Is This The Real Life? (48 page)

A Kind of Magic
, Queen’s eleventh’s studio album, was released in the UK and US just before the tour opened in Sweden. What the band later called ‘The Live Aid Effect’ hadn’t diminished, and it shifted 100,000 copies in its first week alone, eventually seeing off Genesis’
Invisible Touch
and Simply Red’s
Picture Book
to reach number 1 in the UK and Ireland.

Meanwhile, America slipped further away. ‘
A Kind of Magic
sounds like hard rock with a hollow core,’ wrote
Rolling Stone
’s Mark Coleman. The album went as far as number 46, then stopped. Once again, America would be absent from Queen’s tour itinerary. On home turf,
The Times
applauded Freddie’s ‘Diana Ross impersonation’ on ‘Pain is So Close to Pleasure’, but concluded that
A
Kind of Magic
was ‘as chic as a set of flying ducks on a wall’. ‘I’d be a liar to say I’m not hurt by criticism,’ admitted Mercury. ‘But that’s the way of the world. Before, I used to get really mad and start tearing my hair out, but now I don’t have any more sleepless nights.’

The album’s confused origins made for a somewhat uneven listening experience. Even Mercury sounded bewildered when attempting to explain the record: ‘For the first time in Queen’s life we actually made a film soundtrack, but we’ve also made a Queen album, so, we had to try to let people know that it’s not just a soundtrack, because we’ve got other songs as well …’ To confuse matters still further, the 1985 single ‘One Vision’ (which had already featured in the
Iron Eagle
soundtrack) reappeared as the album’s opening track. Much like
Highlander
’s immortal hero, only the title cut and ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’ were songs that would survive the album’s natural shelf life. Like every Queen record since
Jazz
,
A Kind of Magic
was a so-so album, cleverly loaded with two or three potential hit singles. ‘There was some scraping the barrel,’ says Mack, drily.

Onstage, Queen made a grand entrance, through billowing clouds of dry ice, straight into ‘One Vision’ and ‘Tie Your Mother Down’. New songs were threaded in between the hits, with ‘A Kind of Magic’ cueing up ‘Under Pressure’. The final part of the show was wisely given over to the same six songs they’d played at Live Aid. Exuding their usual over-confidence, Queen’s next single ‘Friends Will Be Friends’ would later be dropped in as an encore between ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are the Champions’. ‘I can’t believe we did that,’ murmured Brian May, revisiting the setlist years later.

After the opening night in Stockholm, Diana Moseley took a call from Mercury. The singer’s mood could hardly have been helped by the gauntlet of anti-apartheid protesters outside the stadium, but instead he was fussing over the performance and suggesting that it needed ‘an extra something’. Mercury asked Diana to bring the newly commissioned ermine gown and crown to France in time for the Paris Hippodrome show a week later. Prior to the gig, Mercury spent an afternoon swishing up and down the corridor of the Royal Monceau Hotel, trying out his new outfit. At the end of the show, as the band scrubbed their way through the final bars of ‘We Are the Champions’, Mercury promenaded on from the wings, trailing the gown over his shoulders, doffing the crown and waving to the minions below. Billy Squier watched the concert from the wings. ‘It was a great feeling,’ he says. ‘I’d just recorded with Freddie in London, and I was just offstage at the end of his grand piano, watching my friend lay out this huge crowd.’ It would be the last time Squier ever saw Freddie Mercury.

The crown and ermine would become Mercury’s final flourish for the remainder of the tour. As always, he remained the focus of the show, tirelessly working the enormous stage. ‘He’s the pivot of what it’s all about,’ said an earnest Brian May at the time. ‘It’s all channelled through Freddie, so we look after him.’ ‘It was just before Fred turned forty,’ remembers Peter Hince, ‘and he was still smoking, still drinking vodka and still doing other things that were not good for him but still managing to run around for two hours a night.’ There were moments when it looked as if the years had started to catch up on the singer. Queen’s huge lighting rig could
have an illuminating effect on Mercury’s slightly thinning hair (‘It’s a double-crown, dear,’ Freddie would protest). Backstage, Mercury was never without a steam inhaler, always aware that the nodes on his vocal cords could flare up at any time. If his health was suffering for any other reason, he told no one.

Among Queen’s support acts at the Paris Hippodrome were the UK rock band Marillion. Fronted by larger-than-life Scotsman Derek Dick, aka Fish, Marillion were signed to EMI and had just had a number 1 album with
Misplaced Childhood
. ‘I knew Roger Taylor from the London club scene,’ says Fish now. ‘We were always in the Marquee and I think we went out with a couple of the same girls, but I’d never met the others before.’ At the aftershow party in Paris, Fish, to the chagrin of his bandmates, was whisked away to share the ‘glamour table’ with Queen and Duran Duran’s John Taylor and Nick Rhodes. ‘Freddie was charming and affable and very funny,’ he recalls. ‘Brian and I got into a very deep conversation about South African politics. Queen had been absolutely hammered for playing Sun City and I remember being very impressed by Brian’s intelligence and passion. To be honest, “Deaks” was a bit weird. Marillion’s bass player was off his face and kept coming up and trying to talk to him about what gear he was using. John Deacon kept moving away, and after about three or four times he turned round and just said, “Who the
fuck
are you?” Very funny. There was an apology the next morning.’

In Mannheim, Fish was invited onstage to join Queen for ‘Tutti Frutti’. ‘I kept thinking, “How the fuck does it go?”’ he says. ‘Freddie had let me use his radio mic earlier with Marillion, which is an unusual thing for any singer to do, and he’d watched our show from the side of the stage. He welcomed me on for ‘Tutti Frutti’, and then really put me in my place. Not in a nasty way, but the sheer presence of the man onstage. He owned it. He was the big brother. I didn’t stand a chance.’

Four days later, in Berlin, Queen threw in a version of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’. Later, they’d dust off Shirley Bassey’s ‘Big Spender’, the song that had so impressed their Trident paymasters at the Forest Hill gig fourteen years earlier. The Spencer Davis Group’s ‘Gimme Some Lovin’, a tune Fred Bulsara used to
pester his college friend to play on the church organ, would also be thrown into the set. These were all flashbacks to Queen’s past.

At times, the past must have seemed like a less complicated place than the present. During a break in Holland, May booked a studio to produce a demo for Anita Dobson (‘She’s a very rock ’n’ roll person,’ he enthused). Back in England, though, Christine May would soon become pregnant again. On 5 July, Queen’s Slane Castle gig in Dublin was marred by bad weather and crowd violence. A local councillor deemed the show as ‘a massive rip-off, nihilistic, sensual and anti-social’. Backstage, Mercury supposedly vowed never to play Ireland again.

Offstage, Queen’s after-hours activities now included hard-fought Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit championships, but there was no lack of ‘nihilistic and sensual’ pursuits. ‘There’d been a lesbian floorshow in Paris in the early ’80s,’ recalls one tour insider. ‘But in ’86, in Germany, Queen had an aftershow party in a brothel. I didn’t actually believe it when I was told that all the girls had been pre-paid … Obviously only the single members of the entourage attended.’ There was also the World Cup. Photographer Denis O’Regan joined Mercury to watch Germany beat Mexico on TV. ‘At the end of the match, Freddie jumped up and said, “That’s it! I’m going to go out and fuck me a German!”’

‘When we first said we wanted to do outdoor shows, promoters weren’t confident that Queen would be able to sell enough tickets,’ revealed Gerry Stickells. Yet when Harvey Goldsmith had first invited postal applications for tickets for Queen’s first show at Wembley Stadium, all 72,000 had sold out within a couple of deliveries. In the end, Queen would perform to 150,000 people across two nights at the stadium on 11 and 12 June. Roger Taylor also fulfilled his promise to fans of performing on the biggest stage ever; so big, in fact, that the band’s video screen wouldn’t fit between the stage and the stadium roof. As Gerry Stickells explained: ‘The architectural plans were awry. The distance to the roof was not what it said on the plans.’ After a frantic phone call in which one of the crew suggested, famously, that Stickells ‘press the abort button’, a crane was hired and the crew, again defying the laws of physics, found a way to make the screen fit.

Queen’s first show at Wembley fell on a Friday, and was blighted by torrential rain. The weather held off on the Saturday, where a fifteen-man camera team were in place to shoot the concert for Tyne Tees TV. Backstage, Mick Jagger was among those seen swishing into the VIP enclosure. ‘Mick sat on the side of the stage and said he thought it was too big,’ recalled Stickells later. In fact, Jagger was assessing the competition. The Rolling Stones would roll out their own
Steel Wheels
extravaganza at Wembley three years later.

‘The Live Aid Effect’ was now visible in Queen’s audience: a balanced split of males and females that also included younger pop fans whose point of entry had been ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and ‘I Want to Break Free’. Queen’s chart positions that week said as much: ‘Friends Will Be Friends’ was in the Top 20, with
A Kind of Magic
still in the Top 5. It was clear, though, that when Queen played ‘In the Lap of the Gods … Revisited’, a song that had once been a cornerstone of their live show, a percentage of the audience had no idea what they were hearing.

‘There are fans that I speak to in the street who say, “I like your earlier stuff, but I don’t like what you’re doing now,”’ admitted Mercury. ‘But at the same time, there are people who like our new stuff and don’t even know what we did five or six years ago.’ There was also a more playful element to the show.
A Kind of Magic
’s cover art featured gaudy cartoon images of the band. These had now been turned into helium-filled inflatable models. The blow-up dolls would drift over the audience while they played the title track. Three of the inflatables were captured by the Wembley crowd, while ‘Freddie’ ended up in a garden miles away in Chelmsford, Essex.

The footage from Wembley would be released later on VHS and DVD. It captured the unprecedented scale of the set, the triumphalism of the band, and, though nobody knew it at the time, what would be Freddie Mercury’s last tour. The singer’s rascally banter had been a part of Queen’s live show for years, but on the
Magic
tour, Mercury seemed more at ease with his role than ever. He would play the prima donna, eyes shut, quivering with supposed emotion one moment, but would just as easily wink at
the crowd and send himself up the next. The twitchy smile was a constant, the good-humoured baiting of the audience another. ‘After all, it’s really only a game,’ he said. ‘But a serious game.’

Queen celebrated their two-night stand at Wembley with an £80,000 soirée at the Kensington Roof Gardens. Remembered by one of the 500 guests as ‘another night of bacchanalian excess’, naked waiters and waitresses, their bodies daubed with paint to look like a uniform, joined the usual retinue of drag queens and topless models. The
Sun
’s Page-Three-model-turned-pop-star Samantha Fox, seventies glam-rocker Gary Glitter, and Marillion’s Fish joined Mercury onstage to muddle through ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘Johnny B. Goode’. The group christened themselves Dicky Hart and The Pacemakers.

While Jim Hutton was told to stay away from the cameras, Mercury would be photographed at the party with Mary Austin. In public, he was still maintaining the façade. The complexity of their relationship became apparent when the
Daily Express
writer David Wigg, one of the few journalists Mercury trusted, wrote a story claiming that Austin has asked Freddie to father a child for her. Mercury, still claiming to be single, had explained that he would prefer to buy another cat.

Jim Hutton was now living with Mercury in the refurbished Garden Lodge. His role would also become confused by the fact that although paid to work as Freddie’s gardener, he was also sleeping with the boss. Mercury was aware of the pressure he put any partner under. Stranger still, Mary Austin’s job within the Queen organisation made her responsible for paying Hutton’s £600 a month wages. ‘It’s like the old Hollywood stories where all those wonderful actresses just couldn’t carry on a relationship because their careers came first,’ said Mercury. ‘That’s the way it is with me. I can’t stop the wheel for a while and devote myself to a love affair. The wheel has to keep turning, and that makes it very hard for anyone to live with me and be happy.’

Queen followed their UK stadium dates with a trip to the Continent for outdoor shows in Austria and Communist Hungary. While their old sparring partner Elton John had already played in Budapest, Queen would be the first international rock
group to play what EMI trumpeted as ‘the first stadium rock gig behind the Iron Curtain’.

The band arrived by hydrofoil on the River Danube, with Roger Taylor sporting a nautical-looking blazer, and Mercury asking how many bedrooms there were in the Hungarian House of Parliament and if it was for sale. Queen were hurried past the fans, newspaper reporters and TV crews gathered on the quay, and straight into the British Embassy, where a reception was being thrown in their honour. For the Hungarian government, having a Western rock band play in Budapest could be spun as an example of improving East–West relations. Queen’s motivation was much simpler. ‘We like going places where it’s a challenge,’ said Brian May. ‘What happened with Budapest was the same as what happened with South America. Someone comes along and says, “You’re huge in X, why don’t you go and play there?”’ Meanwhile, the president of the 5,000-strong Hungarian wing of the Official Queen Fan Club griped that just 100 of his members had managed to acquire tickets for the gig: ‘Queen only want the money now,’ he told a reporter from
Sounds
.