by Mark Blake
In his absence, Deacon proved himself an able rhythm guitarist, while Freddie paid frequent morale-boosting visits to Brian’s hospital bed. But with their guitarist again out of commission, a planned run of the postponed US dates was cancelled. ‘Brian has got to look after himself,’ Mercury fussed to NME. ‘We all want to make sure something like that never happens again.’
When May returned to the studio he was confronted with a ‘mountain of playing to catch up on’. There were guitar parts, vocal harmonies, and countless overdubs. ‘It was very weird,’ he said. ‘Because for the first time I was able to see the group from the outside, and I was very excited.’ Despite their guitarist’s absence and the fragmented nature of the sessions, Queen had a clear vision for their next album. ‘Queen II was very layered and had been difficult for people to understand,’ said May. ‘So much so, that when we were making the follow-up, we’d thought we’d better take it a bit easy and spell out what we were doing, so that it would be a bit more accessible.’ Roy Thomas Baker’s understanding of the project was clearer still: ‘OK, let’s have really big hit singles.’
On one of his first studio visits after leaving hospital, May was confronted by the ‘big hit single’ in question: ‘Killer Queen’. The song was Mercury’s baby and, with its dainty piano, mimicked the compositional traits of pre-war songwriters Noël Coward and Cole Porter. ‘It’s one of those bowler hat, black suspenders numbers,’ claimed Mercury, suggesting the additional influence of his beloved Cabaret. Somehow in the midst of all this came chiming heavy metal powerchords and lyrics name-checking Moët & Chandon and Marie Antoinette.
‘I wrote “Killer Queen” in one Saturday night,’ explained Mercury. ‘It’s a song about a high-class call girl. Classy people can be whores as well.’ The song may have been written quickly, but the recording took longer. On first hearing the track, May was unimpressed by what he described as the ‘abrasive backing vocals’; all of which had to be redone. Taylor remembers ‘take after take after take. The pitch had to be exactly right.’ One night after a band dinner, Baker demanded that Mercury return to the studio to work on the song. ‘But Freddie refused,’ explained the producer. ‘He said, “I’m not leaving this chair, dear!” So the road crew lifted him up and carried him to the piano. That’s how we got “Killer Queen”.’
Alongside Baker and Stone came two new recruits to the Queen studio team: Wessex Studio’s tape operator Geoff Workman, a wry Liverpudlian who would go on to engineer Queen’s Jazz album, and Sarm East Studio’s young assistant engineer, Gary Langan. Brian May would only contribute four compositions to the finished album, but these included ‘Brighton Rock’ and ‘Now I’m Here’; songs that would become high watermarks in the Queen catalogue. Both tracks were completed at Sarm, and gave Gary Langan his first taste of working with Queen. Roy Thomas Baker was now an expert at marshalling the band, as Langan witnessed first hand. ‘Roy is the most extrovert person I have ever come across in my life,’ he says. ‘And to see him and Freddie Mercury together … He could also put the band down in a way that fired them up. He’d say, “Darlings, that was truly awful. How could you present such a dreadful performance?”
‘It was very hard work,’ he continues. ‘You’d do fourteen-or fifteen-hour days. You’d start at twelve or one o’clock and go straight through until three in the morning, and it was total concentration for the whole time. They sweated blood.’ Langan remembers that the call-and-response vocals on ‘Now I’m Here’ required five quarter-inch tape machines running at different speeds, which left the ‘whole room humming’. The final mix of ‘Brighton Rock’ was heard by Langan, Baker, Stone, Mercury, May and Taylor crammed into the control booth and was, says the engineer, ‘one of those “Ye gods!” moments.’
In September, May, still looking frail, made his first public appearance with Queen since New York. To commemorate sales of 100,000 copies for Queen II, the band were presented with silver discs at a function at London’s Café Royal. With his usual keen eye for a photo op, Tony Brainsby booked Jeanette Charles, a Queen Elizabeth II impersonator, to present the band with their discs. A month later, ‘Killer Queen’ was released as a single in the UK. It was a double A-side, paired with another new song, ‘Flick of the Wrist’, but only one would find its way onto the radio. Later, Brian May shared his initial misgivings about ‘Killer Queen’ as a single, fretting that some fans would think it too lightweight. But, as he also admitted, ‘It was the turning point. It was a big hit and we desperately needed it.’ ‘Killer Queen’ reached number 2 in the charts, only held off by pop pin-up David Essex’s ‘I’m Gonna Make You a Star’. May’s misgivings didn’t last long: ‘Fuck it! A hit is a hit is a hit.’
Adrian Morrish, Freddie’s old friend from Isleworth Polytechnic, caught Queen performing ‘Killer Queen’ on Top of the Pops that summer. And there was Fred Bulsara in a fake fur blouson ‘being’ Freddie Mercury. ‘It was the first time I’d ever seen the persona,’ says Morrish. ‘I knew he’d joined a band. The shock was that he’d become successful.’ On the same night, Bruce Murray, once Freddie’s bandmate in The Hectics, was working in a mini-cab office in South London, watching television while waiting for another fare. ‘There was something about the singer in Queen,’ he recalls. ‘He had all this long hair now, but there was something about him I recognised … I suddenly realised, “My God, that’s Fred Bulsara.” I phoned Derrick Branche, and said, “Are you watching TV? Go and turn the TV on now!”’
Queen’s third album, Sheer Heart Attack, was released on 1 November, just as the band embarked on their second UK tour of the year. Mick Rock had again taken the cover photograph, but the presentation was startlingly different from that of Queen II. ‘We want to look like we’ve been marooned on a desert island,’ Freddie told him. Rock obliged, by shooting the band from above while they lay in a circle, their faces and bare chests smeared with Vaseline and sprayed with water. When Roger complained about the appearance of his hair, extensions were added in the final picture. While Freddie’s ubiquitous black nail varnish was still visible, the band were dressed down, and less overtly glam than before. ‘We’re showing people we’re not merely a load of old poofs,’ insisted Mercury. ‘We are capable of other things.’
The music inside reflected the cover. This was Queen at their most concise yet. May’s party pieces ‘Brighton Rock’ and ‘Now I’m Here’ opened and closed the first side of music and were the lengthiest songs on offer. ‘Brighton Rock’ had been in existence in some shape or form since Queen II, though the multi-tracked guitar solo idea dated back further to the Smile track ‘Blag’. As a counterpoint to the guitars was Mercury’s startling falsetto vocal. ‘Now I’m Here’ was Queen’s adventures in America set to music, name-checking Mott The Hoople and Brian’s lost love Peaches with Freddie’s exhortation ‘Go, little Queenie’ lifted straight from Chuck Berry. May’s other two compositions ‘Dear Friends’ and ‘She Makes Me (Stormtrooper in Stilettos)’ were less compelling, but offered a glimpse into their composer’s troubled frame of mind. May played piano on ‘Dear Friends’, while Mercury sung a slight lyric of love and redemption; Brian took his own lead vocal for ‘She Makes Me’, asking the world to ‘cure his ills’ over a rather leaden melody.
Even John Deacon had been coerced into writing. The bass player made his compositional debut with ‘Misfire’, a cheery soft-pop piece that scraped in at just one minute and fifty seconds. Not to be outdone, Taylor offered his best Queen song yet. ‘Tenement Funster’ was another in what would become the drummer’s bottomless canon of songs celebrating the joy of the rock ’n’ roll life: a hymn to loud music, ‘good guitars’ and ‘the girls on my block’. But it was Mercury that distinguished himself as a writer on Sheer Heart Attack. ‘Flick of the Wrist’ was venomous hard rock that could have graced the first Queen album. The group-credited ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ was a feverish heavy metal number that dated back to Freddie’s Wreckage days. In contrast, ‘In the Lap of the Chords’ was a pomp rock ballad (als
o reprised as the last song on the album) with a crowd-pleasing chorus that pre-empted ‘We Are the Champions’. Tellingly, it would serve a similar purpose in Queen’s live show until usurped by ‘We Are the Champions’ four years later.
Sheer Heart Attack’s wild cards also came from Mercury. ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’ was a vaudeville pastiche, with May on ukelele-banjo, Deacon thumbing a double bass, and the singer drawing again on his boyhood memory of the novelty records he had heard on Uncle Mac’s Children’s Favourites. ‘There was this feeling that we could try any kind of style,’ said May, ‘and shouldn’t be embarrassed by anything at all.’ ‘Lily Of The Valley’ was a delicate piano piece that hinted at the writer’s inner turmoil. Twenty-five years later Brian May offered his own impressions on what the song was about. ‘“Lily of the Valley” was utterly heartfelt,’ he said. ‘It’s about [Freddie] looking at his girlfriend and realising that his body needed to be somewhere else.’
In late 1974, the singer was still living with Mary Austin, but stalling any questions about his private life in the press with the usual quips and glib aside (‘I’m as gay as a daffodil, dear’). He claimed that he and his chauffeur were enjoying a flirtatious relationship, and that he played ‘on the bisexual thing … because it was fun’. After Mercury’s death, former EMI radio plugger Eric Hall would waggishly claim that ‘Killer Queen’ was inspired by Freddie’s unrequited love for him: ‘He said, “I wrote that song for you. I’m the queen and you’re the killer because I can’t have you!”’ According to Hall, this conversation took place in a Holiday Inn while Queen were due to appear on Radio Luxembourg. ‘Freddie comes to my room in the middle of the night, tells me he’s in love with me, and can he get into my bed with me,’ said Hall. While agreeing to sit and ‘hold his hand’, Hall insists he rebuffed Mercury’s advances and that Freddie accepted the rejection.
John Anthony had also found himself summoned to Freddie’s hotel room one night during Queen’s first UK tour that year. Anthony had travelled from London to Sunderland in the group’s tour bus. One night after a show, Queen were joined by various female admirers back at their hotel. John went to bed, only to be telephoned by a frantic-sounding Freddie, who asked him to come to his room immediately. ‘And there was Fred sat in bed in his pjyamas and night cap and these two girls standing around in his room,’ says Anthony. ‘Fred said, “Get rid of them Johnnypoos.” So I told them that Fred had a big day ahead of him tomorrow and was very tired and they’d best go.’ When they were alone again, Mercury told Anthony that he thought he was gay, and asked him if he would tell Mary Austin on his behalf. John refused.
On the third night, the tour reached the Liverpool Empire, where Queen were briefly reunited with the opening act from earlier in the year. Dave Lloyd was still waiting for the champagne he’d won in a bet with Roger Taylor, while bassist Keith Mulholland joined the Queen entourage in the hotel bar for an aftershow party.
‘Freddie made a very grand entrance,’ recalls Mulholland. ‘He’d obviously gone back to his room, showered and done his hair. Very regal. I was sat at a table with Brian who was having a Jack Daniels, and Jack Nelson was pouring the champagne. I said something like, “This band is going to go ballistic”, and Jack said, “Ballistic? We are going straight to the top.”’
Capitalising on the success of ‘Killer Queen’, Sheer Heart Attack bettered even Queen II’s number 5 placing by reaching number 2 in the UK in its second week on sale (and only denied the top spot by Elton John’s Greatest Hits). They even had some critics on their side. ‘A feast, no duffers and four songs that will run and run,’ extolled NME, which singled out ‘Now I’m Here’, ‘Killer Queen’, ‘Flick of the Wrist’ and ‘In the Lap of the Gods’ for special praise.
All four of those songs now featured in the band’s setlist, spliced in among ‘Ogre Battle’, ‘Liar’ and the encore medley of ‘Big Spender’, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and ‘Modern Times Rock ’n’ Roll’. Mercury managed to conceal any pre-gig nerves behind even greater displays of onstage bravado: ‘Queen is back. What do you think about that?’ he demanded in Liverpool. For some shows, Freddie’s white stage outfit was accessorised by a chainmail-effect gauntlet on his left hand, suggesting a glam-rock falconer. After a change of costume, the singer would reappear, clad head to toe in black wearing a leather glove complete with talons on his left hand (‘Do you like my claws?’). Offstage, of course, the intra-group bickering continued as usual (‘Oh my dear, we’re the bitchiest band on earth. We’re at each other’s throats,’ Mercury told Melody Maker) but onstage, their focus was formidable, their ambition tangible.
The night after Liverpool, at Leeds University, Taylor’s onstage monitor malfunctioned. Back in the dressing room, the drummer kicked a wall, bruising his foot so badly he was taken to hospital for an X-ray. During the show itself, Mercury had called a halt after fans were crushed in the scrum at the front of the stage. At the Glasgow Apollo a week later, the singer himself would be hauled into the crowd before being dragged back to safety by the security guards.
When tickets for the final night at the Rainbow sold out, a second show was added. Both nights were filmed, and while the planned live album was never released, an edited film of the gig was released in the cinema a year later. Queen Live at the Rainbow would play as support to Burt Reynolds’ crime caper Hustle. It remains a fabulous period piece: Queen in their final days as a cult rock band, before the phenomenal success of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ changed their lives for ever.
Outside the Rainbow, after the show, Freddie Mercury’s driver handed him a note that had just been passed to him. It was from Bruce Murray. ‘I’d managed to get a message to Fred through the chauffeur,’ Murray laughs. ‘We both looked at each other through the car window and stared. Freddie said, “What the fuck are you doing here?” I laughed and said, “I’m here to see you, you prick!”’ Murray followed Mercury’s limousine to a club in Berkeley Square, where the two spoke for the first time since India. ‘He told me he was skint,’ says Murray. ‘They were playing these shows, but he had no money.’ Later, at his mini-cab office in Norbury, Murray would receive a phone call from the singer. ‘He’d say, “I need to get to a party, but I have no money, will you take me?”’ One night Murray chauffeured his friend to a party hosted by Elton John. ‘Fred said, “Come in, come in …” But I said no, it really wasn’t my scene. I didn’t want to be a hanger-on.’
While Queen filled theatres and their singer preened from the pages of the music press, not everyone was aware of their success. Patrick Connolly hadn’t seen his friend Fred Bulsara since leaving Isleworth Polytechnic in 1966. Connolly was walking past Claridges, the Mayfair hotel, one afternoon, when he heard a familiar voice: ‘Patrick! Patrick!’ It was Fred. ‘He asked me to come in and have a cup of tea,’ recalls Connolly. ‘Queen were playing a concert in London that night. I was amazed by the change in him.’ At Isleworth, Patrick had designed Freddie’s audition posters and helped him pass his Art A-level, but, with no interest in pop music, he was completely unaware of his current success. ‘I had to admit to him, “Fred, I had no idea.” And he laughed and said, “Oh Patrick, you’re the only person that doesn’t know!”’
For the second time that year, though, Queen would go from playing to their own partisan audience to crowds that cared rather less. In November they began a two-and-a-half week tour of Scandinavia and Europe. When they arrived for a show in Munich, Queen found an audience filled with GIs from the nearby American airforce base. Queen were alternating as headliners with Lynyrd Skynyrd, a gritty rock ’n’ roll band from America’s Southern states, who’d just had a Top 5 hit with ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. They were the antithesis of Queen, and the GIs loved them. ‘For the first time in many months, I felt like I’d done a hard day’s work when I came offstage,’ grumbled Brian May. ‘We were getting nothing back.’
While Queen found the audience’s indifference draining, there was also a clash of cultures between the two groups. ‘Skynyrd could
n’t believe it when they saw us four caked in make-up and dressed like women,’ recalled Roger Taylor. According to Taylor, representatives of Skynyrd’s record label, MCA, were positioned in the audience during Queen’s set. ‘They would be holding up banners that said things like “Shit!” and “Queen Suck!”’ he recalled. It’s difficult not to be reminded of the scene in This Is Spinal Tap, where the hapless rock band encounter their former support act, Duke Fame, and recall an audience that ‘were still booing him when we came onstage’. Yet Taylor’s memory demonstrates just how at odds Queen were with most of their peers, and how determined the band were to prove that these ‘four nancy boys could give [Skynyrd] a run for their money.’
After a third German date in Hamburg, Lynyrd Skynyrd were off the tour. Barely a week later Queen headlined the 6,000-seater Palacio de los Deportes in Barcelona. The gig had sold out in just twenty-four hours, and was their biggest yet.
Back at home, though, the band’s bank accounts and living conditions suggested they were anything but pop stars. Taylor still rented a bedsit near the river in Kew Road, Richmond. Mercury and Mary Austin’s rented flat had a grand address, 100 Holland Road, Kensington W14, but little else. Neither Freddie’s piano, which, bizarrely, doubled as a headboard for his and Mary’s bed, nor the couple’s collection of Biba knick-knacks could detract from the rising damp that had left the walls covered in fungus. Deacon was about to get married, but was still living in a bedsit in Parsons Green. Furthermore, Trident had just turned down Deacon’s request for the £4,000 he needed to put down on a deposit for a house. (‘Do you know how much money £4,000 was in 1974?’ protests Norman Sheffield). Brian May’s living conditions seemed to be the worst of all: a single room in a house in Earls Court, where his girlfriend Chrissy also lived. ‘We lived mainly on cod in a bag and fish fingers,’ he recalled in 2009. ‘We had a single gas ring and no water supply, except the communal bathroom up the corridor.’ More depressing still was the story that to access this bolthole, May had to enter through the building’s basement boiler room.
