by Mark Blake
One lunchtime, Southall and his marketing assistant took Mercury to lunch in a French restaurant close to EMI’s offices in Manchester Square. ‘It was a great restaurant, wonderful food, but I think Freddie asked for a piece of lettuce,’ chuckles Southall. ‘After lunch, it was a lovely day, Freddie decided that he was going to walk back to the office. It was about fifty yards around two sides of Manchester Square. But his limo had to drive, cruising at the same speed, with the door open in case Freddie got tired. He was a star, but a bigger star than anyone I ever met.’
In November, despite EMI’s robot grandfather clocks and the omnipresent ‘We Are the Champions’, News of the World only reached number 4 in the UK, Queen’s lowest chart placing since Queen II. In a comic reversal of fortunes, it was their Wessex studio mates, The Sex Pistols, who took the top spot with their debut album. By then, Queen were on tour in the United States. The blow was softened when News of the World gave them their first American number 1. ‘Any band from that era that says they weren’t competitive are liars,’ said Roger Taylor. ‘We were always like, “Shit, I wish we could be where Led Zeppelin are.” Or we’d be looking at groups like Yes and wanting to do better.’
When Queen had sold out New York’s Madison Square Garden in March, they’d set themselves a goal to better Yes’s record of selling out three nights at the same venue. In December 1977, they managed two nights. ‘We were always trying to take the next step,’ said May. ‘A million records this year, two million next year; one night at Madison Square Garden this time, two next time …’
For Brian, the concerts were a personal victory. May’s father, Harold, had struggled with his son’s choice of career, and Queen’s hit singles and albums had done little to change his point of view. One of his projects at the Ministry of Aviation had been designing the blind landing equipment for Concorde. While John Reid arranged for a group of the band’s friends and employees to fly to New York for the shows on Freddie Laker’s Skytrain, May went one better. ‘I flew my dad over on Concorde to see us play. He’d worked on Concorde for all that time but had never actually flown on it. He saw us play at Madison Square Garden, and after the show he came up to me and said, “Yes, all right. I get it now.” That was a wonderful moment.’
Onstage, Queen still subscribed to their usual policy, expressed by Freddie as ‘the bigger, the better – in everything’. May and Mercury opened the show alone with ‘We Will Rock You’. The tribal rhythm boomed hypnotically across the vast arenas, before the rest of band weighed in for a sped-up, almost punk-rock version of the same song. By then, Queen’s 60-feet ‘crown’ had achieved lift-off and hovered over the stage, beaming out shafts of light through a fug of dry ice. Four months later, cinema-goers would see a similar effect in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
At Madison Square Garden, Freddie Mercury paraded in a crowd-pleasing New York Yankees baseball jacket. In Portland, the audience took over the vocals on ‘Love of my Life’. Before a gig in San Diego, a worse-for-wear John Deacon stuck his hand through a plate glass window, but had it patched up sufficiently to play the show. On most nights, Queen’s cover of ‘Jailhouse Rock’ was now dedicated to Elvis Presley, who had died suddenly in August.
After watching the first night in New York, Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo wrote that ‘Queen songs cannot decide whether to be The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles or tortured chanting Gregorians. Based on audience appeal, they get the job done. I’m just not sure what that job is.’ In America, Queen were still perceived as a heavy rock band with an unusually theatrical lead singer. Some of their musical quirks, the throwbacks to Uncle Mac’s Children’s Favourites or The Temperance Seven, didn’t translate as well as they did in the studio. The good folks of Norfolk, Virginia, preferred to be blasted senseless by ‘We Will Rock You’, ‘Brighton Rock’ or ‘Now I’m Here’. After the opening night, Queen’s newest curio ‘Sleeping on the Sidewalk’ was shelved for the remainder of the tour.
Offstage, ex-Hectics singer Bruce Murray caught up with Mercury at the Aladdin: ‘My mother was living in Las Vegas, and I saw that Queen were playing.’ Backstage, though, Murray could see that how different his old friend’s life now was. ‘I didn’t want to become a hanger-on,’ he says. ‘Freddie was into the whole gay thing now, and to be honest, there was, I think, a feeling backstage of “us and them”.’ The two parted on good terms, but it would be the last time Murray saw or spoke to Fred Bulsara.
Onstage, Mercury sold the show as hard as always. Described in the US press as both ‘obnoxious and joyously camp’, the singer modelled a fashionably shorter haircut, while his new wardrobe included a leather biker’s jacket. Freddie would sign off shows with ‘Thank you, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you’, a quip that annoyed some critics who thought it too cynical. Ian Hunter caught the show at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, and burst out laughing after one incident. ‘Brian May’s amp had exploded,’ recalled Hunter. The guitarist dashed over to tell Mercury, who was at the piano, unaware that his microphone was switched on and that the audience could hear every word. As Hunter recalled, ‘Fred waved Brian away, saying, “Oh, just jump around a bit and the silly bastards won’t know the difference!”’
On 22 December Queen played the LA Forum. It was their final night in Los Angeles, the last of three shows that had seen them play to total of 64,000 people. The band encored with a hastily rehearsed ‘White Christmas’, joined onstage by their bodyguard dressed as Santa Claus, manager John Reid disguised as an elf and assorted roadies as reindeers. They flew home a day later. However much ‘slutting’ there was still to be done in America, Mercury had other things on his mind: ‘My mother would kill me if I wasn’t home for Christmas. I haven’t missed one yet.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with going to bed with somebody of your own sex. I think everybody’s bisexual to a certain degree.’
In October 1976 Elton John discussed his sexuality in a candid interview with Rolling Stone magazine. It was a bold move by a mainstream pop star for the time. A year later, Elton announced his decision to retire from playing live and had broken up his songwriting partnership with lyricist Bernie Taupin, dropping out of the public eye to plan his next move.
Behind the scenes and unknown to the public at the time, Elton was also dealing with the end of his tempestuous personal relationship with John Reid, also his manager. Professionally, there was also another issue to contend with. As Reid’s former PR Caroline Boucher explains, ‘Freddie and Elton got on very well, but you couldn’t manage Freddie and Elton.’
‘It was obviously going to end in tears,’ adds Bob Mercer. ‘If John Reid was in my office with Freddie, then inevitably there would be a phone call from Elton: “What’s he doing with her?” As another insider recalls, ‘If Elton had a tour, then that took priority, and with the different personalities in Queen, you can imagine how that went down.’
With lawyer Jim Beach negotiating, Queen’s separation from John Reid Enterprises was underway before their second US tour in 1977. Reid would receive a substantial pay-off for the early termination of the management contract, plus 15 per cent of the royalties generated by the Queen albums already released. Queen were also still paying a percentage of royalties to Trident; an arrangement that would only expire with the release of their next album.
Queen’s relationship with John Reid had been fruitful for both parties, but they were wary of signing with another manager. Reid delivered the paperwork to the back garden of Roger Taylor’s country house in order to get the necessary signatures. At the time, Queen were filming a promo for ‘We Will Rock You’ and their next single, ‘Spread Your Wings’, attempting to mime in the bitter cold and under a dusting of snow, and after Freddie had consumed the best part of a bottle of brandy. The band themselves squeezed into the back of Mercury’s Rolls-Royce and signed the documents.
Initially, they decided to manage themselves, with Pete Brown and Paul Prenter assisting. Before long, their circumstances
would change again. Queen’s lawyer Jim Beach gave up his position with Harbottle & Lewis and was soon installed as the band’s business manager. ‘Jim took me out to lunch and told me he was thinking of becoming Queen’s business manager,’ remembers Bob Mercer. ‘I was very encouraging. I’d been on the suffering end of the whole Freddie Mercury-John Reid-Elton John thing, and I could please absolutely no one.’ Two years later, Brian May would admit, ‘I think we were in real danger of splitting up when the John Reid situation got really sticky.’
Jim Beach established three new companies: Queen Productions Ltd, Queen Music Ltd and Queen Films Ltd; the last of which was created in response to the growing trend for pop promos. Queen would now finance their own films and maintain control over licensing and video rights. Unsurprisingly, it was John Deacon that guided his bandmates through such matters. ‘John keeps a very close eye on our affairs,’ Mercury told Circus magazine. ‘He knows everything that’s going on and shouldn’t be going on. The rest of the group won’t do anything unless John says it’s all right. We’ve all become businessmen. Even though it’s against our better judgement.’
When asked whether Freddie had ever taken care of the finances when running their stall at Kensington Market, Roger Taylor once replied, ‘Bloody hell, no! That would have been an absolute disaster.’ In 1978 Taylor claimed that the Queen singer ‘has absolutely no idea about money, the value of it or anything.’ That said, one of Jim Beach’s first assignments was to renegotiate the terms of Queen’s deal with EMI. One company insider has described the resulting deal as ‘in the millions. A vast amount for the day.’
By 1978, though, Prime Minister James Callaghan’s government had imposed a top tax rate of 83 per cent on earned income and 98 per cent on unearned income in the UK. As Roger Taylor grumbled, ‘We had to think about leaving the country.’ Queen would follow the lead set by other musicians in recent years, including The Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Bad Company, and become tax exiles, spending less than 183 days a year in the UK, and touring and recording overseas to avoid paying tax on their earnings.
Although Freddie Mercury had applauded it ‘as John Deacon’s best song to date’, ‘Spread Your Wings’ barely made it into the Top 30 in February. Deacon would have some better news that month with the birth of his second son, Michael. But come April and the start of the new tax year, Queen were in Stockholm for the first night of a three-week tour. In Rotterdam, their gargantuan lighting rig malfunctioned. ‘There was the explosion and loads of smoke,’ recalled Brian May, ‘and one side of the crown majestically rose while the other majestically fell. I think it helped break the ice.’ Three days later, matters improved when Queen played France for the first time. ‘We Are the Champions’ and ‘We Will Rock You’ had been in the charts for weeks, but the country had been resistant to the band until then. Following a triumphal performance at Pavillion De Paris, Mercury was overheard to remark, ‘Well, that’s Paris ticked off.’
The UK would be served by two Queen shows at Stafford Bingley Hall and three at Wembley Empire Pool in May. It was now costing around £4,000 a day to keep Queen on the road. The Daily Mail revealed that they were only turning a profit in the United States, where the venues could hold as many as 20,000. Mercury gave an unusually candid interview to the Mail’s Tim Lott. While not discussing his sexuality with the same frankness as Elton John in Rolling Stone, he claimed, ‘My sex drive is enormous. I live life to the full’, and admitted that he and Mary Austin had broken up (‘After seven and a half years we have come to an understanding. Mary should have a life of her own’). Though always good for a flippant bon mot (‘I enjoy being a bitch’), Mercury confessed to ‘all kinds of paranoia’, explaining that he couldn’t bear to go anywhere on his own, and that he had to have someone with him at all times.
Freddie’s circle of gay friends provided him with the constant company he needed. Some would have the singer’s best interests at heart; others would abuse his trust and, in one case, ultimately betray him. Interviewed by Kenny Everett to promote A Day at the Races, Mercury had broadcast a coded dedication to ‘Sharon, Beryl, Phyllis, Serita … all the lovely people.’ Freddie’s ‘lovely people’, gay and straight, had all acquired female names: ‘Sharon’ was Elton John, ‘Beryl’ was John Reid, ‘Phyllis’ was Rod Stewart. Mercury himself was known as ‘Melina’ (after the Greek actress and political activist Melina Mercouri), Roger Taylor was ‘Liz’ and Brian May was ‘Maggie’. Intriguingly, John Deacon was never given a name, while, in a comic reversal of gender, Mary Austin was called ‘Steve’ after Steve Austin, the hero of The Six Million Dollar Man TV series. ‘Oh God, Queen and the girls’ names,’ sighs Brian Southall. ‘You’d be having this conversation and you’d have no idea who this Brenda or Beryl was or what they were talking about.’
‘Serita’ had been a part of Mercury’s life for some time. It was the nickname given to Peter Straker, a Jamaica-born singer and actor who had appeared in the original stage production of the musical Hair! In 1977 Mercury formed his own production company, Goose Productions, and stuck £20,000 of his own cash into Straker’s debut album, co-producing the record with Roy Thomas Baker. Peter’s music had one foot in the dwindling glam-rock scene, the other in campy West End show tunes. The album, This One’s On Me, was released in 1978, but barely sold.
For Southall, Peter Straker was another example of EMI cosseting one of their star acts. ‘In those days, you did things because your artists said so,’ he explains. ‘EMI signed Kate Bush because Dave Gilmour said so, which was wonderful. But then Goose Productions brought us Peter Straker. God bless him, Peter had a sense of humour. I remember we sent him on a huge tour, got to Birmingham Odeon and we’d sold thirty tickets. We were like, “Come on Peter …” But he said, “No, no, my loves, I must go on …’ He had the feather boa and the heels, and he used to do a version of “That Old Black Magic” with a box of Black Magic chocolates. That night he went out with a bag of Revels …’
Straker’s musical career continued in fits and starts, but he would spend the next few years in Mercury’s inner circle, alongside mainstays Joe Fanelli (aka ‘Liza’) and personal manager Paul Prenter (‘Trixie’). Mercury was twenty-nine years old when he’d begun his relationship with David Minns. As one of his former entourage explains, he was ‘very keen to make up for lost time’. Freddie may have craved companionship and romantic love, but his fame and money brought him endless attention and offers of sex.
Writing in 1992, Freddie’s close friend David Evans described Mercury’s time in his thirties as ‘hectic, late-night and greedy’. By 1978, Freddie was in the position of having anything and everything he wanted. One night, at a friend’s birthday party in a London restaurant, the singer broke off from his conversation and uttered one word, ‘Ciggy’. In seconds, packets of cigarettes were thrust in his direction. Later, Mercury stopped again, and said, ‘Pee-pee.’ Within seconds, he was being shepherded towards the lavatory.
It was all rather different in Brian May’s world. In June that year, May and his wife celebrated the birth of their first child, James. While Mercury bragged to the Daily Mail of spending ‘£100,000 over the last three years’, May lived a more frugal lifestyle. ‘I called round Brian’s house in Barnes,’ says his old bandmate John ‘Jag’ Garnham. ‘I hadn’t been there before and didn’t know he was away on tour. It was just an OK, detached house, and I remember thinking, “Where is all the money?” There were no extravagant objects in the house at all. Brian’s dad Harold turned up, and I said, “Are you still living in Feltham?” He said, “Oh yes, Jag, we are. We don’t let Brian pay for anything, only the airfare sometimes so we can go and see him in concert.”’
Inevitably, as Queen’s fame escalated it became harder to maintain relationships with schoolfriends and former bandmates. As Chris Smith says, ‘I never knew Freddie Mercury. My mate was Fred Bulsara.’ After a show at the Liverpool Empire, Ken Testi persuaded Queen to visit his new club, Eric’s. Deacon, Taylor and Mercury arrived
to reminisce with the old friend that had nearly become their manager. But Testi was amused to notice that they came, and went, in three separate limousines. In July 1978, Roger Taylor celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday with a party in Montreux. High on life and anything else on offer, Freddie Mercury supposedly swung from a cut-glass chandelier, telling stunned onlookers, ‘I just couldn’t resist it.’
‘The one about the dwarfs and the bald heads and the cocaine is not true,’ insists Roger Taylor, between conspiratorial chuckles. He hesitates. ‘Actually, it could have been true.’ Taylor is being chauffeured around the Lake District. It is now summer 2008, he has been coaxed onto the campaign trail to support Queen and Paul Rodgers’ album and tour. The drummer cruises through some of the most beautiful countryside in rural England, a mobile phone pressed to his ear, patiently taking a trip back thirty years to one of Queen’s most debauched parties.
On Hallowe’en night, 31 October 1978, Queen celebrated the release of their seventh album, Jazz, in New Orleans. At midnight, a Dixieland brass band marched into the ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel, where over three hundred guests were already gorging on oysters, shrimp creole and champagne served by liveried waiters. Following the trumpet-playing retinue were the four members of Queen, fresh from their sold-out show at the Municipal Auditorium. Before the event, Queen’s publicist had been ordered to trawl the bars and clubs around Bourbon Street in the city’s French Quarter with an instruction to round up ‘every available freak’ and invite them to the party.
As Queen arrived, a flock of transvestites, fire-eaters, dancing girls, snakecharmers and strippers dressed as nuns, appeared from the wings. The Rolling Stones’ disco hit ‘Miss You’ blared out of the speakers, as various female revellers shed their clothes on the dancefloor. In the Sun newspaper, a week later, Freddie Mercury, clad in braces and checked shirt (the de rigueur dress code in US gay circles) was photographed autographing a bare female behind under the headline “WAY DOWN YONDER IN NUDE ORLEANS’. The festivities rolled on until daybreak, with groupies dispensing blow jobs to music biz bigwigs in a back room, and one party girl stripping off to ‘smoke’ a cigarette in her vagina. Or so the story goes …
