by Mark Blake
The notion of a statue of Freddie Mercury fighting it out with Centrepoint as a West End landmark would have seemed incomprehensible in the twentieth century. But then, stranger still, We Will Rock You is now the longest-running musical in the history of the Dominion Theatre. How many times, you wonder, did Ealing art student Fred Bulsara glance up at the same theatre hoarding before ducking down into Soho for a gig at the Marquee? Later, in Queen’s earliest days, Mercury and Brian May would pass the Dominion, then screening The Sting, The Towering Inferno and every Hollywood blockbuster of the time, as they travelled on the number 9 bus from Kensington to Trident Studios.
‘We Will Rock You’, the song that gave the Queen musical its name, was recorded in the late summer of 1977. After completing the final stretch of their European tour, Roger Taylor, eager to keep working, had made demos of four tracks for a possible solo project. One of these was a cover of The Parliaments’ 1967 song ‘(I Wanna) Testify’. Taylor’s version was co-produced by Mike Stone, and slipped out as a solo single in August. It cost him £5,000, failed to chart, but was, Taylor explained, ‘simply a bit of fun’. Then again, he could afford such luxuries.
Taylor was in a relationship with Dominique Beyrand, but didn’t yet have the same commitments as some of his colleagues. Veronica Deacon was pregnant with her second child. By the end of the year, Brian and Chrissy May would be expecting their first child. Mercury’s complex love life would find David Minns replaced by the American Joe Fanelli, who, as one of Mercury’s friends later explained, ‘was a sweet, naive kid, uprooted and dragged into Freddie’s lifestyle’. While May, especially, fretted over going back out on tour and the pressure this placed on his relationship, Taylor and Mercury were itching to get back out again.
‘We got very insular, shut off, self-protective,’ the drummer admitted a year later. ‘I suppose we had too much time on our hands. We were holed up in England and we’re always at our most depressed when we’re not working. We got a bit fed up and lacking in inspiration.’
Publicly, as ever, Queen would defend A Day at the Races and A Night at the Opera, but, in a less guarded moment, Brian May admitted ‘they may have been overproduced’. The plan was to make, as the guitarist put it, ‘a more spontaneous album’. Regardless of musical trends and critical disdain, Queen had gone as far down that path as they could. As Roger Taylor admitted, ‘I thought A Day at the Races was the most brilliant thing we’d done, but it hadn’t sold better than A Night at the Opera, and that didn’t seem the way things should be going.’ At least one of Taylor’s home demos would point the way ahead.
Alongside ‘(I Wanna) Testify’, Taylor had cut three originals: the single’s B-side ‘Turn on the TV’, ‘Fight From the Inside’ and ‘Sheer Heart Attack’. As its title suggested, the last of these had been kicking around since Queen’s 1974 album of the same name. Newly completed, ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ was a fiery rock ’n’ roll song that replicated the verve and energy of the contemporary punk scene, but predated those bands by nearly four years. While Mercury had supposedly told one EMI executive about his dislike of punk, his bandmates were slightly more accepting. The now 28-year-old Taylor’s yen for songs about teenage rebellion was evident in his own work. He would tell interviewers that he liked ‘The Sex Pistols and raw rock ’n’ roll’ but was suspicious of the hype. May, similarly, would applaud The Pistols’ ‘passion and energy’ but was vexed by the music’s self-destructive element: ‘Maybe I’m a sheltered soul, but I was a bit bewildered by all this stuff around them. The whole punk ethos was a bit manufactured and I never took it seriously.’
John Deacon, as always, said nothing. However, by the following year, the bassist had adopted a drastically short haircut, which would earn him the soubriquet ‘Birdman’, after the shaven-headed prisoner ‘the Birdman of Alcatraz’, portrayed by Burt Lancaster in the film of the same name. There was a comparison to be made with Charlie Watts, The Rolling Stones’ unlikeliest hippy, who’d recently dispensed with his own flowing locks for the album Black and Blue. Like Watts, Deacon was Queen’s eternal pragmatist. He shunned publicity, seemed to abhor the frippery and pretension of the music industry, and was content simply to play music and earn enormous amounts of money. On Queen’s next tour, Deacon would model a shirt and skinny tie of the kind he might once have worn with The Opposition. Bizarrely, in 1978, it made him look like a member of The Jam, one of the most critically lauded new bands from the punk scene.
With Taylor snapping at his bandmates’ heels, Queen imposed a deadline of just over two months in which to make their new album. Booking a US tour for November left them no option but to complete the record. The process would begin in July and finish in September and would be split across West London’s Basing Street Studios and Wessex Sound Studios, a converted Victorian church hall in North London. Working quickly would, it transpired, also allow Freddie more time for antique shopping and bidding at Sotheby’s.
The new Queen album would be called News of the World, after Groucho Marx reportedly rejected the group’s request to borrow the title Duck Soup. ‘The story goes that Groucho cabled them,’ says EMI’s Bob Mercer, ‘and told them he didn’t want the next Queen album to be called Duck Soup but said, “I would like it to be named after my next movie: The Rolling Stones’ Greatest Hits.”’
By autumn that year, the UK album charts were a curious mix of diva Barbra Streisand, Swedish pop titans Abba, and the progressive rock band Yes, who inspired Queen in their early days. Only the presence of The Stranglers in the Top 10 hinted at punk’s growing popularity. That would soon change. Bob Marley and The Wailers had just completed their Exodus album at Basing Street, while Queen’s supposed nemesis The Sex Pistols were putting the final touches to their debut, Never Mind the Bollocks (Here’s The Sex Pistols) in Studio B at Wessex Sound.
Andy Turner would go on to become programme director for London’s Capital Gold radio station. In the summer of 1977, though, the eighteen-year-old had just started work as an assistant sound engineer at Wessex (‘Basically, I was Queen’s tea boy’). On his first day in the job, he was told he would be working with the band for the next two months. ‘I was a fan,’ says Turner now. ‘I was in awe of Brian May after hearing “Keep Yourself Alive” on The Old Grey Whistle Test.’ While spontaneity may have been the buzzword for the new album, in Queen’s world, nothing was that spontaneous. ‘On day one, a lorry arrived with Roger Taylor’s drum kit. We unloaded it, set it up in Studio A, and spent the best part of the next two days getting the right drum sound. Roger sat there with his drum tech, hitting drum after drum after drum … That was on Monday, and the rest of the band weren’t due to arrive until Wednesday. I remember thinking, “Bloody hell! You’re being charged £200 an hour for this.”’
As with A Day at the Races, Queen planned to co-produce with engineer Mike Stone. ‘Wessex always used to use in-house producers, so that was unusual,’ recalls Turner. ‘So there was very much this thing of having the Big American Producer brought in for the project.’ One of the first changes Stone made was to bring in a new set of studio speakers. ‘I don’t think there was anything wrong with the ones they already had. But Mike managed to blow a set. Then again, I guess Queen could afford it …’
Paying £200 an hour also gave Queen other privileges. ‘One of my duties for Freddie was to go down to the bakery on Dalston High Street every morning before he arrived and get him some Mr Kipling almond slices to go with his tea,’ explains Andy. After one late-night recording session, Mercury invited Turner and the studio’s young maintenance engineer, Howard, to accompany him to a party. The pair politely refused, but Andy would still be accorded privileges of his own during the recording sessions. ‘Basically, Freddie told me that no one else in the band was allowed any of his almond slices, but that I could help myself. To be honest, I thought this was just Fred being Fred …’ Then, one afternoon, Brian May crossed the line. ‘Brian took an almond slice without asking, and there was a minor row about it. Freddie made th
is big announcement: “No one is allowed to touch my almond slices, no one … except Andy!”’
Back at work, Roger Taylor’s ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ was soon finished, with the drummer playing everything except the guitar solo. Taylor’s other new track, ‘Fight From the Inside’ was weaker, and sounded like a swipe at fly-by-night musical trends, including, inevitably, punk. But before long, Queen would have their close encounter with rock ’n’ roll’s latest public enemy number one. Roadie Peter Hince remembers meeting Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten (real name: John Lydon) at Wessex in 1976 when Queen were working on A Day at the Races (‘He seemed like a pleasant sort of bloke. What was all the fuss about?’). Mercury’s interview with NME in June the year before (‘IS THIS MAN A PRAT?’) had quoted the singer discussing his passion for ballet.
According to Hince, The Sex Pistols’ bassist, born John Ritchie, better known by his stage name Sid Vicious, had stumbled into the control room at Wessex and drunkenly asked Mercury, ‘Have you succeeded in bringing ballet to the masses yet?’ ‘Fred then said, “Aren’t you Stanley Ferocious or something” and threw him out …’ The story varies depending on who is telling it. Others remember Mercury replying to the question with the withering put-down, ‘Oh yes, Mr Ferocious, dear, we’re doing our best.’ Another possibly apocryphal tale has Vicious and/or Rotten crawling into the studio on their hands and knees while Mercury was playing the piano.
‘We used to bump into them in the corridors,’ said Brian May. ‘I had a few conversations with John Lydon, who was always very respectful. We talked about music. I don’t remember everything about Freddie’s legendary conversation with Sid Vicious. But I remember Sid looking like such a boy. Straight out of school.’
Roger Taylor recalls Queen and The Sex Pistols ‘looking at each other with real distrust’, before finding a common ground with Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook. ‘They were down-to-earth guys,’ said Taylor, ‘but Johnny had a big charisma about him.’ Beyond the haircuts, the clothes and the bank balances, the two lead singers had more in common than either would care to admit. Johnny Rotten, like Freddie Mercury, was a self-made creation. Both Lydon and Bulsara appeared to be fundamentally shy boys who had acquired a larger-than-life persona to mask all sorts of insecurities.
Queen’s ex-manager Jack Nelson once said of his charges: ‘When we’d get into an airport, one would stop, one would go right, one would go left, and one would go straight ahead.’ News of the World was the first Queen album to truly highlight those differences. Queen’s diversity had previously been a selling point; now it resulted in an album that didn’t always gel. Almost the equal of Sheer Heart Attack was Brian May’s ‘It’s Late’, a strutting rocker with a dramatic lyric about a love triangle (May: ‘It’s about all sorts of experiences that I had’). It backed up the guitarist’s belief that ‘News of the World would help Queen get back to basics and find some vitality again’, but not everything would succeed as well.
John Deacon’s rather trite ‘Who Needs You’ (described in the music press as like something from ‘a Carmen Miranda forties musical’) and Mercury’s ‘My Melancholy Blues’ were fine but undistinguished. Deacon did better with his big-hearted pop song ‘Spread Your Wings’. May’s ‘All Dead All Dead’, with its orchestral guitar fills, was better than the faux blues of ‘Sleeping on the Sidewalk’. ‘It was the quickest song I’ve ever written’ said the guitarist, but it was just as quickly forgotten.
Mercury’s ‘Get Down, Make Love’ was far better. The sparse piano fills and funk groove suggested the R&B and dance music that soundtracked New York’s gay club scene. The lyrics sounded like a celebration of sexual abandonment (‘New York is Sin City. I slut myself when I’m there,’ Freddie said). Meanwhile, sticking to the band’s ‘no synthesisers’ policy, Brian May helped accompany the tale of the sexual escapades with some unearthly noises coaxed out of the Red Special and an effects pedal.
In October, Queen were presented with a Britannia Award for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, which tied with Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ as Best British Single of the Last Twenty-Five Years. In the same month, they released the first two songs on News of the World as the two sides of their new single: ‘We Are the Champions’ and ‘We Will Rock You’. Rock ’n’ roll bands declaring their invincibility was nothing new. But rarely had any group sounded so utterly assured of that invincibility.
‘“We Are the Champions” is the most egotistical song I’ve ever written,’ Freddie admitted. He had, he said, been inspired by the crowd singalongs at football matches, and wanted to write something for, as he called them, ‘the masses’ at Queen concerts. ‘I suppose it could be construed as my version of [Frank Sinatra’s] “My Way”,’ he added. ‘We have made it, and it certainly wasn’t easy.’
‘I was quite shocked when I heard the lyrics,’ Brian May told Mojo. ‘I remember saying, “You can’t do this, Fred. You’ll get killed.” Freddie said, “Yes, we can.”’ He was correct. Mercury’s conviction drives ‘We Are the Champions’ from its dainty opening verse to its ridiculously overblown conclusion. Not once does he sound like a man suffering one iota of self-doubt. Queen filmed a promo for the single at the New London Theatre in front of an audience of nearly a thousand invited fans, with Freddie conducting the masses in his Nijinsky stage suit. After just one take, the crowd reacted as if they’d heard the song as many times as ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ or ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’.
The bold declaration of ‘no time for losers’ seemed a defiant snub to Queen’s critics (‘In their moneyed superiority, they are indeed champions,’ wrote Rolling Stone’s Bart Testa, as if throwing up his hands in surrender). Taylor and May would always insist that Mercury’s tongue was in his cheek when he wrote the song, and that, as the drummer said, the ‘we’ was ‘a collective “we”. We are all champions.’
If audiences felt patronised, it didn’t show. ‘We Are the Champions’ gave Queen a number 2 hit in the UK, a number 1 in France (for a record-breaking twelve weeks) and a number 4 in the US. A song that at first, as Brian May said, ‘had us on the floor laughing’ would go on to become ‘an international anthem for sports, politics … everything.’
The single’s flipside had been written by Brian May, but was every bit as self-assured. ‘I woke up after a momentous gig at Stafford Bingley Hall when the audience had kept singing after we’d gone offstage,’ recalled May, ‘and I had the idea for “We Will Rock You” in my head. Freddie and I both thought it would be an interesting experiment to write a song with audience participation specifically in mind.’ Until the arrival of the stuttering guitar solo, the track relied only on Mercury’s vocal and the collective hands and feet of his bandmates and anyone else that happened to be in Wessex Studios that day. ‘There are no drums on the track,’ revealed May. ‘It’s just clapping and stamping on boards, overdubbed many times over with many primitive delay machines.’
‘“We Will Rock You” truly showed the creative side of Mike Stone,’ remembers Andy Turner. Over the course of some fifteen takes, Stone recorded everyone he could find at Wessex performing the two foot stomps and a handclap that comprised the song’s rhythm. ‘Early one evening, they came and rounded up me, Howard, and Betty the tea lady, who lived in the council house next door to the studio, and got us all up on these drum risers,’ laughs Turner. ‘We all stood there and did the “boom-boom cha” take after take after take.’
At EMI’s autumn sales conference that year, Brian Southall made use of both songs. ‘Our conference was themed around “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You”, so we handed out football scarves to everyone,’ he explains. In keeping with the spirit of the occasion, Southall had also hired sports pundit Dickie Davies, presenter of The Big Match, to record links for the conference. ‘Then we played both tracks. Everyone was on their feet, totally fired up.’
After spending over six months in the US singles charts, ‘We Are the Champions’ would be adopted by the New York Yankees bas
eball team as their anthem. Thousands of miles away from London in North Carolina, ex-Panchgani pupil Subash Shah would hear Queen’s rallying cry of ‘We Will Rock You’ every time he watched his baseball team over the next few years. Shah was a jazz fan with no great interest in pop music, and, until after Mercury’s death, had no idea that he was listening to his childhood friend ‘Buckwee’ Bulsara.
Defiant as always, Queen refused EMI’s request to put a picture of the band on the sleeve of News of the World. Instead, they hired American artist Frank Kelly Freas to pastiche his artwork for a 1953 edition of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Freas re-created his original doleful-looking robot, now attempting to cradle the members of Queen in his mechanical claw. As a gimmick, EMI created promotional robot clocks. ‘They were big grandfather clocks,’ says Brian Southall. ‘Very expensive. But that’s what we did in those days. There was no expense spared. The policy was, “How much money can we spend to make the band and us feel good?”’
By 1977, Southall and EMI’s Bob Mercer had become acutely aware that Queen were an entirely different beast from the groups they’d encountered earlier in the decade. ‘Queen came to marketing meetings for one thing,’ laughs Mercer. ‘They hunted as a pack.’ For Brian Southall, a squabble over an album sleeve was merely a sign of the times. ‘There was a point in the 1970s where record companies lost control of their artists. You could blame it on Dark Side of the Moon if you like. So it was a perfect time for Queen to take advantage of that, albeit in the nicest possible way. Like Pink Floyd, Queen delivered the album, delivered the album cover, and your job was to do the work of the worker ants and sell it. They were perfect animals for the seventies.’
