Is This The Real Life? (29 page)

‘I thought it reeked of sequel.' Roy Thomas Baker's impression of Queen's fifth album was less than complimentary. ‘It wasn't a disappointment,' their former producer insisted. ‘Just an observation.' Then again, Queen had set themselves up for the comparison. Released in December 1976,
A Day at the Races
, like its predecessor, was named after a Marx Brothers movie and presented in a sleeve that reprised the crest logo and typography used on
A Night at the
Opera
. The band would fight their corner as always, but as Brian May said later, ‘I wish in some ways we'd put
A Night at the Opera
and
A Day
at the Races
out at the same time. The material for both of them was written at the same time. So I regard the two albums as completely parallel.'

A Day at the Races
avoided a rewrite of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody' or another ‘Prophet's Song'. In the main, it comprised brisk, expensive-sounding pop-rock (‘It cost as much as the album before,' confided Roger Taylor), with singles that would sit comfortably on a radio playlist between Electric Light Orchestra, Rod Stewart or Wings.

‘Tie Your Mother Down' was a swashbuckling opener that defined Freddie's ‘no message, just rock 'n' roll' maxim, by being a modern-day rewrite of the Chuck Berry/Eddie Cochran formula: teenage rebellion, disapproving parents and a bit of sex. The rhythm
section delivered a song each: Deacon's ‘You and I' was pleasant enough but unlikely to supersede ‘You're My Best Friend', while ‘Drowse' had Taylor recalling a restless childhood, daydreaming about something, anything, happening. Now that something had happened, the drummer sounded strangely disenchanted.

Brian May's disenchantment was palpable on ‘Long Away'. Once again, the guitarist sounded like Queen's liberal conscience, on a quest for greater human understanding while everyone else was popping champagne corks and shopping for Rolls-Royces. For all his good intentions, though, May's song ‘White Man' was unintentionally condescending; nobody really wanted to hear Freddie Mercury pleading the plight of the Native American people. Finally, ‘Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)' was a plaintive love song that even included some Japanese lyrics, a thank you to the country's fans.

It seemed as if Mercury was better at the shopping and the popping of champagne corks, but behind the frivolity there was so much more going on. ‘Some of
A Day at the Races
is a baroque masterpiece,' May later told
Mojo
, before adding, ‘mainly the stuff I didn't write.' May's false modesty aside, Mercury excelled himself.

‘The Millionaire's Waltz' was a song inspired by John Reid, in which May spent weeks creating an orchestra of guitar sounds as per Freddie's instruction (Brian: ‘It staggers me the stuff that Fred put into it. I can't even remember how I arrived at all that stuff'); on ‘You Take My Breath Away' the singer turning himself into a one-man choir, while ‘Good Old-Fashioned Loverboy' was a playful ragtime jazz, in which Mercury, unknown to the outside world, serenaded boyfriend David Minns.

Some of the credit for the vocals on
A Day at the Races
rests outside the band. ‘Mike Stone was
the
vocal guy,' said Roger Taylor. ‘Mike was a rock,' confirms Gary Langan. ‘All those stacked-up vocals were his work. Roy Thomas Baker had a way of getting people to jump through hoops, but it was Mike's ability as an engineer that made those moves happen.'

Bigger and brasher than everything else on the album was ‘Somebody to Love'. A rolling, piano-heavy soul tune that, incredibly, recalled Ray Charles (with May and Taylor as his Raelettes)
and Freddie's personal favourite Aretha Franklin. Six years earlier, Sour Milk Sea's guitarist Chris Chesney had listened to Fred Bulsara praising the Jackson 5 in a house filled with dope-smoking Who fans. ‘Somebody to Love' was a realisation of the singer's passion for soul music. On paper, the idea – Queen go gospel – sounded terrible; in the studio it worked.

‘Somebody to Love' had been released as a single in November as a trailer for the album. Within three weeks it was at number 2. Kenny Everett conducted a joshing interview with Mercury on air, between playing the whole of the new album, while
A Day at the
Races
was launched with a soirée of free booze and food at Kempton Park racetrack. The 86-year-old Groucho Marx sent a telegram at Pete Brown's behest congratulating the band (‘I know that you are very successful recording artists. Could it, by any chance, be your sage choice of album titles?') Bruce Murray attended a playback party for
A Day at the Races
, and ran into Mary Austin. It was the first time Murray became fully aware of the significant changes in his old schoolfriend's life. ‘I knew he was gay, but I also didn't know,' offers Murray. ‘That was the night that Mary told me they were splitting up. She said, “I think the pretence has gone on long enough, Bruce.”'

On 1 December, Queen were booked to appear on the early-evening TV show
Today With Bill Grundy
. When Mercury had to make a rare visit to the dentist (his first in fifteen years), the band pulled out, leaving EMI promoter Eric Hall with a problem. In Queen's absence, Hall offered EMI's latest signing, the punk rock group, The Sex Pistols. Plied with free booze and encouraged by Grundy, the band swore like naughty schoolboys. The fallout was extraordinary: the show attracted a record number of complaints and caused a Liverpudlian lorry driver to smash his TV set in disgust; Grundy's TV career was over, and The Sex Pistols became household names overnight.

The next day the
Daily Mirror
blazed with the headline “T
HE
F
ILTH
 A
ND
T
HE
F
URY
” and asked ‘Who are these punks?' Musically, they took their cue from The Who, The Rolling Stones and American garage-rock: short, sharp songs with a nihilistic message. It was punk's anti-fashion that caused more concern: cropped hair,
ripped clothes, anarchist slogans … The image and the idea for The Sex Pistols had both been cooked up by their manager Malcolm McLaren and his girlfriend, the designer Vivienne Westwood, in their boutique, SEX. The shop was on the Kings Road, just a few doors down from Freddie's favourite gay haunt Country Cousin, but Pistols' singer Johnny Rotten, with his bleached hair and blank stare, was a world away from Mercury and his rarefied existence.

In the late 1960s, rock music had moved away from three-minute singles to forty-minute albums and musical experimentation. In the late 1970s the pendulum swung back again. Punk didn't require 180 vocal overdubs or a virtuoso guitarist, and claimed to hold up a mirror to real life. In 1976 Britain was in the grip of an economic crisis, with widespread unemployment and inflation at 13 per cent. In 1977 it would get even worse. Many musicians from the punk era would grow rich, famous and complacent, and inverse snobbery was rife, but a band singing a song called ‘The Millionaire's Waltz' and toasting an audience with bubbly was seen by some as incongruous, and even offensive. Queen defended their music as ‘escapist'; critics deemed them ‘out of touch'. In November, as Queen released the single ‘Somebody to Love', The Sex Pistols released ‘Anarchy in the UK'.

Queen's already fractious relationship with the music press would become worse.
New Musical Express
now had a weekly readership of around 200,000, and its writers had been championing punk for some time. There was a backlash against the likes of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, but it was Queen that attracted the most disdain. Nick Kent, writing for
NME
, denounced
A Day at the Races
as ‘grotesquery of the first order'. But what Kent objected to most of all was the singer: ‘Almost everything bearing the composing moniker of one F. Mercury seems to drip with that cutesy-pie mirror-preening essence of ultra-preciousness.'

Eight years before at Ealing art college, Fred Bulsara's fascination with harmony singing had bemused some of the blues-loving students. A year later, when he was singing in a band of his own, he'd insisted on including unfashionable Little Richard covers in their set, while Shirley Bassey's ‘Big Spender' had been a mainstay of Queen's show for years. The clues were all there. Mercury loved
the unexpected, and had no intention of being restricted by the rock format. Early on, he'd told one reporter, partly in jest, that Queen ‘were more Liza Minnelli than Led Zeppelin'. His songwriting and performance on
A Day at the Races
suggested as much, with a side order of Chopin, Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Noël Coward. This wasn't just rock 'n' roll. On
A Day at the Races
, more than any Queen album before, you can hear why, nearly thirty years later, Mercury's music would be performed on the West End stage. But it was too much for some.

Furthermore, while
NME
dismissed Queen as ‘masters of style, void of content', Mercury seemed to fuel the fire, claiming that his music was disposable and throwaway, likening it to a Bic razor, even a used tampon. ‘There was more to this than meets the eye,' said Brian May. ‘It's like when Fred was first asked if he was gay by a writer and he said, “I'm as gay as a daffodil, dear.” It neatly sidestepped the whole question. The fact that he said his song was disposable dispelled any pretension and stopped him having to talk about it. I knew Fred pretty damn well and I know a lot of what was going on, and there's a lot of depth in his songs. That false modesty shouldn't mislead anyone. Even the light stuff and the humour had an undercurrent.'

Despite
NME
and The Sex Pistols, Queen celebrated the New Year with
A Day at the Races
at number 1 in the UK album charts. In January, Queen flew to Milwaukee for the opening night of their American tour. Their support band would be Thin Lizzy. It was an inspired pairing. Formed in Dublin by lead singer and bass guitarist Phil Lynott, Thin Lizzy played hard rock, tempered with folk, blues and Celtic ballads. Lizzy had enjoyed a Top 10 hit a year before with ‘The Boys Are Back in Town', and had just released a new album
Johnny the Fox
, but their plans had hit the skids when guitarist Brian Robertson was injured during a fracas at the Speakeasy.

With Robertson temporarily out of the band, Lizzy had reinstated their old guitarist Gary Moore. Lizzy joined the tour in time for a gig at Detroit's Cobo Hall. Mercury was clearly in his element. His entourage now included a 250lb American bodyguard, his masseur, personal assistant Paul Prenter (appointed by John Reid Enterprises, who would go on to become Freddie's
personal manager), and Dane Clarke, a show-dancer that Mercury had picked up and who was now on the payroll as his hairdresser.

Thin Lizzy's tour manager Chris O'Donnell was stunned by what he saw: ‘He had this coterie of people around him, and it was all “Yes, Freddie”, ‘No, Freddie”,' he says. ‘Dane Clarke would prepare his clothes, take him to the car, put him onto a plane, and then into another car, and then on to the soundcheck. Most people would soundcheck at five o'clock, then have a meal from backstage catering with the road crew. But Queen would sit down after a gig and have a full meal with silver service. After a while, Brian and Roger got fed up with it and were asking to go with us to hang out at some clubs after the show. This left Freddie sat alone at this huge expensive meal, furious that his band had abandoned him. He had this concept that you always had supper after a first night … so he decided you should do it every night. I had never encountered anything on that level.'