by Mark Blake
By now, EMI’s Bob Mercer put Queen in touch with lawyer Jim Beach of the law firm Harbottle & Lewis. Beach acquired copies of the band members’ contracts with Trident and began looking for a way out. Mercer’s relationship with Trident had become similarly troublesome. ‘The Sheffield brothers had their relationship with Roy Featherstone, who had signed the band,’ he explains. ‘So it became something of a bone of contention when the band started saying to him, “We don’t want you talking to the Sheffields.” Roy felt that was the way he’d signed the band and, in the end, he and I had a pretty stand-up fight about it.’
While their lawyer began the slow process of extricating Queen from their contracts, EMI released ‘Now I’m Here’ as the band’s next single in January. Now the melodramatic opening number in Queen’s live set, it was too heavy for most daytime radio playlists but managed a respectable number 11. The day after its release, John Deacon married his long-time girlfriend Veronica Tetzlaff. The couple had been together for over three years after meeting at a party at the Maria Assumpta college, where Veronica had been a student. The Catholic wedding took place at the Carmelite Priory on Kensington Church Street. Veronica was two months’ pregnant with their first child, Robert.
Deacon’s best man was his old schoolfriend and former Opposition drummer Nigel Bullen, who would watch in awe as Freddie Mercury made the grandest of entrances. The Queen singer had arrived in a stretch limo, was wearing a huge feather boa and had a woman on each arm. ‘At first I thought it was the bride,’ Bullen admitted. Deacon’s Opposition bandmates had seen Queen play live, but they would now witness the after-effects of being in a band that had appeared on Top of the Pops. On a pre-wedding trip back to Leicestershire, Deacon had gone for a drink with The Opposition’s ex-singer Dave Williams. Somebody put ‘Killer Queen’ on the pub jukebox, and within minutes ‘Easy Deacon’ was being pestered for autographs.
Around the same time, Chris Smith had run into Brian May at Kensington Market and taken him to the Greyhound. ‘They’d had a hit with “Killer Queen”, and he was getting well-known,’ says Smith. ‘The pub was packed, and as soon as I walked in, with Brian behind, the whispering started: “That’s him from that band …” I sat him in a corner and went to get the drinks, and I remember thinking, “So this is what fame’s like.” When I sat down, Brian said, “No one’s bought me a drink for a ages.” I said, “Well, that’s what you do. You buy the next one. That’s how it is.” I don’t think he’d been treated normally for a while. I think Freddie and Roger could cope with fame – they seemed to love it. But I’m not sure Brian could.’
After his honeymoon, Deacon returned to the fray, and Queen reconvened for another go at the United States. Sheer Heart Attack had received an American release and would peak at number 12. There was still much lost ground to make up for after the earlier aborted US dates. ‘We were confident that we would go down all right in the East and Midwest,’ ventured Roger Taylor. ‘But we were told not to expect too much in the South and far West.’ ‘With a name like Queen there were always questions from day one,’ recalls Mott The Hoople’s then roadie Peter Hince, ‘especially in America. Waitresses in the Holiday Inns would be like, “Gee, you guys are great … are you all fags?”’
After a week’s rehearsal in New York, road-testing their new PA and lighting rig, Queen opened in Columbus, Ohio, and ploughed straight into two or three consecutive gigs without a break, taking in Cleveland, Detroit and Boston. Three weeks later, after a show in Philadelphia, Mercury was losing his voice. A hospital doctor diagnosed possible nodules on his vocal cords. Freddie was told to rest, but played the following night’s show at Washington’s Kennedy Center anyway, managing, against expectations, to scale the high notes as before.
However, not everyone was as enamoured of Queen’s lead singer. When the band had dropped off the Mott The Hoople US tour, their place had been taken by homegrown rock band Kansas. The same group would open several dates for Queen on the 1975 tour. The lead vocalist Steve Walsh would go on to praise the headline act with the exception of their frontman. ‘Freddie Mercury was an asshole,’ said Walsh. ‘He was a prima donna.’ It would not be the last time Mercury’s attitude alienated some of the people around him.
With his voice causing problems, he became increasingly distraught. Mercury was in agony after Washington, and six dates were cancelled immediately. The suspected nodules turned out to be laryngitis and a strained throat, and he was prescribed painkillers and told to speak only when necessary. Despite the setback, when the tour picked up again in Chicago, Mercury’s performance was as assured as ever. Melody Maker’s US stringer Al Rudis saw the show and was entranced by the singer’s mic stand technique: ‘He plays it like a guitar, aims it at the audience rifle fashion … wields it like a cane and a samurai sword, and pretends to break it across his knee like an Apache declaring war.’
On a day off before playing two nights at Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Civic Auditorum, May and Taylor went to see Led Zeppelin at the nearby 18,000-seater Forum. ‘We thought if we played the Rainbow in London we’d made it,’ said May. ‘Then we saw Zeppelin at the Forum and thought, “Jesus Christ, if we ever make this kind of thing” … Our manager was there and he said, “Couple of years’ time, you’ll be doing this.”’
In 1975 Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip was a ready-made playground for any visiting rock band. Like every English rock group before them, Queen made a pilgrimage to the notorious Rainbow Bar and Grill in West Hollywood. The Rainbow was a regular haunt for the likes of The Sweet, Led Zeppelin, The Who’s Keith Moon and their attendant female admirers. ‘I thought, “My God, what a strange island of odd humanity this is,”’ said May. Taylor, however, loved it. As John Anthony insists, ‘Roger always wanted to be a pop star, and wanted to enjoy everything that being a pop star entailed.’
Frustratingly, the tour limped rather than galloped towards the finishing line. Mercury’s voice was still a problem and yet more dates had been cancelled. After a successful show at San Francisco’s Winterland, the band flew to Canada, managing three gigs before cancelling the final date in Portland and flying home. Once again, a US tour had been scuppered by a band member’s failing health.
While Jim Beach continued to wade through Queen’s contracts, the band holidayed in Hawaii before flying on to Japan for a hastily arranged eight-date tour. However slow their progress may have been elsewhere, and however aggrieved they felt about their situation with Trident, Queen had become pop stars in Japan, the second largest market for pop music in the world.
On 17 April the band arrived at Haneda Airport to be greeted by, recalled Roger Taylor, ‘thousands, literally thousands of fans’ (Deacon: ‘hundreds and hundreds’) brandishing album sleeves, photographs torn from music magazines and homemade banners (‘Love Queen’, ‘Welcome Roger Queen’). The tour was bookended by two sold-out nights at the 14,200-capacity Nippon Budokan Hall. During the first, Mercury was forced to stop the show to prevent over-excited fans getting crushed in front of the stage. Part of the second show was recorded by a local TV station and captured May and Mercury trading moves in their now well-travelled Zandra Rhodes frocks. ‘The noise was enormous,’ recalled John Deacon. ‘The screaming and the throwing presents onstage.’ ‘Something just clicked in Japan,’ said May. ‘Suddenly we were The Beatles.’
Offstage, they were assigned a personal bodyguard (Mercury: “Mine was called Hitami. He was very sweet and gave me a lovely Japanese lantern’) and filmed for the Star Senichya TV show, looking politely baffled as they recited personal messages to the camera, and sat cross-legged for a traditional Japanese tea ceremony. As Brian May explained at a press conference in Tokyo: ‘We are overwhelmed … we have never experienced anything like this in any other country.’ Queen returned to England with their complimentary Japanese kimonos, and back to the harsher reality of what Brian May called ‘our crummy basement flats’. ‘We encountered something like Beatlemania,’ Taylor told Mojo. ‘We’d never seen anything like
that, and we came back after playing the Budokan and I went back to my bedsit in Richmond. We were still on £60 a week.’
Chris Smith visited May at home straight after the Japanese tour. ‘Brian was shell-shocked,’ he remembers. ‘He said, “I was just in The Beatles. We got this amazing reception, even at the airport. Now I’ve gone from that to this.” And then he took me into the bathroom, and there was all this fungus on the walls. He said to me, “I’ve got no money, you know.”’ Walking into May’s room, Smith was then confronted by dozens of toy penguins. ‘Brian had done an interview in some magazine and told them he liked penguins, so fans had sent them to him. So there’s fungus on the wall, the room is tiny, but it’s full of penguins – small ones, big ones, six-foot ones … just loads of penguins.’
‘That first tour of Japan was what changed it,’ says Mark Ashton. ‘Queen had gone down extremely well, and the office gossip was that Freddie, especially, was very angry with Jack [Nelson]. I used to hear Fred in the office and he’d be very loud and very irate about Trident’s failings.’ Interviewed now about his time with Trident and Queen, Jack Nelson offers a noncommittal ‘the whole experience was very interesting’. Nelson would move back to the US for a job with EMI, before continuing in management for Chaka Khan and Blackstreet. ‘We parted on amicable terms,’ he said. ‘Brian and I talk all the time.’
In May 1974, the American rock group Sparks had enjoyed a number 2 UK hit with ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For the Both of Us’. Queen and Sparks had shared a bill at the Marquee, and Sparks’ quasi-operatic rock wasn’t so far removed from some of Queen’s work. A year later, Sparks could smell blood. ‘They came round and said, “Look, it’s pretty obvious Queen are washed up, we’d like to offer you a position in our band, if you want,”’ recalled May. ‘And I said, “Well, I don’t think we’re quite dead yet.”’
But May was still deeply frustrated. ‘After three albums people thought we were driving around in Rolls-Royces,’ he later told Q magazine. ‘That’s when we started to feel resentful. There was also a huge drawback in the fact that your manager is your record company, so you don’t have anyone that can represent you to the record company. So you have an impossible situation. It generated friction in every department.’
Furthermore, any money invested by Trident was recoverable before any profits could be shared out. As Norman Sheffield points out: ‘Trident invested over £200,000 in Queen, probably the largest sum ever invested in an up-and-coming band.’ Effectively, Queen had to pay back Trident. Having the best recording facility, the best stage show, indeed the best of everything, came at a price. Sheer Heart Attack had supposedly cost £30,000 to make. When Queen finally had hits, they expected to make money, only to hear that they actually owed Trident. ‘We were deep in debt,’ said May.
‘I don’t think it was the deal that was wrong, it was the interpretation of the deal,’ offers producer Ken Scott. ‘Trident spent a fortune on that band. But some of it was chargebacks. The artist gets charged for things that they think are in-house. The artist looks at it and goes, “We are not paying that back.” It’s the age-old story and it happens again and again in this industry.’
Adding salt to the wound, on 12 May, ‘Killer Queen’ went Top 20 in the US. A week later, Freddie Mercury was presented with an Ivor Novello award for the same song.
On tour in the US, Queen had reportedly met with the late Don Arden, manager of Black Sabbath and E.L.O., and a music business impresario whose brutal reputation has earned him the nickname of ‘The Al Capone of Rock’ (Arden’s daughter Sharon would later manage Ozzy Osbourne and launch a worldwide TV career). In a 2002 interview, Arden claimed he went to see the Sheffields and in an hour convinced them to release Queen from their contract. Trident agreed in principle, and Queen signed a letter authorising Arden to act on their behalf. At some point, however, both parties changed their mind. John Anthony recalls ‘pleading with Queen not to sign with Arden’. Whether they heeded his advice or not, any deal with Don was soon off, but, said the band, ‘by mutual agreement’. Despite his reputation, there were no known reprisals from the Arden camp.
Around the same time, Queen’s management wish-list included 10cc’s manager Harvey Lisberg, The Who’s tour manager Peter Rudge, and the late Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin manager and cofounder of Zeppelin’s Swansong record label. One of the stipulations of any contract with Grant would have included Queen signing to Swansong. Queen were also conscious of their possible place in a management pecking order that also included Bad Company and Led Zeppelin.
In the end, it was John Reid who took on the role of Queen’s new manager. Reid’s managerial career had begun just four years earlier when he took on a young singer-songwriter christened Reg Dwight and now known as Elton John. ‘We knew we were in a difficult position management-wise, but we were in a good position overall,’ explained Brian May. ‘So we went around and saw everybody that we could, and the only situation that was suitable for us, really, was John Reid.’
In August 1975, Queen signed an agreement with Trident that separated them from all of their deals. Queen’s publishing was now in the hands of EMI Publishing (which had taken over Feldman’s), while their record deals, with EMI in the UK and Elektra worldwide, were no longer processed through Trident. Inevitably, it came at a cost. Trident received a severance pay of £100,000 covered by an advance from EMI Publishing. Trident also retained the rights to 1 per cent of the royalties on Queen’s next six albums.
The bitter aftermath of Queen’s Trident deal still lingers. As recently, as two years ago, Ken Scott was waiting in the lounge at London’s Heathrow Airport when he spotted John Deacon. ‘So I went up to him and said, “Hi, John, do you remember me? I was an engineer from Trident called Ken Scott?” And John snapped back at me, “Yes, and I have nothing whatsoever to do with any of that any more!”’
CHAPTER SIX
A Vulture’s Crotch
‘Fantasies? Perhaps I’d like to be Rudolf Nureyev.’
Freddie Mercury
‘… Has all the demented fury of the Balham Amateur Operatic Society performing The Pirates of Penzance.’
Melody Maker review of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, 1975
Rockfield Studios still looks like the working farm it once was. Tucked away in the Wye Valley near Monmouth, its barns and sheds were converted into a recording facility in 1963. The farm’s owners, Charles and Kingsley Ward, had a group of their own, and realised it would be cheaper to record at home than trek down to London. Once the Wards had converted further outbuildings into living quarters, Rockfield became one of the first residential studios in the world. By the mid-seventies Rockfield had chalked up its first hit single with Dave Edmunds’s ‘You Hear Me Knocking’, and had become a Mecca for many of the flagship heavy bands of the era.
At the beginning of August 1975, just before heading to Rockfield, Queen set up base at a country house in nearby Herefordshire for three weeks of rehearsal. Queen’s stay at the house would be recalled in novelist Tiffany Murray’s 2010 memoir Diamond Star Halo. To make ends meet, Murray’s mother had rented the house to rock bands during the seventies, and Freddie Mercury ‘with his fleshy lips and feathered hair’ was remembered as always being the first one up in the morning, and of commandeering the piano to play a new piece of music to the six-year-old Tiffany which turned out to be ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. (‘Do you like it?’ he asked. ‘It’s fantastic,’ I said. ‘It’s a bit long,’ he replied.)
If Queen would be remembered for one song alone it would be this one. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is the third biggest-selling British single of all time, whose worldwide sales tipped over two million following Freddie Mercury’s death in 1991. But the band had little idea of what lay in store when they checked into Rockfield on 24 August to begin work on their fourth album, A Night at the Opera. They arrived just after John Anthony’s protégés Van Der Graaf Generator finished their own stint at the studio. Billeted in a row of converted barns adjacent to the studio, an
d with only the Old Nag’s Head pub in Monmouth within stumbling distance, distractions were few and far between.
‘They spent their free time playing Frisbee in the main yard outside the studio,’ remembers Kingsley Ward. ‘Freddie also used to play the old upright piano we kept in what was then the horse tack and feed room.’ Later, Roger Taylor would set up his drums in the same room, with yards of cable fed across the yard back into the studio.
The tranquillity of the Wye Valley offered Queen some respite from the turmoil in their professional lives. With the demise of their deal with Trident and the departure of Jack Nelson, another US tour had been cancelled. ‘It was an enormous blow,’ admitted Roger Taylor. New manager John Reid’s instruction to Queen that summer was simple: ‘I’ll take care of the business; you make the best record you can.’
On the day Queen were due to start work at Rockfield, Roy Thomas Baker made a phone call of his own to Trident: ‘I told them I didn’t want them to manage me any more … I think it was the only time I actually got a return call from them,’ he said in 1982. Baker, too, would sign himself over to John Reid Enterprises. With one less business problem to distract him, the producer turned his attention to the job in hand.
The seeds of what became ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ went back to the half-written piece of music that Freddie and Chris Smith had fooled around with at Ealing more than five years earlier; the piece Smith remembered Freddie calling ‘The Cowboy Song’ after its lyric ‘Mama just killed a man’. Roy Thomas Baker had first heard the song early in 1975 during a visit to Freddie’s flat. The pair were due to go to dinner, but Mercury insisted on playing him ‘something he’d been working on. So he sat down at his piano, played the first part and said, “This is the chord sequence”, followed by the interim part, and I could tell it was going to be a ballad. He played a bit further through the song and then stopped suddenly, saying, “This is where the opera section comes in.” We both just burst out laughing.’
