Is This The Real Life? (51 page)

That year, 1988, was a challenging year for all. In January, Taylor married Dominique Beyrand at Chelsea register office, with Mercury and Mary Austin as his witnesses. Just weeks later, he moved out of the family home and into a new pad with a 25-year-old
model named Deborah Leng, whose recent TV ad appearance, biting into a phallic Cadbury’s Flake chocolate bar, had caused a stir among
Daily Mail
readers. Naturally, the press were fascinated by the drummer’s domestic arrangements; the whirlwind marriage fuelling the suspicion that rock stars did things differently from mere mortals. The wedding had, it seemed, been necessary to secure the financial stability of the couple’s two children after their parents split.

Odder still, in the same month John Deacon had a hit single. Almost. The bassist took a walk-on part in the video for the spoof hip hop song ‘Stutter Rap’ by Morris Minor and The Majors. The group included the comedian and writer Tony Hawks, who’d met Deacon on a Virgin Airlines junket to Miami. ‘We hung out together over a long and drunken weekend,’ said Hawks. ‘John struck me as someone who’d become a rock star by accident.’

No sooner had Taylor set up a new home than he was out on tour with The Cross. After arriving onstage at Newcastle Mayfair, one or two wags in the audience pelted him with Cadbury Flake bars. When the tour reached Germany, Taylor bowed to the promoter’s wishes, and posters for the gigs were amended to read: ‘Roger Taylor and The Cross’. Yet, as a further reminder of his role as ‘one part of the unit’, The Cross would only play one Queen song: ‘I’m in Love With My Car’.

Life in the day job was no less eventful. In January, Queen met at London’s Olympic Studios. An important decision was made: from now on, every new song would be credited collectively to all four members. ‘I wish we’d done it earlier,’ Brian May told
Q
magazine. ‘It’s the best decision we ever made. It does mean a sacrifice, letting your baby go, but once you actually do it, you have a group working together on all fronts.’ ‘It meant that decisions would be made on artistic merit,’ added Roger Taylor, ‘rather than financial or ego grounds.’

According to May, it was Mercury who had originally suggested separate writer’s credits while making Queen’s first album. Over twenty years later, though, Freddie was willing to split the money. Similarly, the band took a collective decision to return to their earlier way of working, with all four together in the studio, rather
than each working alone with just a synthesiser for company. Queen’s next album started out with the working title of
The
Invisible Man
, but would become
The Miracle
just weeks before completion. The first song to emerge was a return to what Brian May called ‘old-school Queen’. Group credit or not, the mighty riff and mightier guitar solo of ‘I Want It All’ marked it out as a Brian May creation. The song’s petulant lyric was perfect for Freddie Mercury, but the title had apparently come from one of Anita Dobson’s popular sayings (May: ‘She’s a very ambitious girl’). May would later reveal that ideas for the song had been whizzing around his mind while he was digging up weeds in the garden of his second home in Los Angeles.

The Miracle
was recorded in fits and starts between Olympic and Townhouse in London and Mountain in Switzerland. Mercury dashed between Queen and the Montserrat Caballé duets album, even fitting in a live appearance when he joined the cast of
Time
to perform four songs at London’s Dominion Theatre in April. It was a courageous move in the light of recent press scrutiny, with the show a fundraiser for the newly formed AIDS charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust. But still Mercury refused to discuss his health with the rest of Queen. Interviewed in
Mojo
in 1999, May later said: ‘We discovered about Freddie in 1987 or 1988.’ Yet speaking to
The Times
in 1992, May claimed that they had only been told ‘a few months before [Freddie’s] death’. Whatever the truth, the singer was not forthcoming. ‘We didn’t actually know what was wrong for a very long time,’ said Brian. ‘We never talked about it, and it was a sort of unwritten law that we didn’t because Freddie didn’t want to. He just told us that he didn’t feel up to doing tours, and that’s as far as it went.’

On the one hand, it seems bizarre that Mercury would keep his condition a secret from a group of people he’d spent so much of his adult life with. Yet Mercury had always been an enigma, even to his bandmates. His origins, his childhood and his sexuality had all been areas of his life that he had, at times, kept private. His health issues were the same. ‘He obviously wasn’t well,’ says John Brough, assistant engineer on
The Miracle
. ‘But no one spoke about it, and we were expected not to.’

‘I personally didn’t know that he had AIDS,’ said David Richards, who co-produced the final recordings. ‘I speculated he had cancer. I think everyone involved pushed aside the fact that it was really that serious. Everyone still had that glimpse of hope that at the end maybe a miracle would happen.’

In June, Brian May’s father Harold died. ‘The two worst things I ever did in his eyes were: one, give up my academic career to become a pop star and two, live with a woman,’ said Brian. After barely speaking to each other for a year, the relationship had thawed, and Harold had supported his son’s choice of career. As May pointed out: ‘My dad was always trying to stop me going into the rock business but he built my guitar – the thing that propelled me into it.’

The shock of his father’s death was compounded by the guitarist’s marital problems. The birth of a daughter, Emily, came at the beginning of 1988 but before long, May had left Chrissy and his three children, moving out of the family home and into a house on his own. Although his relationship with Anita Dobson was now public, he claimed that he ‘couldn’t admit it to myself, and didn’t allow myself to be with her.’ For May, the end of his marriage and the loss of his father cast a shadow over the Queen album sessions. ‘I was in a complete state of mental untogetherness,’ he said. ‘What I did play I was quite proud of, but my input to the material wasn’t as good as it could have been.’ Stories about the ‘millionaire rocker’ and ‘Angie’ (Dobson was still better known by her
EastEnders
character’s name) were soon splashed across the tabloids. May channelled some of his ire into a new song, the stagey mid-paced rocker ‘Scandal’. Though not everyone was a fan: ‘Not one of our better ones,’ said Taylor.

When he wasn’t working with the band, May seemed to spend every waking hour playing music with anyone else that asked. Just days after his father’s death, he joined Elton John and Eric Clapton at the Royal Albert Hall for The Prince’s Trust Gala concert. In the months that followed, he became a guitar-for-hire for the likes of Holly Johnson, Black Sabbath and boyhood hero Lonnie Donegan. ‘You need distractions,’ he admitted. ‘Being busy is one of the great therapies.’

In October, with The Miracle still in progress, Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé released their duets album,
Barcelona
. Even now, there’s still something compelling about hearing ‘The Fallen Priest’ and ‘The Golden Boy’ in which the self-taught Mercury pits himself against Caballé’s mighty soprano, and still manages to get away with it. Reviewing the album for
Q
magazine, David Sinclair made an insightful observation: ‘
Barcelona
has more to do with
Cats
and
Time
than
Tommy
or
La Traviata
.’ The long road to
We Will Rock
You: The Musical
began here.
Barcelona
would spend a month in the UK charts, just outside the Top 20.

On the day of the album’s release, Mercury and Caballé were the main attraction at La Nit, an open-air concert in Barcelona in front of Spain’s King Juan Carlos, to celebrate the arrival of the Olympic torch. Also on the eclectic bill were Jerry Lee Lewis, Dionne Warwick and the ubiquitous Spandau Ballet. It would be Freddie’s final live appearance, but, again, the duo chose to mime. Among the press corps gathered to cover the event, there was talk of a ‘throat infection’ and ‘AIDS’. In a post-show interview Mercury protested: ‘If my voice was not to come up to scratch I’d be letting her down. I didn’t want to take any chances.’

Three weeks before Christmas, The Cross played the Queen Fan Club party at London’s Hammersmith Palais. John Deacon and Brian May joined them onstage for a handful of blues tracks. There was no sign of Freddie. At the Barcelona concert, Mercury had been able to maintain the façade. Just. But beneath his immaculate tuxedo, he had a wound on his right calf and a lesion on the ball of his foot, which, due to his depleted immune system, would never properly heal.

Recording for
The Miracle
finally wound up in the New Year. Ten songs were culled from what Roger Taylor called ‘a good crop’ of thirty tracks, with some extras being held over for the CD and cassette formats of the album and future B-sides. The first single, ‘I Want It All’, emerged in May and put Queen back in the UK Top 5; its heavy-metal guitar riffs sounding like a gauntlet thrown down to the such fashionably heavy bands as Guns N’ Roses and The Cult. The album followed in June, with a sleeve designed by Queen’s art guru Richard Gray. Using a forerunner of the design
programme that would eventually become Photoshop, the four band members’ faces had been morphed into a single image; an unnerving montage of eyes, noses and mouths.

The Miracle
went straight to number 1 in Britain, and 24 in the US. Despite Brian May’s emotional distractions, he was all over the album. There were no shortage of guitar solos on ‘I Want It All’ and ‘Breakthru’, but even on the beach-bar calypso of ‘Rain Must Fall’, May played like a man trying to blow the song up from the inside. Like Queen’s guilty conscience, the troubled guitarist cropped up again and again, salvaging the throwaway opener ‘Party’, messing up the pop-funk of ‘My Baby Does Me’ and ‘The Invisible Man’, and adding extra muscle to the Led Zeppelin-soundalike ‘Khashoggi’s Ship’ (only Queen could write a song inspired by a Saudi playboy and millionaire arms dealer) ‘I can remember whole days sitting there blank, I was in such a depression,’ May said later. ‘I’m surprised how much guitar there is on it.’

For much of the record, Mercury pulled off his customary trick of singing beautifully while giving away very little. Knowing that it’s the work of a man on borrowed time, it’s easy to read more into the lyrics of the more thoughtful material. May described the title track, with its peace-and-love-to-all sentiment, as ‘Freddie’s small masterpiece’. On the album’s final song, ‘Was It All Worth It?’, Mercury reflected on a life of money, excess and the eternal quest for perfection.
The Times
would write it off as ‘a grotesque stadium-rock equivalent of “My Way”,’ but other reviews for the album were cautiously complimentary, with
Rolling Stone
praising
The
Miracle
for its ‘snippets of Queen’s former majesty’.

The promotional campaign extended to
Queen for an Hour
, a group interview with BBC Radio 1 DJ Mike Read. Asked why they wouldn’t tour, Freddie said he wanted to break the cycle of album, tour, album, tour … ‘I am the spanner in the works,’ he declared.

Following ‘I Want It All’, four more singles would be lifted from
The Miracle
over the coming months. As well as the new CD format, EMI pushed out 12-inch vinyl, cassette and picture-disc versions of ‘Breakthru’, ‘The Invisible Man’, ‘Scandal’ and ‘The Miracle’ title track; only the last two failed to crack the Top 20. Yet making promo videos presented a greater challenge than before. In each
promo Mercury sported a beard or heavy stubble. ‘I couldn’t be bothered to shave any more,’ Mercury told the press. ‘It’s as boring as slicing bread.’ According to Jim Hutton, in his
Mercury and Me
memoir, it helped conceal the signs of Kaposi’s Sarcoma better than layers of make-up. For the ‘Breakthru’ video, Queen were filmed on a customised steam engine racing through the Cambridgeshire countryside. To all intents and purposes, Mercury looked healthy: flourishing the sawn-off mic stand, soloing on an imaginary guitar and pumping his arms as if nothing had changed.

For ‘The Miracle’ video, Queen hired stage-school child actors to play themselves, dressing up their mini doppelgängers in versions of their own stage clothes. ‘It was a joy to make,’ recalled Taylor. ‘We were smiling the whole time.’ But when the real Queen emerged for the finale, Mercury, in his
Magic
tour yellow jacket, looked visibly older – and frailer – than he had in 1986, as though time had somehow accelerated.

The task of promoting the new album fell to Taylor and May. Talking about the music was easy enough (the party line: Queen were now ‘refreshed and rejuvenated’), but at a press conference in Munich, a German reporter asked Taylor outright whether Freddie Mercury had AIDS. ‘Freddie is as healthy as ever,’ insisted the drummer. ‘The reason we’re not going to tour is because we can’t agree on the process. Everything else is just a stupid rumour.’ Whether the drummer already knew the truth or not, Mercury’s bandmates were becoming adept at stonewalling questions about his health.

Barely taking a break after finishing
The Miracle
, Mercury, clearly aware of how little time he had left, returned to Montreux, determined to keep working. By the spring of 1989, with
The Miracle
not yet released, Queen began work on a follow-up. ‘I think we all thought
The Miracle
was going to be the last one,’ said Brian May in 1992. ‘There were no guarantees how long Freddie was going to last at that time. So we just knew we had to press on and do what we could.’

According to Jim Hutton, it was in Montreux at this time that Mercury finally told the rest of the group about his condition, with a dramatic display in a restaurant. ‘Someone at the table was
suffering from a cold, and the conversation got round to the curse of illness,’ said Hutton. ‘Freddie still looked fairly well, but he rolled up his right trouser leg and raised his leg to the table to let the others see the painful, open wound weeping on the side of his leg: “You think you’ve got problems,” he told them. “Well, look at this.” Then, as quickly as he’d mentioned it, Freddie brushed the subject aside.’ However, like many anecdotes relating to Mercury’s final days, this has been called into question, with one unnamed source insisting the singer would never have broken the news to them in such a public manner.