Is This The Real Life? (46 page)

Four days later, just before midday on 13 July, a pastel-suited Brian May and Roger Taylor, joined by the drummer’s tech ‘Crystal’ Taylor, took their VIP seats at Wembley Stadium, alongside David Bowie, Bob Geldof, George Michael, and Elton John. BBC DJ Richard Skinner’s voice boomed out of the PA: ‘It’s 12 o’clock in London, seven o’clock in Philadelphia, and around the world it’s time for Live Aid …’ Onstage, the Coldstream Guards blasted a royal fanfare as Prince Charles and Princess Diana arrived
to take their seats in front of the Queen entourage. Within seconds, bagpipes had given way to guitars as Status Quo cranked up the opening riff to their hit single ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’. In front of them, a sea of 70,000 people began moving.

Some twenty minutes later, ex-Jam frontman Paul Weller’s new group Style Council arrived with their hit ‘You’re the Best Thing’, replacing Status Quo’s macho rock with some sophisticated Parisienne café pop. By one o’clock, Bob Geldof had left the BBC’s commentary box, where he had been urging TV audiences to pledge their money, and led his own group The Boomtown Rats through two of their hit singles and one new non-hit. There was a pattern emerging. Minutes later, Adam Ant declared ‘the world is watching, let’s feed it’ and then spoiled it all by playing his brand-new single, ‘Vive Le Rock’.

But whatever musical own goals were being scored, by one o’clock, the show had raised £40,000. As well as the stadium’s captive audience, every television in every house, shop and pub seemed to be tuned into the concert. As the afternoon drew on, the broadcast cut from Spandau Ballet to bluesman B.B. King in Amsterdam to cockney actor Dennis Waterman, star of eighties comedy drama
Minder
, hobnobbing backstage at Wembley and urging viewers to ‘give some of your dough’. Onstage, Sting and Phil Collins played musical tag (Collins would follow his set by flying to Philadelphia to perform at the US Live Aid) and Bryan Ferry performed a downbeat set, light on hits, with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour guesting on lead guitar.

Backstage, Brian May would confess to being as nervous at Live Aid as he had ever been in his life. If Queen were ever going to be upstaged by anyone on the day it was going to be by U2. Introduced in Philadelphia by Jack Nicholson as ‘a group direct from London whose heart is in Dublin’, the Irish rockers opened with their hit ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’. On the day, U2 were regarded as an antidote to the old guard of Dire Straits, Bowie, The Who – and Queen. U2 were the eighties rock band
du jour
, worthy and earnest, but with lead singer Bono also having an old showman’s flair for transfixing a crowd. Intriguingly, Queen had turned U2 down a couple of years earlier as a support band, while Peter Freestone later
maintained that Mercury couldn’t abide the group, particularly Bono’s preachiness.

Still, ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ was a masterly opening move, but no sooner had they started their second song, ‘Bad’, before Bono was hanging over the stage barrier urging a girl in the audience to join him onstage. Frustrated by the security guards, who were unable or unwilling to co-operate, the singer scrambled down into the pit between the barrier and the stage and plucked another young girl from the crowd. Grabbing hold of her, the pair began a slow dance, with every move captured by flashing cameras and the TV crew. A nation was watching. But the impromptu performance cost U2 the rest of their set. By the time Bono made it back onstage, there was no time for ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’, their Top 5 hit from the previous summer. U2 left the stage with Bono believing he had scuppered the band’s reputation. In truth, his photo-pit waltz had been a welcome distraction after six hours of tightly choreographed performances.

Neither The Beach Boys in Philadelphia nor Dire Straits in Wembley could hope for anything quite so spontaneous. Back in the commentary box, a frazzled Geldof began pleading to the cameras: ‘There’s not enough money coming in … Get on the phone right now! We want to get a million pounds out of this country on the telephone by ten o’clock tonight. Get on the phone!’

An hour before Queen were due on, Freddie Mercury had been limousined backstage, still plagued by the same throat infection he’d been suffering from during the Simon Bates interview. ‘Doctors had said he was too ill to perform,’ recalled one of the BBC’s Live Aid team. ‘He wasn’t well enough at all, but he absolutely insisted.’ Just offstage, comedians Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones, dressed as policeman, waited in the wings to introduce ‘the Queen’. Unseen by the crowd, Brian May peered out at a sea of faces. It was the first time in so many years that he had actually seen an audience as Queen hadn’t played in daylight for years. But Queen’s decision not to insist on a headline slot had paid off. ‘By six o’clock, some of the audience had been in there for seven hours,’ recalls Peter Hince. ‘They needed a lift. They were flagging.’

Having watched the show so far, Queen had just one concern: it wasn’t loud enough. ‘We didn’t have a soundcheck,’ Roger Taylor said. ‘But we sent our brilliant engineer to check the system.’ Out front Queen’s soundman Trip Khalaf sneakily set the limiters, with dramatic consequences. ‘We were louder than anybody else at Live Aid,’ admitted Taylor. ‘You’ve got to overwhelm the crowd in a stadium.’

At 6.40 p.m., Queen walked onstage. Upstairs at Wembley, Bob Geldof put down the phone after receiving a donation of one million pounds from an Arab businessman. Geldof was suddenly aware again of what was happening outside. For the first time that day, he could actually hear a band properly. ‘My first thought was, “Who’s got the sound together?”’ he said, later. His second, on hearing the audience’s response to what sounded like a jukebox pumping out hit after hit, was one of shock: ‘Who the fuck is that?’

‘T
hank God that’s over!’ Having dashed offstage at Wembley, Freddie Mercury, drenched in sweat, downed a large vodka in his trailer. A popular anecdote has it that Elton John ran in, shouting, ‘You bastards! You stole the show!’ ‘I certainly remember Freddie holding court in his portakabin,’ said Live Aid publicist Bernard Doherty later. ‘Everyone had come straight over to congratulate him – “daaahling, you were wonderful!” – Bowie, Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney taking pictures of the other photographers taking pictures …’

While everyone was busy backslapping Queen, Wembley and Philadelphia screened Mick Jagger and David Bowie’s video for their new single, ‘Dancing in the Street’. It was a high-spirited love-in that almost rivalled Mercury’s performance for Olympian levels of campness. Within minutes Bowie was onstage, in the flesh at Wembley, grinding through ‘TVC15’, a song that would never rouse an audience in quite the same fashion as ‘Radio Ga Ga’.

After Bowie came The Pretenders, The Who, and Billy Connolly trooping on to announce that ‘this concert is being shown on 95 per cent of the televisions on earth’ before introducing Elton John. The
nation was still watching, but in the passing years, Queen’s performance seems to have blotted everyone else from memory, including Brian May and Freddie Mercury’s later appearance as a duo.

Backstage, Roger Taylor had been seen with actor John Hurt. At 9.42 p.m., Hurt appeared onstage at Wembley to introduce Mercury and May’s acoustic performance of ‘Is This the World We Created?’ The gentle ballad from
The Works
album showed the flip side to Queen’s showboating ‘We Are the Champions’ or ‘We Will Rock You’, but was blighted by sound problems. Minutes later, Paul McCartney led a mass, ad hoc choir, including Mercury, through Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, bringing the show to its conclusion.

The BBC’s coverage of the Philadelphia show continued until gone 4 a.m. Mercury and his entourage had ducked out of the aftershow party, and, joined by John Hurt, headed back to Kensington to watch a video of the concert. ‘Freddie had a caustic look at everything that was going on around him,’ John Hurt later told
The Times
. ‘He was terrifically competitive, too. I remember going to watch the tape of Live Aid back at his place and when Duran Duran came on he said, “Just look at them waddling across the stage!” He was quite irreverent.’ Then again, Mercury had earned the right to mock the competition. As even the self-critical Brian May conceded, ‘Live Aid proved we didn’t need backdrops or the cover of darkness. I’ll remember Live Aid till the day I die.’ Within a fortnight,
The Works
album had re-entered the UK Top 40. Live Aid was the moment Queen went from being a rock band with a past to a pop group with a future. It gave them a reason to carry on.

The following day’s press claimed that as much as £50 million had been raised for famine relief. The concerts had also promoted pop music to the front page of the nation’s dailies. ‘R
OCK’S
F
INEST
  H
OUR
’ declared the
Daily Mail
, which led with a photograph of Charles and Diana in the Wembley stands, with Roger Taylor peeking from beneath the prince’s armpit.

Queen immediately took a six-week break. Mercury and his coterie, including Jim Hutton, took off for Ibiza. Deacon played a session for Elton John (Peter Hince: ‘Elton said that Deakey was one of the best bass players he had ever worked with’) and Roger Taylor revived his production team with David Richards. Led Zeppelin fan Taylor’s latest protégés were a rock band named Virginia Wolf, which now included drummer Jason Bonham, son of Led Zeppelin’s John. Their debut album surfaced the following year, but Virginia Wolf never broke through.

In September, Mercury was back in Munich to celebrate his thirty-ninth birthday. He hired Henderson’s for the night, paying to redecorate the club to match the theme of the party: a black-and-white drag ball and for many of the 300 guests to be flown to Germany and housed at the Munich Hilton. The bill came to £50,000. After partying until 6 a.m., Mercury and a pack of dancers and drag queens were back at the club again the next day to film scenes for Mercury’s next video. ‘I find I can survive on two or three hours’ sleep a night,’ Freddie had told Simon Bates.

‘Living On My Own’ would be the fourth single from the
Mr Bad
Guy
album. It was dance-pop crossover with a nimble piano solo from Fred Mandel and a lyric documenting the highs and lows of Freddie’s lifestyle. The video was produced and directed by the Austrian film-makers Rudy Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, ardent Queen fans who had acquired the nickname of ‘The Torpedo Twins’. The promo featured scenes from the party, some of which were supposedly taken by hidden cameras, and the following day’s shoot. The end result, with its cross-dressing and bare buttocks, was too much for Columbia and the video was never screened in America. But even in Britain, the single would only go as far as number 50.

Once again, there was little time for Mercury to dwell on such failings. In September, May, Taylor and Mercury regrouped at Musicland in Munich, with Deacon joining them later. By the time he arrived, the other three had written a new song. It was an uncommonly democratic move, and one that would go some way towards stopping Queen’s regular arguments over money. The new composition was titled ‘One Vision’. Taylor recalled writing
lyrics that had been inspired by Martin Luther King, and loaded with anti-establishment sentiments (‘one goddam religion’ being one line that didn’t make the final cut). Reportedly, Mercury and May took the lyrics and began editing and changing. ‘One Vision’ would end up as a one-size-fits-all call for peace, love and unity, supposedly inspired by the Live Aid experience. The music benefited from the collaborative effort. With its synthesiser fanfare, radio-friendly chorus and heavy metal guitar riff, ‘One Vision’ found room for every facet of the Queen sound, including some throwaway humour. On the final line, Mercury swapped the words ‘one vision’ for ‘fried chicken’.

In another break from tradition, the group agreed to be filmed for a planned Queen documentary. The Torpedo Twins moved into Musicland and shadowed the band’s every move. ‘I honestly thought they’d never bloody go away,’ complained Taylor. ‘The documentary cameras actually ruined the whole thing,’ said May. ‘I think everyone was so conscious of them being there – everyone sort of played up to the camera.’

Some of the studio footage would be used in the video for ‘One Vision’, with the whole sequence finding its way into Queen’s
The
Magic Years
documentary. Whatever doubts May and Taylor had about the fly-on-the-wall cameras, it offers an unaccustomed peek of the band at work. The sight of clunky analogue tape recorders and the fug of cigarette smoke is a flashback to studio life circa 1985. John Deacon had followed Freddie’s lead and also begun smoking the year before (Peter Hince: ‘a sign of stress maybe’). There is a self-conscious element to the footage (in one scene, Mercury jokes that the film-makers’ microphone looks like ‘a big fat dick’) but once they stop hamming it up, it shows how the four band members interacted.

An animated Freddie is seen fussing over a drum break, complaining that too many harmony vocals will make the song ‘sound like the fucking Andrews singers’ and ad-libbing risqué lyrics in place of the real thing: ‘One dump, one turd, two tits, John Deacon!’ The film showed a rare glimpse, also, of Reinhold Mack: silent, stoic, smoking …

Queen’s plans to take significant time off had already gone awry.
No sooner had they met up at Musicland than they were fielding another soundtrack offer. Video director Russell Mulcahy needed music to accompany his first full-length film,
Highlander
, a fantasy action movie starring Sean Connery and French heart-throb Christophe Lambert. Mulcahy had made pop videos for Elton John, Spandau Ballet and the ‘waddling’ Duran Duran. ‘I’d always been a fan of Queen, so I approached them,’ he said. ‘I cut together a twenty-minute piece, which was excerpts from a number of scenes. They watched it and they said yes.’ Immediately, Queen began working up ideas for songs, using points in the
Highlander
plot as jumping-off points for the music. Oddly, ‘One Vision’ wouldn’t be used and instead found its way onto the soundtrack of director Sydney Furie’s instantly forgotten action flick,
Iron Eagle
.

While being driven back from watching the clip of
Highlander
, Brian May began humming a melody into a portable tape recorder. It was the beginning of what would become ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’. ‘
Highlander
is about a man who becomes conscious that he’s immortal, and he’s reluctant to accept that fact,’ explained May in 2003. ‘But he’s told that if he falls in love he’s in big trouble, but of course he falls in love anyway. And the girl that he falls in love with eventually grows old and dies in his arms. That opened up a floodgate in me – the death of my marriage, and so forth.’

May’s marriage was in trouble, as the guitarist tried to deal with what he had called ‘the life-and-death battle’ between the group and its ‘emotional distractions’, and his family life. Equally, John Deacon was battling to balance his professional and private life. Inspired by the same
Highlander
clips, Deacon went away and wrote ‘One Year of Love’, a ballad on which, later, saxophonist Steve Gregory blew a solo not unlike the one he’d contributed to Wham!’s hit single ‘Careless Whisper’ a year before. Both songs also featured string players; another bold move for a band once so reluctant to allow other musicians into the studio. Russell Mulcahy’s second musical coup, after landing Queen, had been to hire the late Michael Kamen, an arranger and film-score composer who had previously worked on Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
. Kamen would conduct the National Philharmonic Orchestra, helping to pile on the drama during ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’.

Recording of the next Queen album began in September 1985. Yet two months into the schedule, the band put out ‘One Vision’ as a stopgap single. It reached number 7 in the UK, but only 61 in America. There were grumbles from some critics that Queen should have donated the royalties from a song supposedly inspired by Live Aid to Geldof’s charity. ‘I was absolutely devastated when I saw that in the press,’ raged Taylor. To add to their woes, the band were also asked to issue a statement to the press confirming that they had no intention of ever playing South Africa again. In truth, behind the scenes, Queen were still donating all royalties from ‘Is This the World We Created?’, the B-side of ‘It’s a Hard Life’, to Save the Children, but it was apparent that their Sun City faux pas would not be forgotten so easily.

Mercury, as ever, found a way to distance himself from the fuss, turning up at the Royal Albert Hall for Fashion Aid, a catwalk show in aid of Ethiopian famine relief, where he squired actress Jane Seymour across the stage in an Elizabeth and David Emanuel wedding gown. Later, he would cut two tracks, ‘Time’ and ‘In My Defence’, for the soundtrack of his friend Dave Clark’s West End musical
Time
. In the meantime, CBS allowed themselves a further throw of the dice with another solo Mercury single, ‘Love Me Like There’s No Tomorrow’. It didn’t even make it into the UK Top 50.