by Mark Blake
Bullen would occasionally visit Deacon in London, but was astonished when John told him he wanted to join another group, presuming that he’d given it up to concentrate on his college course. None of his former band members had considered Deacon ambitious enough to want to make a career in music. Interviewed in 1996, Bullen recalled Deacon telling him that he’d begun answering ads in Melody Maker but ‘bottled out when he discovered they were for a name act’. As Richard Young admits, ‘Little did we know when practising in a cold, draughty garage that the shy, unassuming kid, probably still paying me some of his pocket money on an instalment on his bass guitar, would become the famous one.’
Just a couple of days after their meeting at the Maria Assumpta college, Deacon showed up at the Imperial lecture theatre with his bass guitar and a tiny practice amp. His audition comprised of a lengthy blues jam and a run-through of three Queen songs, including ‘Son and Daughter’. Recalled Brian May: ‘Having been through a lot of hugely thunderous bass players, this quite shy guy turns up, and as soon as he started putting basslines to what we were doing, we realised it was right.’
Also present at the session was ex-Sour Milk Sea guitarist Chris Chesney. At the time, Freddie had hatched a plan to expand Queen by adding a second guitarist. ‘I’d seen them play at Imperial with the blonde guy [Barry Mitchell],’ recounts Chesney. ‘Freddie had come up to afterwards and said, “I’d like you to join the band.”’ Previously Queen had supported Wishbone Ash, the denizens of progressive blues-rock, notable for having two lead guitarists. Maybe the inspiration was there, or, more likely, the rather static Brian was less of a visual foil for Freddie than Chris had been. When it came to their individual playing, ‘Brian was ahead of me technically,’ offers Chesney. ‘But I thought I nudged him on feel.’ In the absence of a guitar of his own, Chris had to borrow the Red Special. ‘It was a nightmare,’ he admits. Unused to the homemade guitar’s unusually large neck and idiosyncratic fretboard, Chesney struggled to play properly. ‘It was nice of Freddie to consider me,’ he laughs.
Before long, Chesney had quit London and enrolled at university. After a spell in the US, he returned to the UK and skirted the fringes of the punk scene. A career making video and TV commercials ensued, while covers bands, session gigs and stints as a backing musician to the likes of Percy Sledge and Ben E. King kept him involved in music. After his fumbled audition with Queen, Chris would not cross paths with Freddie Mercury again until 1987.
‘Easy Deacon’ made his Queen debut on 2 July 1971 at a college gig in Surrey. He did not embarrass the band with any ‘incongruous behaviour’, and as a student himself, wasn’t shackled to a day job. His bass playing was excellent (Chris Chesney recalled that at his audition Deacon didn’t drop a single beat) and his electronics expertise was considered a bonus. But there was much more to it than that. As Roger Taylor observed, ‘We were all so used to each other and so over the top, we thought that because he was so quiet he would fit in with us without too much upheaval.’ As Deacon told an interviewer later, ‘When we argue, I yell much less than the others.’
John Anthony was invited to check out the new-look Queen. ‘I saw them rehearse with John. To be honest I thought he was neither fish nor fowl,’ he says. ‘He always reminded me of a character in the seventies TV comedy Please Sir! There was a school bully who wanted to beat everyone up, and he had a sidekick who was always egging him on – “Yeah! Yeah!” That was John Deacon.’ At the time, Anthony was about to set up his own production company, Neptune Productions, with Trident Studio’s engineers Robin Geoffrey Cable and Roy Thomas Baker: ‘I told Queen I was booked up for nine months producing other bands, but that I really wanted to do something with them.’
In the meantime, John Deacon’s apprenticeship would continue with a trip to Cornwall. The band rented a cottage in Devoran and played eleven dates around the county. Sometimes billed as ‘The Legendary Drummer of Cornwall Roger Taylor … and Queen’, their garish stage clothes and Freddie’s mannered posturing was paraded before the personnel gathered in the NCO’s mess hall at RNAS Culdrose. One pub gig was marred by a row over the volume of their PA, and the band were, literally, chased out of town by angry locals. It was all grist to the mill. Roger’s old pal Rik Evans promoted an outdoor gig at Tregye Country Club near Truro, with Queen warming up the crowd for Hawkwind and Arthur Brown.
Back in London, ‘Cornwall’s legendary drummer’ bit the bullet and went back to being a student. Taylor’s year off was over, and he signed up to study biology at North London Polytechnic. Adamant that the course would not stand in the way of Queen, Roger had to give up the market stall. In Taylor’s absence, Freddie closed the stall and carried on working for Alan Mair. The close proximity between the two stalls also allowed the singer to continue using the market’s public telephone box as his personal office. ‘You could always call Freddie on that phone and he’d answer,’ says Ken Testi.
Whatever progress Queen were making as a live act, they were still even further away from a record deal than Smile had been. Two years earlier, Pye Studios maintenance engineer Terry Yeadon had recorded a demo for Smile in a late-night session. That autumn, Yeadon took a phone call from Brian May. It was the first time they had spoken since Smile, and the call was a sign of May’s desperation to get something, anything, happening for Queen. ‘Brian told me that he had a new band, that Tim had gone but that they had a great new singer, and could I do anything?’ says Yeadon. ‘His timing could not have been better.’
De Lane Lea’s Kingsway Studios had closed and the studio team, which now included Yeadon, had moved to a newly built facility in Wembley, North London. But there were problems. As Louis Austin, the studio engineer, bluntly explains: ‘De Lane Lea was a piece of tut, a rubbish studio, appalling. When a band played in Studio One, you could hear them in Studios Two and Three, and vice versa.’
In an attempt to fully soundproof the facility, a false wall was installed in the corridor and filled with formaldehyde chips (Yeadon: ‘That stuff you embalm dead bodies with’). What the team now needed was a live rock band to test the rooms, and identify any further problems. ‘I remember thinking, “Who can we get?”’ says Terry Yeadon. ‘At Pye Studios, I’d worked with everyone from The Kinks to Sammy Davis Jnr. I thought, “I can’t get any of them.” Brian phoned at the right time. I was like, “Step this way.”’ Queen arrived with, as Louis Austin recalls, ‘a complete setlist and all the songs mapped out for a first album. We were impressed.’ The deal entailed the band acting as guinea pigs, with a professional studio demo as payment. ‘They said if we came along and made a noise, they could do their acoustic tests and they’d make some demos for us,’ recalled Brian May.
‘Thinking back, we really pissed them around,’ says Yeadon. ‘We had them dragging their gear from one studio to the next for about a week. Then, when we were recording, we discovered there was a problem with the new tape machines, so every two minutes we were asking them to stop and start again.’
Queen rehearsed their live show in Studio Two’s mini-amphitheatre, blasting through the 100-watt Marshall PA stack the engineers had hired for them, with Freddie brazenly throwing shapes. ‘Fred couldn’t sing and not perform,’ says Yeadon. ‘Even when we were recording them I think Louis had a problem with him going off mic.’ Louis Austin was used to working with hungry young bands, and had just engineered Thin Lizzy’s debut. ‘But Queen were unusually confident and committed. I did think they’d get somewhere, but not with me and certainly not at De Lane Lea.’
Queen came away from the studio with sixteen-track, two-inch masters of five original songs: ‘Keep Yourself Alive’, ‘Liar’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Great King Rat’ and ‘The Night Comes Down’. The demos offer a time capsule of Queen in late 1971. Most of the elements of what would become their signature sound are already present: be it the grand bombast of ‘Liar’, the galloping heavy metal of ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ or the fervent ‘Jesus’, an early example of Mercury’s lyrical ambition; like a Cecil
B. de Mille biblical epic condensed into three and half strange minutes, or Freddie’s art A-Level crucifixion painting set to music.
At the end of the session, Terry Yeadon experienced a déjà-vu moment. ‘Once again, they were like, “Can you do anything for us?” and we all said, “Sorry, chaps, we’ve got a studio to build here.” But while most new bands have a crappy little demo made on a Grundig, they were walking away with these professional masters.’
‘We figured that at some point an opportunity would come along,’ said Brian May. ‘You have to get your break, and what distinguishes the men from the boys is that some people are ready for it and some aren’t. So we said, “When it comes along, everything is going to be rehearsed, we’re going to know what the stage act is going to be like, the whole thing is going to be professional.”’
One glimmer of hope came via John Anthony. On his recommendation, his Neptune Productions partners Roy Thomas Baker and Robin Geoffrey Cable had dropped by De Lane Lea to watch Queen in action. ‘I heard “Keep Yourself Alive”,’ recalled Baker, ‘and I immediately thought it was a hit.’ Baker walked away with a tape of the demo.
In the meantime, though, the band still had to earn money from somewhere. Mercury was still reliant on Mary Austin’s earnings and any pennies scraped on the market stall; Taylor and Deacon were living off their student grants, while Brian May’s thesis was still not complete and his grant had run out. Before long, the guitarist had taken the radical step of getting a proper job, teaching mathematics and science at Stockwell Manor, a South London secondary school. ‘It was very challenging,’ he recalled. ‘You couldn’t get the children to attend unless they were incredibly interested in what you were saying. I had an advantage because I was young and could speak to them in their own language.’ However one of May’s lessons went disastrously wrong, when he allowed his pupils to use scissors to cut out shapes. ‘Half an hour later they were attacking each other – blood and paper everywhere.’
Nevertheless, now that Queen had a professional demo to shop to record companies, the entrepreneurial Ken Testi came back into the picture. Testi was looking for his own way in to the music business and was now in London, sharing a flat with promoters Paul Conroy and Lindsay Brown while working part-time at a market research company. While Queen were thrilled with the demo there was one hurdle: none of them owned a tape machine on which to play it. ‘Cassettes hadn’t been invented,’ says Testi. ‘So any time they wanted to listen to it, they had to find someone with a machine. Dear Mary Austin had a friend out in North London with a reel-to-reel. Then we heard of someone looking after a flat off the Kings Road, who I think may have been the keyboard player in Genesis [Tony Banks], and he had a reel-to-reel so they let us in there. But I started to get marginally pissed off because all the guys would do was listen to these tapes. They were not making any attempt to contact record companies.’
Ken’s first port of call was his flatmates, Conroy and Brown: ‘They used to share a room and despite this being a stoners’ flat, they were very professional and went into their room to discuss it. Then they came out and said, “Right, we don’t think there’s room for another Led Zeppelin.” That was a knee to the groin for me.’
In Truro, Roger Taylor would receive a similar knockback. ‘I had a reel-to-reel in the flat where I was living with my wife,’ remembers Rik Evans. ‘Roger played us Queen’s demo, and I was like, “Great band, Roger, but I’m not too sure about the singer.”’ A bit like saying no to The Beatles.’
Frustrated, Ken began cold-calling record companies: Polydor, Island, MCA, CBS, A&M … ‘Amazingly, I managed to make appointments at EMI and Decca. Freddie and Brian came with me. Their A&R guys listened, but didn’t get it, which was amusing in the case of EMI, who ended up paying bundles for Queen in the end.’
The only company to bite was B&C, an offshoot of Charisma Records, the two-year-old label that had signed the cream of the progressive rock set, including Van Der Graaf Generator, The Nice and Genesis. Charisma’s founder Tony Stratton-Smith, known to most as ‘Strat’, was a larger-than-life bon vivant, passionate about music, horses and alcohol. Charisma had signed The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and would soon do the same for Monty Python and The Holy Grail. The 1971-era Queen, with their wild quirks and ferocious imagination, would have been a comfortable fit.
As Ken Testi remembers it, ‘Charisma made Queen an offer of, I think, £25,000. The band went and slept on it and then came came back with a decision … they turned it down.’ Paul Conroy, who’d helped secure the meeting with Stratton-Smith, was shocked. ‘Paul thought they’d looked a gift horse in the mouth,’ continues Ken. ‘But Queen’s view was that if they signed with Charisma they would always play second fiddle to Genesis and those other bands, which was very forward-thinking of them. I was easy with the notion that if it wasn’t right for them, they shouldn’t do it, and I thought that if we had one medium-to-large fish on the hook we could get another.’
‘Arrogance is a very good thing to have when you’re starting,’ offered Mercury, years later. ‘And that means saying to yourself you’re going to be the number one group, not the number two.’
In the meantime, Roger Taylor had telephoned John Anthony and told him about the Charisma deal. ‘I wasn’t surprised that Charisma had made an offer,’ he recalls. ‘But when we met up, the band told me that Charisma had offered them a tour of Belgium and a new van! I told them we could do better than that. I went straight to Norman Sheffield at Trident and told them they had to sign this band or I would take them elsewhere.’
Trident Studios was in St Anne’s Court, a blink-and-you’ll-miss it alleyway off Wardour Street. It was right at the heart of the Soho music scene, an easy stagger to the Marquee, the Ship pub and La Chasse drinking club. Brothers Norman and Barry Sheffield had built the studio in 1967. Trident’s forte was its state-of-the-art ‘A’ Range consoles and Bechstein concert piano, famously used by The Beatles to record ‘Hey Jude’ (Ken Testi: ‘Harry Nilsson would fly to England just because he wanted to use that piano’). Trident’s client list included Elton John, George Harrison, The Rolling Stones and Free. In 1970 David Bowie cut his Hunky Dory album at Trident, and by mid-1972 was there putting the finishing touches to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. ‘Trident was the best studio in the world,’ insists John Anthony, ‘which was why it was booked twenty-four hours a day.’
The Sheffield brothers had also established Trident Audio Productions, with a view to signing bands, giving them access to a superior studio and then arranging a distribution deal for their music with a major record label. Neptune Productions would act as the go-between for Queen and Trident Audio Productions. ‘I’d seen what Chris Wright and Terry Ellis had done at Chrysalis,’ explains Anthony. ‘I wanted the same deal they’d had: act as a production company and when your artist sold a certain number of records the company would become a label. That’s what I wanted for Neptune or Trident. I didn’t care which. They key thing was the quality of the work. Roy Baker and Robin Cable had been to De Lane Lea to see Queen and they were as convinced as I was.’
If Queen hoped 1972 would be better than 1971, one of their first gigs that year left them wondering. In January, they played Bedford College, a gig booked on John Deacon’s recommendation, only to perform to six paying punters. Paul Conroy threw them a lifeline with a support slot at King’s College Medical School on 10 March. Two weeks later, Queen played a hospital dance in Forest Hill, South London.
‘I’m sure it was a nurse’s college,’ says Anthony. According to John, that was the night Tony Stratton-Smith was given his marching orders. ‘Norman Sheffield had heard the Queen tape and he told his brother Barry to go and see them. I said to Barry, “Bring the big car, and we’ll all dress in black and put the Brylcreem on.” We were all big guys, all over six feet tall, and we even had a security guy with us. So we turned up, looking like we were parodying the Kray twins, and there was Queen stood at the bar with the guys from Charisma. Queen fell over la
ughing when they saw us.’
Onstage, the band performed the likes of ‘Son and Daughter’, ‘The Night Comes Down’, ‘Keep Yourself Alive’, ‘See What a Fool I’ve Been’ (a song that had started life with Smile but would become a Queen B-side) and ‘Hangman’, the heavy blues track that would never find its way onto a Queen album (Taylor: ‘It was very much based on Free’). The Trident entourage were impressed. ‘We watched the gig, and Barry couldn’t believe it when they did Shirley Bassey’s “Big Spender”,’ says Anthony. ‘Straight away, he was like, “Right, we have to sign them!”’
The studio was the bait in the deal Trident Audio Productions offered Queen. They would have use of the best recording facility in the country and Trident would supply them with a new PA and instruments. However, the deal they offered meant that Trident would also be responsible for their recording, producing, management and song publishing. While Queen insisted on the Sheffields producing separate sub-contracts for each part of the deal it still placed them in a situation where Trident controlled everything; a potentially dangerous situation for any band to be in.
The Forest Hill gig would be Queen’s last for eight months. They had yet to sign with the Sheffields, but initially spent the time poring over the contracts, biding their time and possibly waiting for other offers. ‘I told them to lie low,’ says John Anthony. ‘I wanted them to concentrate on getting their sound together, and then they could come back and play bigger gigs. Why bother with tiny clubs?’
