by Mark Blake
At least on tour, the band’s efforts weren’t going unrewarded. Yet on the second night, at Friars in Aylesbury, there was a portent of trouble ahead. During the show, Brian May’s playing became hampered by a pain in his arm. The band had been given injections before flying to Australia to play the Sunbury Rock Festival in January. May’s right arm had swelled up. The needle used to inject him had not been sterile, and it was discovered that he had contracted gangrene. While it was treatable, the infection would impact on the guitarist’s health as the tour progressed.
At Plymouth Guildhall on 3 March, Queen were joined by the tour’s support act Nutz, a hard rock band from Liverpool, similarly predisposed towards loud riffing and with a corkscrew-haired frontman, Dave Lloyd, who was very much in the Robert Plant mould. There was already a double connection between the two groups: Nutz’ just-released first album had been produced by John Anthony, and the band members were from the same Merseyside clique as Freddie’s old sparring partners Ibex. According to Nutz bass guitarist Keith Mulholland, Brian May’s opening gambit to the band was, ‘I hear you rock.’ At Plymouth, Mulholland and Nutz drummer John Mylett watched Queen from the wings. ‘We were looking at Freddie, and we thought, “OK, he has something going on here,”’ says Mulholland. That ‘something’ seemed to develop as the tour progressed. ‘He just started getting more and more outrageous.’
Much like their mutual friends in Ibex, Nutz’ approach to their music and their stagecraft was less rarified than Queen’s. Dave Lloyd described it thus: ‘Queen seemed very sensitive … we were four crazy Scousers.’ Keith Mulholland watched Freddie dabbling away at ‘White Queen (As It Began)’ on the group’s mini-grand piano during soundcheck. He was both impressed by the singer’s musicality, and amused by his flamboyance. ‘Freddie was reasonably shy,’ says the bassist, ‘but also very dramatic. There was always lots of “Oh yes, dear”. He was definitely different.’ Word of how different had already filtered down to the band via Ibex roadie Geoff Higgins. ‘Geoff told us about Freddie and the crushed velvet flares,’ says Mulholland. ‘Any normal bod would just put on a pair of trousers and get on with it. But Geoff said Fred would stand in front of the mirror for ages, and make sure he got the seams straight.’
‘Nutz came back home halfway through that tour,’ recalls Ken Testi. ‘That was when they started telling me how gay Freddie is, and I’m not having it. I’m saying, “You don’t know Mary Austin’, but Dave Lloyd was like, “Trust me on this one, Ken.”’ However, Keith Mulholland doesn’t remember any specific incident. ‘I think that women may have noticed it more than the fellas. He wasn’t “out”, but he might have been a bit “outish”,’ he laughs. ‘We didn’t care. We liked him.’
The tour progressed with a mixture of onstage highs and offstage lows. After a gig at Cheltenham Town Hall, Queen fired their lighting engineers. Trident arranged for Elton John’s lighting ace James Dadd to take over, but the lighting rig would remain an unpredictable beast for the rest of the jaunt. After the Croydon Greyhound, Mercury was convinced he was ‘breaking down, I was so fatigued’. Sheepishly, he told a writer from New Musical Express that he had thrown a glass at one of his entourage in a fit of pique, and that Taylor and May ‘had a heavy scene’ in the dressing room one night after the drummer squirted the guitarist in the face with hairspray.
However, despite being prone to what one tour insider describes as ‘his dying-swan routine’, the singer would often remain upbeat in the face of adversity. Arriving at Aberystwyth University, the road crew discovered that the event was a formal student ball, for which a steel band had also been booked, and that Queen weren’t due on until after midnight. Dave Lloyd ran into Mercury at the hotel and began moaning about the booking: ‘Freddie just said, “Oh David, you can be such a cunt. We’ll do well tonight.”’
With ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ and Queen II inching up the charts, the timing of the tour couldn’t have been better, even if, as Freddie recalled, ‘Suddenly, everything escalated.’ Tiny gigs in rural Norfolk and on Essex’s Canvey Island began to feel incongruous, and at least one venue manager wondered whether the band would honour their booking now that they’d had a hit single. Stirling University embodied the scale of the change. ‘It was a 500-capacity venue,’ explains Keith Mulholland. ‘“Seven Seas of Rhye” was in the charts, and the promoter had oversold the place. As soon as we walked onstage you could feel the heat of all these people. Then I saw all these guys coming back from the bar with seven-pint party cans. It was a bad combination.’
Mulholland could feel the stage moving with the combined force of the bodies pressed against it. Meanwhile, roadies crouched behind them, holding the amps upright. As soon as Queen appeared, a beer can whizzed towards the stage. ‘Freddie used his mic stand like a bat,’ says Mulholland, ‘and whacked it back into the crowd.’ After that, a hailstorm of cans landed on the stage. Later, the audience refused to leave the venue after the final encore. Queen barricaded themselves backstage, while the police were called, with fans and roadies injured during the ensuing fracas.
The following night’s planned gig at Birmingham Barbarella’s was postponed. A week later, the tour reached the Douglas Palace Lido on the Isle of Man. An aftershow party at the group’s hotel led to a room getting wrecked. Over a more sedate drink, Mulholland became keenly aware of how different Queen’s approach to the business was. ‘We were talking to Freddie one night and he explained how they wouldn’t let the record company backstage, and how they, as a group, were protective of every single member of the band,’ he says. ‘To be honest, we didn’t know what he meant at the time, but, looking back, he was so clued up. Other bands didn’t think that way.’
The four-week tour was due to end on Sunday, 31 March at London’s Rainbow Theatre. The 3,500-capacity venue in Finsbury Park had been the place where Jimi Hendrix first set his guitar alight in 1967. Motown child-prodigy-turned-funk-superstar Stevie Wonder had played the theatre just weeks before Queen. While soundchecking during the afternoon, Freddie threw another tantrum. Keith Mulholland is convinced that the argument started over Taylor’s choice of stage clothes: ‘Roger had worn some top that Freddie wanted to wear that night. Freddie was furious, threw down his microphone and stormed off. I think he went and sat in the van. Brian turned up the volume and said over the mic, ‘Freddie dear, come back, you old queen. Come back and soundcheck.”’ In retrospect, though, the squabble over a shirt may have masked a bigger problem. For all his onstage bravado, Dave Lloyd recalled seeing Freddie being sick before the first gig in Plymouth. Keith Mulholland remembers it also: ‘He did get nervous before a show, and he’d throw up. But everybody has their thing, their ritual, before a gig.’
On the night, though, Mercury hid any sign of such nerves. It was Queen’s biggest headlining show yet, and the singer chose it to unveil the white winged tunic Zandra Rhodes had created for him. Through ‘Great King Rat’, ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ and ‘Liar’, Mercury did his customary prowling-cat routine, pacing from one side of the stage to the next, tossing his hair alongside Brian May before scuttling off to do the same next to John Deacon. During May’s guitar solo, Freddie disappeared for a change of clothes, reappearing in a slashed black top (a second-choice perhaps, after Taylor had nixed his first), before ending the show tossing handfuls of flowers into the audience.
‘He’s a riveting performer,’ wrote Melody Maker’s Colin Irwin. ‘The stuff idols are made of.’ But Irwin, like others, was turned off by the freneticism of Mercury’s performance. John Anthony, watching Queen from the wings that night, saw how nervous the singer was. ‘Fred was getting very flustered,’ he recalls. ‘He’d come over to the side of the stage and I’d be saying, “Calm down, Freddie, calm down …” I encouraged him. I said, “Freddie, you look like Nijinsky tonight, you’re fucking majestic”. He was like, “Oh thank you, Johnnypoos.”’ Backstage after the show, Mercury received his best compliment yet. ‘Pete Townshend’s younger brother Simon had been at the gig,’ says Anthony
. Thirteen-year-old Townshend Jnr was smitten. ‘He said to Freddie, “You’re much better than my brother’s band.” Fred was ecstatic.’
The show at Barbarella’s had now been rescheduled to take place two days after the Rainbow, making it the official last night of the tour. The club on Birmingham’s Cumberland Street would later become a hot-spot during punk and New Romantic eras. The Barbarella’s stage had a catwalk, which Mercury made great use of that night. While the Queen singer paraded before his throng, Dave Lloyd and a couple of Queen roadies scampered onstage behind him. Roger Taylor had bet the Nutz singer and the crew a bottle of champagne that they wouldn’t streak during Queen’s set. ‘So they walked onstage stark-bollock naked and mooned the audience,’ remembers Keith Mulholland. ‘Fred couldn’t work out what was going on, until he turned round. He later said that he knew something was up as “for the first time, nobody in the audience was looking at me!”’
By April, ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ had peaked at number 10, while Queen II had reached number 5, with Queen’s debut also sneaking back into the Top 50. There was no time to bask in the glory, though. Queen II was released in the US, making it into the Top 50, as the group joined Mott The Hoople for an American tour. After headlining their own shows it was a wrench to go back to opening for another band, but the pill was sweetened by the promise of a trip to the States and a reunion with Mott.
The tour began in April at Regis College in Denver, Colorado, taking in a further five consecutive shows across the American Midwest at college venues and civic theatres. Barely a month before in the UK, Queen’s partisan audiences had taken to singing the national anthem unprompted at the end of the group’s set. Such a response was rather less forthcoming in Oklahoma City. Mott The Hoople’s Ian Hunter could sense Mercury’s impatience. ‘He couldn’t understand why Queen weren’t huge immediately,’ said Hunter. ‘I remember him marching up and down, saying, “Why don’t these silly bastards get it?” But America wasn’t England; you had to tour there a few times.’
On 26 April, the tour reached Boston. Local musician Billy Squier would go on to become a hit solo artist and support Queen on their 1982 US jaunt. In 1974 he had just started fronting his own band, The Sidewinders. ‘At the time I was going out with a very hip local disc jockey at WBCN called Maxanne Sartori,’ says Squier. ‘She was one of the first DJs in America to pick up on Queen’s first record.’ Squier’s connections with Sartori led to him being invited to a record company dinner with Queen. Billy had already seen and heard the first album, marvelling at the photos of Freddie’s painted fingernails. At the restaurant, he would be afforded his first glimpse of just how image-conscious Mercury was.
‘I wound up sitting next to Freddie,’ recalls Squier. ‘He was wearing these white satin pants, very tight-fitting, along with some sort of brocade jacket. As we went to sit down, I can still picture him looking around furtively as if to make sure no one was watching, and then he quietly undid his trousers and took his seat. I realised his costume prevented him from sitting comfortably.’
Squier would go on to be managed by Bill Aucoin, whose clients already included Kiss, the face-painted comic-strip rockers, who also witnessed Queen on the Mott The Hoople tour that summer. There was a pattern developing among the audience. The name ‘Queen’ was enough on its own to attract attention from the more outré elements of the American music community. As Brian May recalled: ‘We thought we were unusual, but a lot of the people that came were surprising, even to us – a lot of transvestite artists, New York Dolls, Andy Warhol – people that were creative in a way that appeared to trash everything that had gone before.’
For May, like countless British musicians before him, Queen’s first US tour was a ‘mind-blowing experience’. But while it was a manifestation of the dream he’d had since childhood, there was also an intensity to the experience that unsettled him. ‘I hadn’t learned the technique of touring,’ he admitted. ‘I think I was fighting against it rather than going along with it. We might have looked like a million dollars – or Fred did, I don’t know about me – but we had nothing. Everything was on a shoestring, we were sharing rooms, and our manager would let us use the phone in his hotel room and call home as a treat.’
Eager to impress the natives, Queen and Elektra threw regular aftershow parties as the tour wound its way across the US. The morning after one soirée, Mott’s keyboard player Morgan Fisher saw a staggeringly hungover Freddie Mercury pass out face first into his breakfast of fried eggs. For a gig at the Farm Arena in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a second support group, Aerosmith, were added to the bill. Aerosmith were a louche, glammy rock ’n’ roll band whose lead singer Steven Tyler was an accomplished poser.
A row quickly broke out between the respective management of Queen and Aerosmith over who would play first. Eager to distance himself from the fracas, Brian May fell into conversation with Aerosmith’s guitarist Joe Perry, who quickly cracked open a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey. Morgan Fisher was surprised: ‘Brian always seemed like such a gentleman and I don’t ever recall him drinking heavily.’ Come showtime, both guitarists were blind drunk. May later claimed that he played the whole gig from memory, swearing never to drink ‘more than a pint of beer’ before a show again. Perversely, the rest of Queen complimented him on how much fire and energy he’d brought to his performance that night. May made another mental note: to ‘always give it some action’ in future.
Yet, the guitarist had other matters on his mind. An encounter in New Orleans led to a lifelong love affair with the Louisiana city and to a romantic entanglement alluded to in a song on Queen’s next album. ‘I fell in love in New Orleans,’ admitted May in 1998. Thousands of miles from London, and from girlfriend Chrissy Mullen, the new object of Brian’s affections would be known only as ‘Peaches’. But she did find her way into the lyrics of ‘Now I’m Here’, a Queen song that captured the combined innocence and madness of their first US tour.
A six-night stand at New York’s Uris Theater made Mott The Hoople the first rock band to play – and sell out – on Broadway. The shows also gave their support act the chance to prove themselves in front of America’s hippest audience. John Anthony was in Canada producing a band of Hell’s Angels named The North Ontario Paradise Riders (‘that was an experience’), when he hustled a free trip to New York to see his former charges. By now more than a little one-upmanship was creeping into Queen’s relationship with the headliners.
‘Brian had the Zandra Rhodes costume on at the Uris,’ remembers Anthony. ‘The idea was that when he hit the big Pete Townshend windmill chord, the lighting engineer knew to put a spot on him which would catch the pleats of the tunic. It was a beautiful effect. One of Mott’s crew knew this and started trashing the board, hitting all the faders to throw him off his mark.’ The producer’s fiery streak surfaced again. ‘So I got hold of the guy, stuck this huge torch in his face and told him to leave the board alone.’ Later, Mercury was delighted to read a review of one of the New York shows, in which the female critic had noted that ‘she could tell what religion I was … and that I wasn’t wearing any knickers.’ ‘They notice everything down to the pimple on your arse, dear,’ he told writer Caroline Coon.
The bands travelled to Boston for the next night of the tour. But waking up in his hotel on the morning of the gig, May was barely able to move. After dragging himself into the bathroom, the guitarist saw his reflection in the mirror and realised why: his skin was yellow with jaundice. The infected arm, poor diet, late nights and the stress of touring had left his immune system depleted. May had contracted hepatitis. Queen flew back to England, where the guitarist was ordered to take six weeks’ bed-rest. Meanwhile, the rest of the band, their crew, and everyone that had come into close contact with May was inoculated against the virus. Mercury returned to the UK with a health problem of his own: not a ‘pimple on his arse’ but a plague of boils.
‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ was released as a single in the US at the end of May, but with the band una
ble to promote it, failed to chart. PR Tony Brainsby issued a press release, expressing Queen’s ‘bitter disappointment’ at the cancellation of the rest of the American tour, but that the group would be back in the studio by early July.
With May recuperating in hospital, Mercury, Deacon and Taylor began working up ideas for the next album. Having lasted three years in Queen, Deacon was finally shaking off the feeling that he was still, in his words, ‘an outsider’. He would later tell interviewers that it was only now, with the recording of Queen’s third album, that he felt convinced the band might have a serious future.
Work on the new album would take place between Trident, Wessex, Air and Sarm Studios in London, and Rockfield in Monmouth, with Roy Thomas Baker and Mike Stone again manning the board. Back on his feet, May joined the band at Rockfield, but kept leaving the studio to throw up. At Trident in August, he collapsed and was taken to King’s College Hospital, where he was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer, which had, it transpired, first developed in his teens. After an operation, May was ordered to remain in bed. Paranoid ‘the band would replace me’, he began writing songs while recuperating.
