by Mark Blake
If one moment encapsulates the vibe of Queen’s 1979 tour it’s the leather-clad Mercury snarling his way through a nihilistic ‘Let Me Entertain You’. The rest of Queen all played good cop to Freddie’s bad. May, with ringlets and white waistcoat; Taylor the eternal blond Peter Pan; and Deacon, static on the drum riser and looking, in his shirt and tie, as if he’d just come to fix the photocopier. Above them, Queen’s new rig, bathed the band in red, white and green lights, and at such a ferocious temperature that the crew nicknamed it ‘the pizza oven’.
The 1979 tour would be Pete Brown’s last stint as Queen’s tour co-ordinator. One of his tasks for the European dates had been to ensure that the four band members had accommodation of exactly the same standard. But it was an impossible task. ‘It didn’t matter what I did,’ said Brown. ‘It was never right.’ Brown eventually became a comedy agent and formed the production company, Talkback. Tragically, he died after a brain haemorrhage in 1993.
In April, Queen travelled to Japan for seventeen shows, including three at Tokyo’s Budokan. Japan was a safe haven after the drubbing they’d received in the UK and US press. To honour the occasion, ‘Teo Torriate (Let Us Cling Together)’ was introduced into the set. Queen’s standing in Japan was such that other bands were able to break into the same market almost by association. The American hard rock group Cheap Trick had opened for Queen on the US News of the World tour. Japanese journalists who’d flown to America to cover the tour had been impressed. Six months on, Cheap Trick were selling out the Budokan.
In June, EMI released Live Killers, a concert album spliced together from Queen’s European shows. There had been talk of a live album since the recording of the Rainbow Theatre gigs in 1974, but the fear had been that a live Queen album couldn’t match the meticulous standards of their studio work. It didn’t. But in the mid-to late-seventies, most of Queen’s contemporaries had made hay with live recordings: Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same, Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous, Genesis’ Seconds Out. ‘Live albums are inescapable really,’ said Brian May. ‘Everyone says you have to do them.’ With no immediate plans to follow up Jazz, EMI wanted a Queen product to tide the audience over until their next studio visit.
Live Killers was an undoctored account of Queen in concert spread across four sides of vinyl. It was loud and messy. In concert, Queen would leave the stage midway through ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, giving the audience lights and smoke while they played a tape of the song’s operatic section over the PA. It worked live, but without the visual extravaganza, fell flat on record. Brian May insisted there were no overdubs, but what Live Killers missed in finesse it made up for in energy. ‘I still find it extraordinary,’ said Roger Taylor, ‘that the four of us could make so much fucking noise.’ Live Killers is now a time-capsule recording of Queen in the 1970s. In the next decade the band became a very different beast.
By the time Queen reconvened to headline the Saarbrucken Festival in Germany in August, the prolific John Deacon had become a father again (to daughter Laura) and Roger Taylor had been the victim of a bizarre hairdressing accident after over-bleaching his hair on the morning of the show. The decision to play a rare one-off festival date had been taken to boost Queen’s profile in Germany. They headlined over Irish guitar hero Rory Gallagher (whose old band Taste had once played above Smile), Ten Years After, and The Commodores. To the delight of Freddie Mercury, Taylor played the gig with near luminous green hair.
Taylor and Mercury would see out the summer of 1979 enjoying all the perks of moneyed rock stardom. They were among the spectators watching Bjorn Borg win the men’s singles final at Wimbledon. Days later, the Queen office approached the All England Lawn Tennis Club for permission to play a gig on Centre Court. They were refused. Later, Taylor and Dominique Beyrand holidayed in the South of France. On the drive down to St Tropez, the engine on Taylor’s new Ferrari blew up, rendering the car a wreck (a similar fate would befall his Aston Martin). In September, Mercury celebrated his thirty-third birthday with another lavish soirée and began plotting his next career move.
Queen’s lead singer was going to become a ballet dancer.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Four Cocks Fighting
‘Freddie’s new moustache suggests he is looking for a spare-time job as a waiter in the Fulham Road.’
Evening News, December 1980
‘Fuck the cost darlings! Let’s live a little!’
Freddie Mercury
Sunday, 7 October 1979. London’s Coliseum Theatre. The Royal Ballet Company has acquired a new male dancer: Freddie Mercury. Reportedly, his footwork is terrible, but what he lacks in natural ability he compensates for in enthusiasm and commitment. Outside, in the music world, The Police and Blondie are conquering the singles and album charts while Led Zeppelin have just played what would be their final British gig for twenty-eight years. But in the rarefied world of classical dance, Queen’s lead singer was about to make his debut with one of the world’s finest ballet companies in front of an audience of nearly two and half thousand people.
Mercury had been recruited to perform at the gala charity event by one of the company’s principal dancers, Wayne Eagling. To drum up publicity for the show, Eagling wanted to enlist a performer from outside the world of dance to make a cameo appearance. When Kate Bush turned him down, Eagling was offered Freddie Mercury. The singer leapt at the chance, but, as he later admitted, ‘I thought they were mad!’ For his first rehearsal in a studio at Baron’s Court, Mercury made the most regal of entrances, reporting for duty already wearing ballet shoes and tights. ‘Finding out what it involved really scared me,’ he said. ‘They had me rehearsing all kinds of dance steps. I was trying to do, in a few days, the kind of things they had spent years rehearsing, and let me tell you, it was murder. After two days, I was aching in places I didn’t even know I had.’
Mercury appeared at the gala to perform ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and Queen’s next single, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’. With his hair slicked back, and wearing a slashed V-neck one-piece, he began his routine on the shoulders of three bare-chested male dancers, singing live to an orchestral accompaniment of the song. For the song’s grand denouement, Mercury reappeared, barefoot and clad in a silver catsuit, before being flipped 360 degrees by his partners to sing the song’s final lyric upside down. ‘I wasn’t quite Baryshnikov, but wasn’t bad for an ageing beginner,’ he claimed. ‘I’d like to see Mick Jagger or Rod Stewart trying something like that.’
Sitting in the audience was Roger Taylor. ‘There was only one person in the world that could have gotten away with it,’ he recalled. ‘Freddie was performing in front of a very stiff Royal Ballet audience, average age ninety-four, who did not know what to make of this silver thing that was being tossed around onstage in front of them. I thought it was very brave and absolutely hilarious.’ It wouldn’t be the last time Mercury donned his ballet shoes and tights.
Earlier, that summer, Queen had spent their time between London, Geneva and Munich. The Mountain Studios complex in Switzerland had been put up for sale. Shortly before flying to Japan, Queen’s accountants approached the studio’s shareholders on Queen’s behalf. In the light of a recent hefty tax bill, they considered it prudent for the band to own their own studio. The deal would be completed by the end of the year, with Queen also inheriting Mountain’s resident engineer David Richards.
In early June, though, Queen arrived at Munich’s Musicland Studios. They were still on their tax year out and had no firm plans to make another album, but a session had been booked following the Japanese dates. Musicland was an underground complex that had been established by the Italian producer Giorgio Moroder. German producer Reinhold Mack (known to all as just ‘Mack’) was recording in Los Angeles with guitarist Gary Moore when he received a message about working with Queen at Musicland. When he phoned the studio to check, no one seemed to know what he was talking about. On a whim, he bought a ticket anyway and flew to Munich.
‘After Jazz, we
felt we had to get away to new territory,’ said Brian May. ‘We asked Musicland who they had, and they said Mack. He turned out to be a real find.’ Arriving at Musicland, Mack found the studio crammed with boxes, amps and flight cases, flown in from Japan, and three-quarters of Queen: Mercury, Taylor and Deacon. ‘They had no plans to make an album,’ says Mack, ‘but Freddie said to me, “If you’re up for it, I’ve got an idea. But let’s do it now before Brian arrives.”’ Mercury strummed out the opening chords to what would become ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’.
The song had taken shape just hours before. Peter Hince had flown into Munich from London, bringing Mercury with him: ‘Fred never travelled alone. There always had to be someone with him.’ A strike at Heathrow Airport had delayed all flights, and Mercury was especially anxious as he’d used up his allotted days under UK tax laws. When they finally reached Munich, the pair checked into the Hilton hotel. No sooner had Mercury disappeared to take a bath before he was calling out to Hince: ‘Ratty! Ratty! Get me a guitar now.’ Mercury emerged from his bathroom, draped in towels, picked up his acoustic guitar, and began humming and picking out the chords. Mercury didn’t want to lose the moment and they went straight to Musicland.
Mack secretly recorded Mercury’s first run-through of the song. When the singer asked if he was ready to start recording, Mack offered to play him back what he’d just done. For Queen, this was a brand-new way of working. Backed by Deacon and Taylor, Mercury sang and played acoustic rhythm guitar. ‘“Crazy Little Thing Called Love” took me five, ten minutes to write,’ said Mercury. ‘I was restricted by only knowing a few chords. It’s a good discipline, as I simply had to write in a small framework.’ The discipline and restricted framework gave Queen a song that was the polar opposite of ‘Killer Queen’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Bicycle Race’. ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was a fun rock ’n’ roll pastiche, like something Fred Bulsara might have worked out on the college common room piano after hearing Elvis on the radio at Gladstone Avenue that morning.
Mercury’s parting shot to Mack was: ‘Brian isn’t going to like it.’ When May arrived at Musicland, Freddie was proved right: ‘He didn’t like it at all.’ Unaware of the balance of power and diplomacy required around Queen, Mack asked May to ditch his hallowed Red Special and AC30 amp, and play the song’s solo on a Telecaster (borrowed from Roger Taylor), which he would then put through a Mesa-Boogie amp rather than Brian’s favoured AC30. The idea was to give the song a more authentic rockabilly feel. ‘I wasn’t happy,’ admitted May. ‘I kicked against it, but I saw that it was the right way to go.’ In the space of just four hours, Queen recorded the song that would become their first American number 1.
Over the next month at Musicland, they worked on three more tracks, recording without a deadline, but to have material ready for when they decided to make a new album. ‘It’s a way of getting out of the rut of album, touring Britain, touring America …’ explained May. One track, Roger Taylor’s ‘Coming Soon’, began during the Jazz sessions. It was slick, modern power-pop, with shades of Mack’s recent production clients, E.L.O. In contrast, May came up with ‘Save Me’ and ‘Sail Away Sweet Sister’, two heavy ballads that offered a nod back to the Queen of old.
‘One of my fortes is I work really fast,’ Mack explains, ‘and Queen work very slowly. I only discovered how slow later on. My plan was to get them to change because they’d become so stuck in their ways.’ Under Queen’s old rules, backing tracks were recorded over and over again until they were perfect. Even the group realised that the end result could be sterile and too precise. ‘I said, ‘You don’t have to do that,”’ explains Mack. ‘I can drop the whole thing in. If it breaks down after half a minute, then we can edit it in and carry on if you just play along with the tempo.”’
‘We thought that was a joke at the time,’ admitted May. ‘But doing it Mack’s way we were able to get a complete backing track down in half a day.’ Unhappy with many aspects of Jazz, Taylor had a clear idea of what was needed: ‘Mack’s brief was to make it fresh and easy and not to use too many microphones. We wanted him to make us sound like a band again.’
‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ impressed EMI, who hurried it out as a single in October, a fortnight after its premiere with Mercury and The Royal Ballet. Back in England, Queen filmed a promo at Trillion Studios in London’s Soho. Their image was as strikingly different as the song: everyone was in black leather, everyone had gone under the barber’s scissors (even Brian), while Freddie straddled a motorcycle and shimmied with a group of male and female dancers choreographed by Arlene Phillips, later to become a BBC reality TV judge, but then the boss of TV dance troupe Hot Gossip.
Mercury and the dancers promenaded along a catwalk into which holes had been cut through which clapping hands emerged (belonging to various members of Queen’s entourage). To augment his campest performance yet, Mercury’s T-shirt was riddled with strategically placed holes, while his PVC trousers were accessorised by skateboarders’ kneepads. ‘It was the era of skateboarding,’ says Peter Hince. ‘Fred would pick up influences from all over the place.’ Top of the Pops viewers who’d last seen Queen in the promo for ‘We Will Rock You’ would bear witness to the singer’s transformation from glam-rock pimpernel to Castro Clone in just two years.
‘Horrified or thrilled, audiences couldn’t always believe their eyes with Freddie,’ said Taylor. ‘But we let him get on with it. Despite the arguments, we were a very tight-knit group. Our attitude was always: if that’s what he wants to do, go for it.’ By the end of the month, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ had peaked at number 2, only denied pole position by Dr Hook’s country-pop smoochie ‘When You’re in Love With a Beautiful Woman’. Queen’s Elvis spoof broadened their audience almost overnight. ‘Suddenly, we’ve got a lot of younger people coming to our concerts,’ said Brian May.
The Queen Crazy tour ran for eighteen dates across the UK in November and December. Two years before, Queen’s homecoming had been marked by just a handful of arena shows. This time, Gerry Stickells had been instructed to find smaller venues. ‘We’d been accused of being too grand,’ admitted Roger Taylor. ‘So this was our way of getting closer to the audience, and to prove to critics, “Fuck you, we can go down just as well in a 1,400-seater.”’ The name of the tour didn’t just relate to the single, but ‘to the fact that we were crazy for doing it,’ he adds, ‘It was Crazy as in we could have done a couple of nights at Wembley instead.’
The tour opened at larger venues in Dublin and Birmingham before moving on to what Brian May called ‘the daft ones’. On 13 December, Queen pitched up at the Lyceum in London, only to find a problem fitting their lighting rig into the 2,000-seater theatre. ‘The Lyceum roof was too small to fit all our lights,’ recalled Taylor. ‘So we asked the manager if it would be OK to drill two holes in it. He was fine about it, as long as we paid for the holes. Then we got a call from Paul McCartney saying that Wings were playing there next week, and they’d need a hole in the roof too, so could he pay for one of them? We became the first ever group to sell Paul McCartney a hole.’
While Queen could see the whites of their audience’s eyes, there was an incongruity between the jetset rock band and the humbler surroundings of Tiffany’s Ballroom in Purley, Croydon. Mercury’s entourage now included former Royal Ballet wardrobe assistant Peter ‘Phoebe’ Freestone. Writing in Freddie Mercury: An Intimate Memoir, Freeman remarked: ‘Tiffany’s in Purley? I think the only Tiffany’s that Freddie knew about was on Fifth Avenue in New York.’
Onstage at the Lyceum, though, Mercury must have been aware of how far he’d travelled. Ten year earlier, on 12 October 1969, Fred Bulsara had been to see Led Zeppelin at the same venue. Back then, he was just out of college, paying the rent with a part-time job at Harrods, and trying to become a rock star with the band Ibex. Back then, too, he had kept one aspect of his sexuality a secret. After Queen’s show at the Brighton Centre, Mercury picked up a blond motorcycle courier nam
ed Tony Bastin at a gay club and took him back to his suite at the Grand Hotel. For all the one-night stands in America, Mercury’s closest friends always maintained that, ultimately, he wanted a long-term relationship. Smitten by the 28-year-old, though unable to stay completely faithful, Mercury moved Bastin into Stafford Terrace, where he became a fixture for the next few months.
The Crazy tour wound up at London’s Alexandra Palace. Yet, just four days later, on Boxing Day, Queen played the Hammersmith Odeon. The venue was hosting a series of concerts to raise funds for the people of war-torn Kampuchea (now Cambodia). Paul McCartney had helped recruit Queen to play the first night, before gigs by The Who, The Clash, The Pretenders and Elvis Costello, among others. Showing little sign of fatigue, Queen played one of their best shows of the year, with Mercury trashing the monitors during ‘Sheer Heart Attack’, and re-appearing for ‘We Will Rock You’ on the shoulders of a roadie dressed as Superman.
While the tour was deemed a success, it came at a cost. Gerry Stickells collapsed backstage at the Lyceum, suffering from exhaustion. The pressure of tending to the band’s exacting needs and, at times, trying to defy the laws of physics to fit Queen’s stage show into tiny provincial ballrooms proved too much. Ignoring doctors’ advice, Stickells stayed to oversee the rest of the tour. ‘That’s what they pay me for,’ he said. ‘To work miracles.’
Others weren’t so fortunate. Sound engineer John Harris, the inspiration for ‘I’m in Love With My Car’, and once described by Brian May as ‘the fifth member of Queen’, had been taken ill at the end of the News of the World tour. His replacement was the American Trip Khalaf, who would remain with the band until the end. Harris was devoted to Queen, and, unusually, had been rewarded with a financial deal that involved him receiving a percentage of the band’s live shows. He returned for the Crazy tour but ill-health forced him to quit again at the end of the year. Harris was offered the chance to run Mountain Studios, but declined. ‘John succumbed to a mysterious illness which all but immobilised him and put an end to his touring days,’ said Brian May in 2009.
