by Mark Blake
In April, a month after they cut their deal with EMI, Jac Holzman saw Queen again at the Marquee and made a formal offer from Elektra Records. John Anthony encountered him on the way out of the gig where Holzman had some advice to be passed on to Brian May: ‘Jac said, “We’ll do the deal … but tell the guitarist to make it look harder. Kids like to think it’s Beethoven.”’
Though technically beaten to the punch by the Larry Lurex single, Queen made their EMI debut with the single ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ on 6 July. The lyrics had a simple message: don’t let the bastards grind you down (appropriate in the light of Queen’s struggle and Mercury’s ongoing reinvention); the heavily phased guitar riff was pure Led Zeppelin, the chorus was pure pop, while Taylor returned to his schoolboy inspiration, Surfaris’ ‘Wipe Out’, for the tribal drum fill in the middle. ‘If Queen look half as good as they sound, they could be huge,’ raved New Musical Express. Except no one was listening. The single failed to chart, and years later, May still fretted over the final mix: ‘It never had the magic it should have had.’
Queen’s debut album, called simply Queen, finally saw the light of day on 13 July. The front cover spoke volumes. It was a picture of Mercury pulling an heroic pose onstage, shot by Roger Taylor’s friend from Cornwall, BBC cameraman Douglas Puddifoot. Freddie was meant to resemble ‘a figurehead on the prow of those old sailing ships,’ according to Brian May. Decorated with the Mercury-designed Queen crest logo, the back cover contained a montage of snapshots, including one of Mercury and Mary Austin’s flat decorated with fancy Biba artifacts. Apparently, EMI’s creative services manager pronounced the homemade cover ‘crap’. But the design was forced through. It was an early indicator of Queen’s unwillingness to compromise.
The liner notes renamed John Deacon as Deacon John and gave Taylor his full family name of Roger Meddows-Taylor; giving the band an air even more regal air. It also included what would become Queen’s mission statement for most of the decade: ‘… and nobody played synthesiser’. As Roy Thomas Baker explained, ‘We would spend four days multi-layering a guitar solo and then some imbecile from the record company would come in and say, “I like that synth.”’
Like the single, the album sold slowly and made it to number 32 in the UK (though it would chart higher following Queen’s breakthrough two years later). In the press, some reviews were positive. ‘A thrusting, dynamic debut,’ claimed underground magazine Time Out. Others were less so. ‘A bucket of stale urine,’ said New Musical Express, sparking a resentment of the music press that would endure throughout Queen’s career.
Relieved that they finally had a record out, Queen now wrestled with the fear that it might be already out of date. ‘We were into glam-rock before The Sweet and Bowie,’ Brian May told Melody Maker. ‘We’re worried now because we might have come too late.’ The competition was fierce. Androgynous-looking boys in exotic clothing had become de rigueur in rock and pop. That spring, Bowie released Aladdin Sane, and Roxy Music put out their second album For Your Pleasure. Roxy, with their feather boas and art-school pedigree, had made their live debut a year earlier at the Hand and Flowers pub, a stone’s throw from the Kensington Tavern. Roxy had already enjoyed one hit single and album. ‘We don’t want people to think we’re jumping on their bandwagon,’ insisted May.
That summer, London’s number 9 bus became the scene for many an earnest discussion about Queen’s prospects. Carrying May, Mercury and various friends, the double-decker would inch its way through the traffic on Kensington High Street, past the Royal Albert Hall and the market, and into the West End. Chris Smith recalls catching the number 9 with Mercury just after the first Queen album came out. ‘Fred was getting a bit desperate: “God! I hope this band takes off. I don’t know what I’m going to do if it doesn’t.” And he looked up at me and said, “I don’t want to end up working in an art studio.” We both cracked up … I, of course, was the one that did end up working in an art studio.’
‘If you ever get on a number 9 bus and go upstairs to the front left, that’s where Freddie and I used to sit,’ explained Brian May. ‘We used to get the bus and go up to Trident to beat them on the heads, and to ask them why they weren’t doing anything about our record.’
There was some good news that summer. Mike Appleton, producer of the BBC TV music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test, had received an unmarked promo pressing of the Queen album. The disc had been sent without Queen’s detailed press biography and photographs. Appleton liked what he heard, particularly ‘Keep Yourself Alive’. With no idea of who Queen were or how to contact the band, he produced an animated sequence for the song, lifted from a cartoon which had been used to promote US president F.D. Roosevelt’s election campaign. The film was broadcast on The Old Grey Whistle Test. An initially irate EMI and Trident both contacted the BBC, but the band were buoyed by the unexpected publicity.
In August, Mercury shaved his chest before filming a promo video for ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ and ‘Liar’. But the grooming proved pointless. The band rejected the video, unhappy with the lighting, among other things, and reconvened in a studio in St John’s Wood two months later. The final film shows Queen, daubed in eyeliner, bedecked in black satin, with May sporting the sort of opulent necklace usually found buried with an Egyptian pharaoh, and even ‘Easy Deacon’ in knee-length platform boots. Mercury preens, shimmies and, at one point, tosses a tambourine into the wings. It’s a fabulously assured performance.
In an attempt to drum up some support for their charges, Trident hired a publicist. Tony Brainsby was a bespectacled, stick-thin 28-year-old. Rarely seen without a drink or a cigarette in his hand, he had been a teenage pal of The Rolling Stones and had a client list that included Paul McCartney, Mott The Hoople and Cat Stevens. His Edith Grove townhouse doubled as his office and was a Mecca for pop stars, writers, actors, models and liggers.
Brainsby had seen Queen live and been impressed by their conviction in front of a disinterested college crowd. He was immediately intrigued by Freddie Mercury’s mannerisms (‘He’d say “darling” or “my dear” practically every sentence’) but also recalled the secrecy surrounding the singer’s past life (‘For years I believed his proper surname to be Bulsova’). Mercury was, said Brainsby, ‘better at being seen, heard but not known.’
But when Brainsby took Queen on as clients, he met with hostility in the music press. ‘They were called posing ponces,’ he recalled in 1997 (Brainsby died in 2000). ‘They were accused of getting session musicians in to cover for them because people found it so hard to believe they could look like that and be talented.’ While many of their contemporaries presented an air of stoned insouciance, Queen made no attempt to conceal their intelligence, middle-class backgrounds or clarity of thought. May and Taylor would earnestly outline their game-plan, with the drummer particularly prone to outbursts: ‘We are a bloody good band!’
Steven Rosen, who would go on to write for Rolling Stone, was spending the summer of 1973 in London trying to break into music journalism. He’d been given Tony Brainsby’s name. The PR took pity on Rosen, who’d been sleeping in Hyde Park, and let him crash at Edith Grove. To help out the aspiring writer, Tony made a suggestion. ‘He asked me if I wanted to interview Queen,’ recalls Rosen now. ‘And right away I thought the name was a bit too glam. Tony had a white test pressing of the first album and in my infinite stupidity I passed. He was like, “I could have all four guys here in the office and you’d have one of the first interviews with them.” And I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” I still think about that moment.’
While critics, even the destitute ones, were broadly suspicious, Brainsby noticed that the band had a dedicated following that over the next two years would expand to include an age group much older than was associated with the traditional rock fan (‘housewives, middle-aged women – I had one old woman that used to ring me up’). Queen would soon appoint Taylor’s Truro friends Pat and Sue Johnstone to run their fast-growing fan club, when the deluge of mail they received
via EMI became too much for the company to deal with.
In the meantime, Brainsby also wasted no time placing Queen in the teen mags. His pitch was simple: they were well-educated, fancy dressers and their guitarist had made his instrument out of a hundred-year-old fireplace. Queen may have been fuming over accusations that they weren’t a serious group (Roxy Music drummer Paul Thompson had denounced them as ‘too contrived’), but in October, they showed up in Mirabelle magazine, discussing their academic achievements, likes and dislikes. Mercury’s ambition was to ‘appear on The Liza Minnelli Show’ and Taylor’s was ‘to go super-nova!’. ‘Tall, dark, handsome’ Brian May’s likes are given as ‘cats, Hermann Hesse and prawn cocktails …’
In August, desperate to start recording again, Queen had gone back to Trident to begin work on a second album. This time they insisted on and were granted proper studio time during daylight hours. Roy Thomas Baker, Robin Geoffrey Cable and Mike Stone were retained. “Jack Nelson very nicely said that we had to go and see the boys as they didn’t want me to do the second album,’ explains John Anthony. ‘So I went to Haverstock Hill where they were rehearsing and said, ‘I wish you well.’ There was no hard feeling. I was working flat out anyway. But I used to still go and watch them rehearse, and advise them on the live show.’
Taylor informed Record Mirror that the next Queen album ‘would be alright as long as our egos don’t get out of control.’ It would prove a prophetic statement. Not for nothing would Queen’s second album have a working title of Over the Top. Mercury quickly gave his bandmates and Baker a glimpse of what he had in mind, escorting them to the Tate Gallery to show them The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke by the Victorian artist Richard Dadd. ‘It’s one of the most complex paintings I’ve ever seen,’ said Taylor. ‘It had about fifty different scenarios all done by a man who was, quite literally, going bonkers.’ Dadd, who believed he was acting on an instruction from the Egyptian god Osiris, had murdered his father, and spent nine years working on the painting while an inmate at the Bethlem Royal Hospital. It showed an intricate woodland scene with fairy-tale creatures lurking, sometimes almost unseen, behind the undergrowth. Mercury’s song of the name would be peopled with just such creatures.
Richard Thompson had always declined Freddie’s invitation to accompany him on his weekend gallery visits. But the former Wreckage drummer was still aware of Mercury’s fascination with one particular artwork. ‘I was at the flat with Mary Austin once, and Fred came back from the Tate with a picture postcard of The Fairy Feller’s Master-stroke,’ says Thompson. ‘Freddie was most annoyed as the picture on the postcard had been printed the wrong way round!’ Roy Thomas Baker was also marched to the Tate to gaze upon the Dadd masterpiece, and Mercury’s instruction to the producer was simple: ‘Anything you want to try, throw it in.’
The band and Baker made full use of Trident’s sixteen-track facility, attempting, said Taylor, ‘to break the boundaries of what people thought you could do in a recording studio’. Six-part harmonies became the order of the day, and though they stuck to the ‘no synths’ rule, piano, Hammond organ, castanets and tubular bells found their way into the mix (Baker: ‘It was the kitchen-sink album’). May and his co-producer also took the first album’s idea of an orchestral guitar a stage further on the tracks ‘Procession’ and ‘Father to Son’, creating a sumptuous din that sounded like the London Symphony Orchestra jamming with Jimi Hendrix. ‘Queen were relentless,’ said Baker. ‘They were coming up with millions of ideas.’ In the end, the title, Queen II, was the only simple thing about the album.
Aside from a couple of dates in July and a show supporting Vinegar Joe at Newcastle’s Mayfair in August, Queen had hardly played live since March. ‘We’d already driven ourselves mad playing pubs and little clubs up and down the country in Smile,’ griped May. ‘And we didn’t want to go through that again because we thought it would get too depressing.’ But it wasn’t over yet. On 13 September they played London’s Golders Green Hippodrome for a BBC In Concert show, road-testing most of Queen II on the night. A month later, they made their European debut as part of a promo trip, playing in Bonn and at Le Blow Up club in Luxembourg City.
On 4 September, Queen’s debut was released in the US. Jac Holzman’s enthusiasm was certainly mirrored in Rolling Stone’s gushing review, which frothed over Mercury’s ‘cocky, regal arrogance’ and likened ‘Deacon John’ to ‘a colossal sonic volcano whose eruption maketh the earth tremble’, finally concluding ‘Queen is a monster’. It would be a year before Queen played in the US, but it was a positive start.
As a warm-up to their forthcoming tour supporting Mott The Hoople, Queen booked two dates at Imperial College and invited photographer Mick Rock to shoot the show on 2 November. Rock, introduced to Queen at Trident on Ken Scott’s suggestion, was a Cambridge University graduate who had been close friends with Pink Floyd’s lost-boy singer Syd Barrett. He had gone on to photograph David Bowie and Lou Reed and had shot the covers for Reed’s Transformer and, most recently, Bowie’s Pin-Ups album. ‘Ken Scott said, “Queen love your work, especially the things you’ve done with David and Lou,”’ recalled Rock. ‘They really want you to shoot them.’
At their first meeting, Rock was quickly swayed by Mercury and Taylor’s charm offensive, but also by the band’s absolute self-confidence. He noted, not for the last time, that they wanted answers for everything, and that Jack Nelson was invariably the one being questioned: ‘They wanted the world and they wanted it no later than teatime on Friday.’ Rock listened to an acetate of Queen II and agreed to shoot the album cover later. But first, at Trident’s bequest, he shot some promotional photos for the forthcoming tour. Rock’s first shoot had Queen huddled around Mercury, who was clutching a giant sceptre. But the royal look was too obvious for some (‘Brian didn’t like them and they didn’t get published at the time’). Rock’s next proposal was to get the band to strip to the waist. The topless look was shamelessly kitsch, but Mercury adored it. ‘They wanted something sensational, an image that people would talk about,’ said Rock. The naked Queen pictures would quickly find their way into Mirabelle and NME, fuelling more antagonism from the paper. But the plan worked. As Rock recalled, ‘They got themselves some ink’. Better still, their sold-out show at Imperial garnered one of the best reviews of their career from Disc’s Rosemary Horide: ‘They were forced onstage for three encores until they finally had to stop – from sheer exhaustion.’
In the meantime, EMI had broken with tradition and paid for Queen to be the support act on Mott The Hoople’s upcoming UK tour. Jack Nelson was friends with Mott’s manager, a fellow American Bob Hirschmann, and recalled the company stumping up £3,000. EMI’s Bob Mercer claims it was between £9,000 and £10,000: ‘Queen was the first time EMI had paid for a support tour, although it became common practice after that. Mott The Hoople were as hot as bear shit, and that was the audience we wanted to expose Queen to.’
In preparation for the tour, Queen booked rehearsal time at Fulham’s Manticore Studios, a converted cinema that had just been bought by super-group trio Emerson, Lake & Palmer. It was November and a jet heater had been switched on inside the studio, with parachute silks hung over the stall seats to keep the warmth in. Peter ‘Ratty’ Hince, who would become head of Queen’s road crew, was working as roadie for Mott The Hoople at the time. Hince and his employers were already at Manticore when Queen arrived.
‘It was freezing, so Mott were in there in jeans, scarves and fur coats,’ recalls Hince. ‘Then Queen showed up, all in their dresses, just to rehearse. We were like, “Who is this bloke called Fred prancing around with one glove and a sawn-off mic stand. Fred’s no name for a pop star.”’ Hince was similarly intrigued by Brian May and his choice of plectrum, a sixpence coin, which May preferred to a conventional pick, possibly because of its serrated edges. ‘He had a homemade guitar and an AC30 on a chair and he played with a sixpence … I thought, “Well, he’s probably got no money …”’ Bob Mercer tried to gatecrash the rehear
sals but was refused entry. ‘I didn’t want to interfere or tell them what songs they should play, I was genuinely curious. But I was forbidden.’ Instead Mercer would have to wait until the opening night of the tour at Leeds Town Hall.
Mott The Hoople had been together since 1969 and had been on the verge of splitting before being persuaded not to by superfan David Bowie. His song ‘All the Young Dudes’ gave Mott a surprise hit in 1972. A year later, with new guitarist Ariel Bender and his dyed silver hair, Mott chimed with the current craze for glam-rock. More than that, they nurtured a connection with their audience and presented themselves as regular human beings not unapproachable superstars. As Brian May put it, ‘Mott were something to learn from,’ and their 1973 hit ‘All the Way from Memphis’ included a line that could have been written for Freddie Mercury: ‘You look like a star, but you’re still on the dole.’
Queen’s set included most of the yet-to-be released Queen II, ‘Keep Yourself Alive’, ‘Hangman’ and a medley of rock ’n’ roll numbers, including their uber-camp version of ‘Big Spender’. The audience’s response to Queen on the tour is the subject of wildly varying opinion. Joop Visser remembered that by the end of the tour Queen were stealing the show from Mott The Hoople. Bob Mercer recalls seeing one gig where ‘Freddie came on and did “Big Spender” and the audience went nuts.’ Backstage afterwards, Mercer remembers a spat with someone close to Mott The Hoople over how well Queen had gone down. ‘He put me up against a wall and said, “They are off the tour. My band will never survive this.” And I said, “Sorry, sunshine, that’s your problem. I paid for them to be here.”’
