by Mark Blake
Over the last three decades, the tale has taken on a life of its own to include all manner of bacchanalian excess: public sex, naked mud-wrestling, a nude woman served on a salver of raw meat, and, most infamous of all, dwarfs, sometimes described as ‘hermaphrodite dwarfs’, ferrying cocaine on trays strapped to their, possibly bald, heads … ‘Look, if it’s true I never saw it,’ admits Roger Taylor, eventually. ‘But I have to say that most of the stories from that night are not that exaggerated.’
EMI’s Bob Mercer had flown to New Orleans especially for the bash. ‘The party was outrageous,’ he admits. ‘The story about the gnomes and cocaine is apocryphal. As far as I know, I was the only one there that had any blow [cocaine], because all night I kept getting tapped on the shoulder by certain people and I kept having to go with them to my hotel room …’
At round 3 a.m., Mercer remembers escorting Brian May and Roger Taylor on a trip to ‘some of the seedier parts of the French Quarter’. Mercury was also ‘trolling in the same village’, in the company of Queen’s old PR Tony Brainsby and Sounds journalist Sylvie Simmons with whom he was competing to spot the best-looking men (‘He’s mine!’). May, however, remembers the night differently. Eager to get away from what one eyewitness called ‘the groupies and fame-worshippers’, the guitarist left the party and headed off on what turned out to be a wild goose chase.
‘You know that feeling, where everything’s going on, everything’s wonderful, fabulous, but inside there’s this big hole?’ said May in 1998. ‘So it was great, it was outrageous, but I remember thinking, all is not quite right.’ Brian went looking for Peaches, the woman he had met in New Orleans on Queen’s first US tour. ‘I’d fallen in love some years before in New Orleans and I expected that I would see her, but she wasn’t there. I didn’t find her but she found me later on.’ Recalling the party in 2008, May still sounded dreamily wistful. ‘New Orleans is a party town, and I still have a huge emotional attachment to the place. I still feel a tug on the heartstrings when I go to that city.’
The arrival of a new day brought with it a $200,000 bill, and the mother of all hangovers. Hardened bon vivant Bob Mercer returned to his hotel room at 6 a.m., only to discover that he had been robbed. ‘I used to carry what we called a “nancy bag”,’ he explains. ‘Men in those days carried all their gear in these bags because our pants were too tight to put anything in the pockets. I opened mine and I had no money, no credit card, no passport … I was supposed to fly to New York to catch a plane to London to go with Kate Bush to Holland for some record awards. Believe it or not, I got home. How? I don’t know. I was like one of those marines who’s dropped in the middle of a forest at night and told to find their own way back.’
While Mercer plotted his escape from New Orleans, a bleary-eyed Queen held a press conference. ‘The party was deliberately excessive,’ said May later. ‘Partly for our own enjoyment, partly for friends to enjoy … and partly for the hell of it.’ But as Taylor ominously admitted, ‘The trouble was, as time went on, we just got better and better at having a good time.’
Sessions for what became Jazz had begun four months earlier and, for tax purposes, would be split between Mountain Studios, overlooking Lake Geneva, and Superbear Studios in Nice. In Mike Stone’s absence, Queen had reunited with Roy Thomas Baker. ‘Mike had been like part of the band,’ explained Brian May, ‘but by the time we were going to start Jazz, Mike had fallen in love and then had a period of falling apart.’ Stone’s later worked with Journey and Asia, bands who made great use of the stacked vocals and harmony techniques he had first used with Queen. Sadly, Stone died in 2002 and would never get the chance to work again with Queen.
By the summer of 1978, Roy Thomas Baker was basking in the success of his latest project, The Cars’ debut album. The Cars, from Boston, Massachusetts, were part of what record company marketing departments were calling ‘new wave’; the radio-friendly successor to punk. It was now the era of Elvis Costello, Blondie, and The Police. ‘Roy came back with a huge amount of confidence,’ said May. ‘He’d done The Cars’ album really quickly, and was like, “Oh, I tossed that off in two weeks and it was a massive hit!”’
Queen wanted to retain the spontaneity of News of the World, without creating an obvious sequel. With The Cars, Baker had fused huge harmony vocals with sparse backing tracks. Queen would employ a similar technique for Jazz. ‘It was the first time we’d done an album away from home,’ said Brian May. ‘The idea being that there would be no distractions, but of course there were even more distractions. Just different kinds.’ According to May, one of Freddie Mercury’s distractions was the Tour de France: ‘Fred got quite worked up about it, though we couldn’t understand why, and then he came back with this delightful creation.’
The delightful creation was ‘Bicycle Race’, a song with lyrics that name-checked Jaws, Star Wars, cocaine, Superman, the Vietnam War and the Watergate political scandal. If that wasn’t enough, it had a schizophrenic rhythm, pure Gilbert and Sullivan vocals, and, said May, ‘about a billion chords’. The song was exquisitely camp. ‘I’m not saying who was sleeping with whom and when,’ insisted May, but a popular rumour still persists that ‘Bicycle Race’ was composed after Mercury enjoyed a tryst with one of the Tour de France cyclists. ‘If anything, Freddie’s personal life spilled over into his work in a positive way, the part that made it theatre,’ suggested Roy Thomas Baker. ‘His horizons were broad, and being gay was one extra thing he could draw upon.’
Brian May delivered the perfect companion piece with ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’. ‘I wrote it with Fred in mind,’ he said, ‘as you do when you have a great singer that liked fat bottomed girls or boys.’ The song swung from thigh-slapping country-rock to heavy metal, with Mercury singing about his sexual initiation at the hands of one ‘Big Fat Fanny’. ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ evoked a Donald McGill saucy seaside postcard and an old Carry On film, with a mugging Kenneth Williams about to be pounced on by Hattie Jacques’ predatory Matron.
With ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ and ‘Bicycle Race’, Queen had acquired a double A-side single that would return them to the UK Top 20. But Jazz divided opinion within the group. Interviewed in 1984, John Deacon described it ‘as an album I dislike’. Roger Taylor was equally unimpressed. ‘It’s not one of my favourites,’ he admitted later. ‘Jazz was an ambitious album but I never felt as if it lived up to its ambition. The double A-side single was good, but I was never happy with the sound on Jazz, it never thrilled me.’
Interviewed in 2005, Roy Thomas Baker insisted, ‘I thought everyone had a great time. I thought their songwriting was equally as good as what they’d done before.’ One of the high points of the sessions for Baker was working again with Freddie Mercury. At Mountain, the control room was on a different level to the studio, which irked the singer. ‘We installed a close circuit TV,’ explained Baker. ‘When Fred and I had worked together before, I wouldn’t sit behind the recording console but between the console and the window, so that Freddie could tell from my facial expression if I thought a particular vocal was good or not. Freddie wanted a camera on my face, so we could maintain that relationship.’ Baker found that Mercury was still ‘intense and strong-willed, but great to work with. He’d write everything down on bits of paper so he was always focused, and then play me little things, like a cymbal smash of some record, and say, “How do we get that sound?”’
The singer’s imagination worked overtime for the opening track, ‘Mustapha’. Here, Mercury offered a rare nod to his heritage, scatting away in Arabic and broken English over a frenetic backing of drums, bass, guitar and piano. It was unlike anything Queen had attempted before, and a strikingly original, if uncompromising way to begin an album. ‘I thought it was fantastic,’ said May simply. ‘Intrinsically difficult, but fantastic.’
Elsewhere on Jazz, Mercury displayed the usual split personality: playing the weary romantic on the ballad ‘Jealousy’, while bragging about whoring himself out to an audience on the smoke-and-mirrors hard roc
ker ‘Let Me Entertain You’. When Roger Taylor said that Queen were getting better and better at having a good time, one band member seemed better at it than most. The ‘good time’ being enjoyed by Mercury would be extolled in the future single ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. In the twenty-first century, the song has been used to sell Cadbury’s chocolate, sung on reality TV talent shows, and voted The Greatest Driving Song Ever by viewers of the BBC’s petrol-head programme, Top Gear. Mercury describes himself as a tiger, an atom bomb, and a sex machine travelling at 100mph, suggesting that the song’s two greatest inspirations were sex and drugs. Interviewed in 2010 Brian May admitted that although the song was full of optimism, ‘lyrically it represented something that was happening to Freddie which we thought was threatening him.’ Namely: his lifestyle.
May’s contributions to Jazz swung from bruising heavy rock, ‘Dead On Time’ (which included the sound of a thunderstorm recorded over Montreux) to ‘Dreamers Ball’, a light, jazzy shuffle that apparently prompted a heated row in the studio between May and Taylor, who didn’t like the song. ‘Around the Jazz album we were all getting into our own things and nobody much liked what the other guys were doing,’ admitted May. ‘To be honest, there were times when we couldn’t tolerate each other offstage.’ On ‘Leaving Home Ain’t Easy’, May played his straightest hand yet with a song seemingly inspired by the the drawbacks of being a globetrotting rock star. Elsewhere, he delivered an epic guitar solo to John Deacon’s ‘If You Can’t Beat Them’ that was arguably the best part of the song. Deacon’s other composition, ‘In Only Seven Days’, stuck to the same pop middle ground as ‘You’re My Best Friend’.
Roger Taylor has always saved his strongest criticism of Jazz for his own tracks, ‘Fun It’ and ‘More of That Jazz’. ‘My songs are very patchy,’ he said. ‘Instantly forgettable.’ ‘Fun It’ was Queen’s first foray into dance music and included a syn-drum, the electronic gizmo that would briefly revolutionise the sound of so much pop music in the next decade. Taylor’s second effort was the rather sullen ‘More of That Jazz’, which reprised snippets from the tracks that had gone before but ended the album on a very downbeat note. ‘I don’t think we were as much of a group at the time,’ he said. ‘We were all living in these different places in a different country.’
The days of Queen bussing in to London from their respective bedsits for a recording session at Trident were long gone. In July, May had been forced to leave the UK for tax reasons soon after the birth of his son. He had flown to Canada for a break, before joining the rest of the band in Montreux. Deacon now had two children and the same commitments as May. Jack Nelson’s earlier description of the four band members entering an airport (‘one would stop, one would go right, one would go left, and one would go straight ahead’) seemed even more apt. Jazz had a fractured feel, as if all the pieces didn’t quite fit and everyone was pulling in their own direction. Interviewed in 1982, Baker recalled the sessions less for the songs than for the local nightlife: ‘Every night we’d go to this club on the corner that had the most amazing stripper, so we had to stop the session at eleven o’clock, watch the stripper, and then go back to record again.’
Baker’s co-production gave Jazz a crisp, cold sound, not that distanced from his work with The Cars. The choruses were as big as before, but everything else felt shrunken, as if it had been condensed, especially Taylor’s drums. It was a modern sound far removed from the bombast of Queen II or A Night at the Opera, which is what all parties had been striving for before. But as Roger Taylor said: ‘Jazz was disappointing … I don’t think it really worked with Roy.’
Billy Cobham and Gilbert Gil had been among the star attractions at the annual Montreux Jazz Festival that summer. Away from the studio, Queen had spent time at the festival, which was the inspiration for the album’s title. The monochrome cover artwork was Roger Taylor’s idea, and came from graffiti he’d spotted while crossing through Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. Once again, though, EMI were denied a photograph of the band on the cover.
‘Our biggest disappointment was the cover,’ admits Brian Southall. ‘This one was particularly bizarre, as was the title Jazz, which we thought might indicate some sort of mad move into jazz and confuse people.’ EMI were understandably relieved when they finally heard the album, especially ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, but their fears were raised once again when they learned of the proposed video shoot for the ‘Bicycle Race’ and ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ single.
On 12 September, Queen arranged for a total of sixty-five naked female models to be filmed energetically cycling around the track at Wimbledon Stadium in southwest London. Queen’s nude cyclists ran the full gamut of shape, size and race. Images from the shoot would be used in the promo video, on the cover of the ‘Bicycle Race’ single and also in a poster to be given away free with every copy of the album. ‘It was a fun idea,’ says Southall. ‘And a great day out with a bunch of naked ladies on bikes. There was an enormous amount of media interest, but there was a backlash.’
There was also a problem the day after when Queen’s people returned the bikes to the Halford’s store from where they were borrowed. Queen were informed that, for reasons of hygiene, they would have to pay to replace all sixty-five saddles. When EMI baulked at a naked female behind on the single’s cover, Queen relented and arranged for a pair of black knickers to be drawn on to the offending rear. But the free poster with its gaudy array of naked breasts and buttocks prompted a furore in America, and would be withdrawn from US copies of Jazz. ‘I guess some people don’t like to look at nude ladies,’ quipped Mercury.
‘That wasn’t our problem,’ laughs Southall. ‘That was Elektra’s. But what was a problem for EMI in the UK was getting the video on Top of the Pops or Saturday morning kids’ TV. Queen, of course, couldn’t be bothered with “little things” like that, and were never going to compromise what they wanted to do.’ In the end, ‘Bicycle Race’ reached number 11 in the UK and number 24 in the US.
In Britain, Jazz was released on 10 November, coming out four days later in America, where Queen’s next tour was already underway. Jazz drew more critical flack than even News of the World. Dave Marsh’s savaging of the album in Rolling Stone took great exception to the air of elitism, concluding, ‘Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band. The whole thing makes me wonder why anyone would indulge these creeps and their polluting ideas.’ With Britain still in the grip of widespread unemployment, a left-leaning music press bristled at a group of tax exiles hiring women to strip off and ride bikes around for their amusement, and throwing $200,000 parties in New Orleans. Accusations of sexism were thrown around, while the music didn’t fare much better. NME advised its readers to buy Jazz only if they had ‘a deaf relative’. Queen’s most sensitive soul Brian May would admit to being wounded by such comments (‘We are quite excessive, but in a harmless way’); Roger Taylor would agree that, yes, it rankled but it didn’t matter as ‘people kept on buying the records’. Jazz made it to number 2 in the UK and number 6 in the US.
In America, Queen were now touring without an opening act and were booked into the biggest sheds to maximise ticket sales and profits. Mercury was still experiencing problems with his voice, which he blamed on the nodules that had plagued him on earlier tours, but which others said were being aggravated by his lifestyle. In 2005, a former road manager told Uncut magazine: ‘Around 1978 and 1979, when Queen became huge, Freddie’s appetites soared. He was non-stop sex and drugs. Before a show, after a show … Even between songs. Before an encore, he’d nip backstage, have a few lines of coke, get a quick blow job from some bloke he’d just met, then run back to the stage and finish the gig. The man had stamina.’ Even allowing for exaggeration, one observer from the time described Mercury as being ‘full of volcanic, pent-up energy’. ‘Christ! Fred was full of something,’ admitted Roger Taylor. ‘Such a joy and great fun to be around.’ At Madison Square Garden, the show included the arrival of nine half-naked women on bicycles for ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’. As Me
rcury sang, the girls circled him, trilling their bicycle bells. The press griped: ‘How far will Queen go to keep people from noticing that it’s not only the bicycling beauties that are bare?’
On Queen’s 1977 US tour, Brian May had augmented his map of the United States with what one journalist recalled as ‘a sliding tour schedule, ingeniously fashioned from cardboard and staples, and containing timetables and stopover details.’ In 1979, May’s sliding tour schedule must have resembled one of Heath Robinson’s contraptions. Queen spent most of the year on the road promoting Jazz. Two weeks after Christmas they began the six-week European leg in Germany, going on to play Holland, France, Switzerland, Spain and, for the first time, Yugoslavia. By the time they returned to the UK for part of the days allocated under their current tax status, Freddie’s anthem to excess, ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, was at number 9 in the charts.
The 1979 tour saw a pronounced change in Mercury’s image. Gone were the sequinned jumpsuits to be replaced by a leather biker’s cap, jacket and trousers and a heavy chain necklace. It was the singer’s interpretation of an ultra-masculine look (initially known as the ‘Castro Clone’) that had originated in San Francisco’s Castro district and had become popular in America’s gay communities. As Queen played Europe in January that year, the New York disco group Village People scored a huge mainstream hit with Y.M.C.A., a coded anthem to a popular gay cruising spot. The group’s members included the late Glenn Hughes (aka ‘The Biker’) who took the clone look even further with a heavy moustache, and whom Freddie had encountered one night at a hardcore New York gay club, The Anvil.
