by Mark Blake
The two bands had met at Elstree just before the tour was due to start. ‘Queen were farting about onstage, and it sounded awful,’ says Dicken. ‘We watched them and thought, “Oh, we’re gonna blow them offstage.” Then we got to Liverpool, and I stood at the side when Queen were on and just went, “Oh!”’
On 21 November, the day after ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ debuted on Top of the Pops, EMI released A Night at the Opera. While over-shadowed by its epic single, the rest of the album hardly trailed behind in the scope of its ambition. In later years, it would become a clichéd statement for rock groups to make, but Brian May’s explanation ‘we wanted A Night at the Opera to be our Sgt Pepper’ was no exaggeration. The album had been created in six different studios, with, on occasion, three studios being used simultaneously. Its cost was estimated at a then unheard of £40,000, leading to a rumour that it was the most expensive album ever made (later denied by the band). Such was the band’s ceaseless meddling that they’d missed their deadline of a release in time for the tour. No sooner had the band premiered A Night at the Opera at a press reception at London’s Roundhouse Studios, than Roy Thomas Baker whisked the tapes back into the studio to continue the process of fine-tuning. ‘This album combines the outrageousness of Queen II and the good songs of Sheer Heart Attack,’ Mercury told the press. ‘The finest songs ever written.’ As a final flourish, the album artwork featured a very regal crest, incorporating lions, fairies and a swan over the band’s Q logo. ‘The advertising side of me comes out in that aspect,’ Mercury explained. ‘We look upon it as a campaign, a project.’
The album’s opening song was outrageous enough. Written by Mercury ‘Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to …)’, found the singer spitting bile about blood-sucking leeches and decaying sewer rats, and seemed to have been inspired by some perceived wrong-doers. It wasn’t until the album sleeve had been manufactured and an EMI executive read the lyrics that the label had doubts (Paul Watts: ‘Someone said, “Are you sure about this?”’). The song’s lyrics were so vicious that Mercury recalled May ‘feeling bad singing it’. But ‘Death on Two Legs’ was very much the singer’s baby. ‘In the studio, Freddie was insistent on having the headphones so loud in order to reach the high notes that his ears started bleeding,’ recalls Gary Langan. (Mercury himself told a reporter that it was his throat that bled.)
The camp vaudeville of ‘Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon’ came as light relief, and Queen explored a similar mood with ‘Seaside Rendezvous’ and ‘Good Company’. The rest of the album also illustrated the eclectic nature of the band’s songwriting. Mercury’s ‘Love of my Life’ was the subtlest of ballads that paid lip service to his great passion for classical music. Mercury even coerced May into playing the harp on the song; a process fraught with difficulty as the instrument kept slipping frustratingly in and out of tune.
After the inconsequential ‘Misfire’ on Sheer Heart Attack, John Deacon’s ‘You’re My Best Friend’ sounded like the work of a completely different songwriter. The antithesis of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, it was a disarmingly simple pop song, dedicated to his wife, and featuring its composer playing electric piano (Taylor: ‘Freddie thought the electric piano was vastly inferior to the grand’). ‘You’re My Best Friend’ managed to sound unlike anything Queen had done before, but still wholly convincing; a trick the band would achieve again and again in years to come.
John Anthony’s belief that Roger Taylor was Queen’s most obvious pop star seems confirmed by his contribution to A Night at the Opera. But ‘I’m in Love With My Car’ was actually inspired by the band’s soundman John Harris – a ‘boy racer to the end’, said Taylor – whose pride and joy was his Triumph TR-4, although Taylor sampled the sound of his own Alfa Romeo on the song. ‘I’m in Love With My Car’ was eventually chosen as the B-side of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, earning the drummer considerable royalties. As Brian May explained, ‘At the time, we’d always work on each other’s songs, but when it came to credits, the person who came up with the original idea would go, “I wrote the fucking song, so I’m taking the writing credit.” A lot of terrible injustices take place over songwriting. The major one is B-sides. “Bohemian Rhapsody” sells a million and Roger gets the same writing royalties as Freddie because he did “I’m in Love With My Car”. There was contention about that for years.’ Queen would finally change this rule for 1982’s hit single ‘Under Pressure’. ‘A wise decision,’ said Taylor, ‘as that financial side of things can be very divisive.’
The rather one-dimensional ‘Sweet Lady’ aside, Brian May’s writing on A Night at the Opera was as varied as that of his bandmates. The straight-ahead folk song ‘39’ was sung by May with lyrics supposedly inspired by German poet and novelist Hermann Hesse. ‘It’s a science fiction story,’ May told a BBC interviewer. ‘It’s about someone who goes away and leaves his family, and when he comes back, he’s aged a year and they’ve aged a hundred years.’ Not for the last time, the guitarist had written a song expressing his misgivings about being away from his home and his family.
However, May’s greatest coup was ‘The Prophet’s Song’, a number of more than eight minutes. ‘It’s this outrageous, mammoth track,’ Mercury told Kenny Everett. May claimed the song had been inspired by a dream, and that it tapped into his fears about the human race: their lack of empathy and interaction. ‘People don’t make enough contact with each other,’ he explained. With its Wagnerian riff, biblical feel and an a cappella vocal interlude featuring countless overdubs, it had all the ambition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, but not the pop hook. After ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, the album closed with Queen’s own short version of the national anthem. At the playback party, Mercury, typically, leapt to his feet during ‘God Save the Queen’ and demanded the press do the same: ‘Stand up, you cunts!’
Onstage, the singer had become especially quick-witted. After Mercury was heckled at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall (‘You fucking poof!’), he ordered a spotlight to be turned on his tormentor (‘Say that again, darling’). On 25 November, four days after Top of the Pops, the news broke that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ had reached number 1. ‘We’d just played in Southampton,’ remembers Dicken. ‘It was a wonderful moment for them.’ On a rare day off, a Queen and Mr Big entourage went to see the funk band Hot Chocolate in concert. Their hit single ‘You Sexy Thing’ had been scaling the charts, but had now been stopped at number 2. ‘Their singer Errol Brown came up to us after the show and said to Brian, “You bastards! That was my chance of a Christmas number one.”’
Back on the road, high spirits took over when one member of Mr Big acquired a carpenter’s plane, and began shearing off chunks of wood in one of the hotel lifts. ‘I think we were in Birmingham,’ says Dicken. ‘But he was seen doing it by the comedian Dickie Henderson, who was staying at the hotel. Dickie went and reported it to the management and he got us all banned. Freddie was not best pleased.’ Dicken also saw how distanced Mercury could be from everyone else, when the mood took him. ‘On the coach, he’d spend most of his time with his minder and Mary Austin. Me and Mr Big’s drummer John Burnip would be allowed into his dressing room, but we were the only ones from the band.’ Regrettably, the tour’s five-night run at London’s Hammersmith Odeon was marred when the Mr Big singer fell into the orchestra pit. ‘I landed on a photographer,’ he explains, ‘and broke my guitar.’
A few days later, the tour bus was pulled over by the police between Newcastle and Dundee. One of the crew had been fired earlier, and is believed to have placed an anonymous call claiming there were drugs on the bus. Some of the crew were found with tiny amounts of amphetamines, but Queen and Mr Big had nothing, bar a bottle of Southern Comfort and a packet of aspirin. Freddie would soon discover cocaine, but, as Peter Hince recalls, ‘drugs were very taboo amongst the band back then’. When asked by one of the officers whether he indulged, Freddie, dolled up as ever in fur coat and eyeliner, replied, ‘Don’t be so impertinent, you stupid little man!’
The tour ended with two nights at
the Glasgow Apollo, but promoter Mel Bush threw in another Christmas Eve show at the Hammersmith Odeon. The concert would be broadcast live on BBC radio and also on The Old Grey Whistle Test.
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ spent seventeen weeks in the charts, nine of them at number 1. For Bruce Gowers, the brains behind the promo video, it was a slightly hollow victory. In 1973 Gowers had directed an Emmy-winning documentary, Aquarius: Hello Dali! with Salvador Dali. ‘But my phone never rang,’ he said. Then came ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. ‘I did one lousy six-minute video and the phone never stopped.’ Gowers would go on to become a director on the US reality TV show American Idol.
For EMI’s Martin Nelson, Queen’s success was validation for all their efforts. ‘I’d spent hours on the road with them,’ he says. ‘All of them crammed into my company Ford Cortina estate, where Brian had to sit in the bit behind the passenger seat as his legs were so long. But they’d done everything asked of them. Freddie may have become outrageous later, but what I’d seen was a very dedicated working vocalist. It was a work of genius to get “Bohemian Rhapsody” on Capital Radio, because after that other DJs thought it was OK to play the record, but only after Kenny Everett.’ As EMI’s Bob Mercer admits: ‘It was all Queen’s doing. The only thing EMI were smart enough to do was say, “Yes.”’
Some of the press pounced on the amount of money and studio time spent on A Night at the Opera. ‘It sounds as if the production team were having a little too much fun in the control room,’ wrote Melody Maker. NME’s Tony Stewart concluded: ‘If it is the most expensive album ever made, it’s also arguably the best. God save me.’ With the single at number 1, it took three weeks for A Night at the Opera to follow it to the top of the charts. Critical suspicion remained, but readers of all the music papers would nominate Queen for the likes of Best British Single and Best Band in the months ahead.
With another US tour due to start in the New Year, A Night at the Opera had been released in America in December. Kris Nicholson, writing in Rolling Stone, praised ‘Queen’s willingness to experiment, even when they fail’, concluding that of ‘all the heavy metal groups … Queen is obviously the strongest contender in the field’. The album would go on to spend seven weeks in the US Top 10, peaking at number 4.
Back in England, Mercury scooped another Ivor Novello Award for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, which had just shifted over one million copies. But when he received his gold disc commemorating A Night at the Opera, he was suspicious. Believing the powers-that-be at EMI were too miserly to provide the real thing, Mercury was convinced the disc inside the frame was not his own album. He broke it open and put the record on a turntable, shocked to discover that it really was A Night at the Opera.
Such suspicion and erratic behaviour seemed to have become part of the Freddie Mercury persona. Bruised by his experience with Trident, Freddie, even more so than the rest of the group, questioned everything and everyone. Somewhere inside, behind the fur coat, the hair, the nail polish and the endless ‘darlings’ and ‘dears’, he was still Fred Bulsara. ‘I seem to have created a monster,’ Mercury said at the time. ‘When I’m performing I’m an extrovert, yet inside I’m a completely different man.’
Despite his public relationship with Mary Austin, Mercury was now struggling with his sexuality. In the spring of 1975, the singer had met 25-year-old record executive David Minns through a mutual friend. Minns worked for Paul McCartney and had recently begun managing a singer-songwriter named Eddie Howell. One night, while drinking at a club on the Kings Road, Mercury kissed him on the cheek. Minns was openly gay, but he was surprised that a male pop singer would display such public affection for another man (although, as EMI’s Martin Nelson recalls, ‘My wife remembers Fred kissing me on the cheek. That’s just what he did’).
Minns was invited to the studio to hear a playback of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Before long, David and Freddie had become lovers. ‘Freddie was a very sweet guy,’ said Minns in a 2004 interview. ‘He was highly sexed and just latched on to you.’ Unfortunately, Freddie had been a little economical with the truth regarding his home life. Minns was introduced to Mary Austin, believing her relationship with Freddie to be platonic. But when the three of them went back to the Holland Road flat, David was shocked to see only one bedroom: ‘There was clearly more to the relationship than he had been able to tell me.’
Interviewed in 2000, Mary recalled a shift in Mercury’s behaviour towards her as early as the release of the first Queen album. ‘Things were never the same after that,’ she said. ‘Our relationship cooled. When I came home from work, he just wouldn’t be there. He would come in late. We just weren’t as close as we had been.’
The even greater success of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and A Night at the Opera seemed to magnify the distance between the couple. While Queen struggled in penury, Mary had been the breadwinner. Now Mercury had money, recognition and fame. When the singer joined his sister Kashmira for a day out in York, he found himself trailed by schoolchildren who recognised him. Yet he could no longer hide in private, either. At some point, Mercury confessed all to Mary. ‘He said, “I think I’m bisexual,”’ Austin recalled. ‘I told him, “I think you’re gay.” And nothing else was said. We just hugged.’
Brian May’s theory that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ reflected the battles Mercury was having in his personal life is supported by Peter Freestone, Mercury’s personal assistant through the 1980s and 1990s. ‘If you look at the way “Bohemian Rhapsody” is written, it’s in three parts that describe Freddie’s life,’ said Freestone. ‘Living with Mary, his coming to terms with his desire for men, and his actual sleeping with men.’ Mick Rock, who had always presumed that his friend ‘liked boys and girls’, saw the song as indicative of something more: ‘“Bohemian Rhapsody” changed everything, That was when he threw all caution to the wind.’
Through his new boyfriend, Mercury worked outside of Queen for the first time. Minns’s client Eddie Howell had recently been signed as a songwriter to Warner Brothers. Mercury was in the audience at Howell’s showcase gig at Kensington’s Thursday Club in the autumn of 1975, and was especially impressed by a new composition called ‘The Man From Manhattan’. He asked if he could produce the song.
In the end, Mercury and Mike Stone would co-produce the track during sessions for A Night at the Opera at Sarm East Studios. Freddie played piano with Brian May contributing the guitar solo. Howell marvelled as Mercury worked out intricate harmonies in the same idiosyncratic notation Queen had seen him use for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Meanwhile, even at £60 an hour, the singer seemed unperturbed by the cost of the session. When a bell he wanted used for the final note of the song turned out to unsuitable (Howell: ‘D was the correct note and there wasn’t a D-pitched bell in the studio’), a studio minion was sent off to find the right one. Several hours and hundreds of pounds of extra studio time later, the song was completed.
The lyrics for ‘The Man From Manhattan’ had been inspired by Mario Puzo’s hit novel The Godfather; musically it took its cue from The Kinks. However, under Mercury’s direction the song veered closer towards Queen, becoming something that wouldn’t sound out of place on A Night at the Opera. ‘It was great, but I did make a conscious effort not to include John Deacon and Roger Taylor,’ said Howell. ‘They would have played on it, but I wanted the song to retain some of my own identity.’
Freddie’s parting shot to Howell – ‘You should sue Warner Brothers if this isn’t a hit’ – didn’t help. Released in 1976, the song sank due to lack of promotion after it was discovered that the American bassist playing on the session didn’t have a work permit. ‘The Man From Manhattan’ would find its way into Queen’s soundchecks, and appear on a Queen box set in 2000. Meanwhile, following his brush with royalty, Eddie Howell would return to an under-the-radar career as a songwriter for hire.
By the time the North American leg of the A Night at the Opera tour began in late January 1976, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ had been in the US charts for three weeks, inching its w
ay up to number 59. During the weekend that Kenny Everett had blanket-bombed the airwaves, Paul Drew, programme director of the RKO group of American radio stations, was in London and heard the record. Drew acquired a tape of the song and began playing it on air in the States. Queen’s label, now Elektra/Asylum, just like EMI a few months before, had been forced into releasing it as a single. ‘It was the same in America,’ said Mercury. ‘A six-minute single? You must be joking! Oh, you just got away with it in Britain.’
The tour took in theatres in Waterbury Connecticut, Boston and Philadelphia before reaching a four-night run at New York’s Beacon Theater. Here, they joined Ian Hunter and Roy Thomas Baker at Electric Ladyland Studios, where Mercury, May and Taylor performed on one song on his upcoming All American Alien Boy album. With Jack Nelson gone, Queen had now appointed Hendrix’s former road manager Gerry Stickells as their tour manager, while Roger Taylor had acquired his own drum tech, Chris ‘Crystal’ Taylor. Personal assistant Pete Brown’s duties now extended to removing the thorns from the roses that Freddie regularly tossed into the audience, and appearing as a Freddie lookalike onstage during ‘Now I’m Here’. The vocal echo used on the song would be accompanied by Brown flashing into view on one side of the stage, before the real Mercury appeared on the opposite side. However, dressing up as Mercury and tending his flowers would be the least of Brown’s problems on the tour. Coping with the singer’s airs and graces presented a far greater challenge.
