendship endured, despite their change in circumstances. To the press and to the public, they were still a couple. By playing up his campness, Mercury had become even more adroit at deflecting intrusive questions about his private life and sexual orientation. In 1976, when asked whether he was straight, gay or bi-sexual, the singer replied: ‘I sleep with men, women, cats, you name it …'

In June, EMI released the single ‘You're My Best Friend'. It reached number 7 and, later, number 12 in the States. As one EMI insider explains, ‘It was the anti-“Bohemian Rhapsody”.' A charming love song, free of operatics and running to a manageable length, it was unlikely to scare the horses.

Queen, restless as ever, were already moving on to the next project. In July, they booked into the Manor studio, in Oxfordshire, owned by Virgin Records supremo Richard Branson, to start work on another album. Roy Thomas Baker's four-album contract with Queen had now expired. By mutual agreement, Queen would produce their fifth album themselves, with Gary Langan and Mike Stone engineering.

‘Roy's ego was exploding,' laughs Langan, ‘and he went off to America.' Baker had signed a deal with CBS Records, and was busily producing the likes of Ian Hunter. Over the next few months, though, he would drop in and out of Queen's lives, checking on their progress and offering advice. The relationship between the two parties seemed to be that of a parent looking on, anxiously, as their child heads off to make his own way in the world. ‘Taking more responsibility has been good for us,' Mercury explained. ‘Roy's been great, but we simply felt that it was now or never.'

Queen had proved themselves as a hit album and hit singles band. Yet they now faced the challenge of repeating that success, without being seen to repeat the ideas they'd used before. Roy Thomas Baker's mantra of ‘no problems just challenges' seemed an appropriate mission statement for the job ahead.

‘Queen took the success of
A Night at the Opera
in their stride,' says Gary Langan. ‘It wasn't like dealing a team of football players, where you take a player off the street, give them a huge wage and
they go off the rails. Queen were intelligent guys, and because of their aptitude they dealt with it very well.' Nevertheless, the pressure-cooker environment of making a Queen album still took its toll. ‘There were huge rows some days,' explains Langan. ‘Freddie could throw the biggest tantrums of all – pure rage. But it was all about the music.'

Others would see a different side to the singer that summer. One afternoon at the Manor, Mercury asked to be driven back to London to visit Mary. Without his regular car or chauffeur on hand, Peter Hince agreed to drive Freddie in a car borrowed from the studio. Approaching a roundabout in West London, the brakes failed and the car smashed into a pile of drainpipes stacked next to some roadworks. Unhurt, Freddie clambered out of the car, marched to the nearest house and asked to use the owners' telephone. ‘I'll never forget him standing by the roadside,' says Hince. ‘He hadn't shaved for two days, he was wearing white clogs, blue jeans and a Japanese kimono with “Queen” written on the back.' Astonished to find Queen's lead singer on the doorstep, the residents let him use the phone and made him a cup of tea, but only after Hince had scavenged a few coins for their gas meter, which had just run out. EMI's Brian Southall later heard from someone in the Queen camp that Mercury arranged for several hundred pounds in small change to be sent to the flat, by way of a thank you.

A month into the sessions, the band realised that they were behind schedule, and that a planned summer release was impossible. With a full tour postponed, Queen agreed to play two open-air shows and two nights at a theatre. The outdoor shows would be held in September at Cardiff Castle and London's Hyde Park. The warm-up shows were at the Edinburgh Playhouse, a venue now being sponsored by John Reid, and into which he had block-booked a week of his own acts, including Elton John. Before then, though, Mercury celebrated his thirtieth birthday with a lavish party at a cabaret club on the Kings Road, treating his 150 guests to caviar, lobster and Cristal champagne, after personally handwriting every one of their invitations.

At Cardiff Castle, Queen were joined by Manfred Mann's Earth Band, Frankie Miller and Andy Fairweather-Low. Like a scene out
of
This Is Spinal Tap
, ex-Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore's new band Rainbow withdrew from the bill when refused permission for their 35-feet stage prop of a giant rainbow. Onstage, Queen premiered two new songs, fresh from the Manor sessions. ‘You Take My Breath Away' was a highly dramatic showcase for Mercury's piano and voice with lyrics that are now impossible to ignore in the light of the singer's tangled love life. Brian May's ‘Tie Your Mother Down' was also given its first public airing. The song's riff dated back to the summer he'd spent working at an observatory in Tenerife. ‘I was on top of a mountain, playing some riffs while the sun came up, when the words to that song came into my head,' he says. ‘I thought it was a crap title, but Freddie said it meant something to him, so he knows the answer, and who am I to argue?' ‘Tie Your Mother Down' would become a mainstay of Queen's live set on the tours that followed.

The free Hyde Park show was held a week later, on the sixth anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's death, and had been organised by Richard Branson. Brian May had watched Pink Floyd at the inaugural free concert in the park in 1968. A year later, The Rolling Stones had played the same event. Queen agreed to an hour-long headlining slot on an eclectic bill that also included Kiki Dee, Steve Hillage and a Liverpudlian funk band called Supercharge. Their guitarist Les Karski had been at Ealing art college with Fred Bulsara, but although he met him backstage, Karski was unable to recognise Freddie Mercury such was the reinvention (‘He'd changed so much since those days').

Over 150,000 people filled the park, while Capital Radio broadcasted live with Queen fan Kenny Everett among the DJs commentating. For Roger Taylor, there was an added attraction to playing Hyde Park: Richard Branson's beautiful personal assistant Dominique Beyrand, with whom he would begin a relationship.

After being smuggled into the park in the back of a laundry van, Freddie's pre-show nerves boiled over in the backstage area. Before long, he was hurling abuse at the freeloaders and demanding they go out front and watch the show. David Minns would describe such behaviour as ‘Freddie pitting himself against an imaginary foe to get the adrenalin going'. Onstage, Queen found room for ‘You
Take My Breath Away', but their set was cut short after they overran by thirty minutes and broke a police curfew. Mercury was threatened with arrest if he set foot on the stage again. Although furious at being denied his encore, as tour manager Gerry Stickells recounted, ‘the thought of being in jail in tights didn't appeal to Freddie at all'.

Reviewing the Cardiff Castle show,
Record Mirror
wrote: ‘Queen don't worry about competition. Queen don't worry about anything.' Unfazed by the size of their audience, the band positively embraced the scale of the event. They wanted more. ‘We always said we wanted to be the biggest band in the world,' explained Roger Taylor. ‘That was the object of the enterprise. What else are you going to say? We'd like to be the fourth biggest!'