by Mark Blake
After Japan, while the band members kicked back with a week’s holiday, the crew began the tortuous operation of transporting 20 tons of equipment from Tokyo, and 40 tons from Miami, to Buenos Aires for the first date at Vélez Sársfield football stadium. A DC8 was chartered to make the 35-hour journey from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, with the crew flying to Argentina from Tokyo via New York. As soon as they arrived in Buenos Aries, Hince and the rest of the crew were given strict instructions: ‘Basically, we were told, “Right, you are not going to Drug Heaven, the laws here are very strict, and please remember this is a Catholic country.”’
As well as their gear, Queen also had to provide a hundred rolls of artificial turf to cover the precious pitches of South America’s biggest football stadiums. ‘That was half the problem,’ said Brian May. ‘Trying to get permission for the audience to actually stand on the pitch.’ On the way to Vélez Sársfield, one of the equipment trucks overturned. It took forty-eight hours to locate a crane big enough to clear the load. Meanwhile, at the stadium, Queen’s sixty-strong crew, aided by local workers, were tasked with constructing a stage (100 feet high, 140 feet long and 40 feet deep) from scratch in the 80-degree heat.
‘I took a photo of the first piece of wood and a measuring tape on the ground of the empty stadium,’ says Peter Hince. ‘Even the locals that were helping us out didn’t believe that the gig was actually going to happen. They were convinced the whole thing would be called off at the last minute. So all of us were feeling edgy the whole time.’
The crew’s paranoia was understandable. According to Peter, Queen were also provisionally booked to play shows in Cordoba and Belo Horizonte (Hince: ‘These got blown out for whatever reason’) and the Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Queen were desperate to play Maracana as it was the biggest stadium in the world, but the gig was pulled when the governor of Rio declared that the venue could only be used for events of sporting, religious or cultural significance. These included appearances from the Pope and Frank Sinatra in 1980, but not Queen in 1981. In the end, Queen would play three shows in Buenos Aires, a night each at Mar del Plata and Rosario, and two in São Paulo, Brazil.
Queen (‘SUPERGROUPO NUMERO UNO!’ declared the Sun) arrived in Buenos Aires to an extraordinary reception. After being escorted off the plane by security guards and a government official, the band were fast-tracked through Customs. ‘As we walked into the airport building, we couldn’t believe our ears,’ said Freddie Mercury. ‘They stopped all the flight announcements and were playing our music instead.’ Queen were accompanied by a small group of reporters from the music and national press, including Melody Maker’s Ray Coleman and the Sun’s Nina Myskow. But, from the moment they set foot on Argentinian soil, their every move would be shadowed by local TV and radio crews.
Queen would be hustled from airport to press conference to the Sheraton Hotel to gig in armoured vehicles. ‘They were these battleship-like personnel carriers, bristling with machine guns poking through holes in the metal,’ wrote Nina Myskow. ‘Fleets of motorcycle cops sirened their way alongside the circus.’ While Queen were hungry for their own personal victory by beating their contemporaries to become the first rock band to play huge gigs in a new territory, there was vast political capital to be made out of their visit. General Roberto Viola was in the process of becoming de facto president of Argentina, and it was Viola that had arranged for Queen to be met at the airport. Queen’s visit was being sold as Viola’s personal PR coup. In a country under military rule and with such a volatile political climate, it was little wonder that the Argentinian secret service were monitoring the band’s visit.
Prior to the opening night at Vélez Sársfield, promoter Jose Rota was taken aside by secret servicemen and asked what he would do if a terrorist put a gun to Freddie Mercury’s head during the show and ordered him to shout ‘Viva Peron!’ in honour of the former Argentinian leaders. ‘There were worried that with such a vast audience it might become political,’ quipped Mercury. ‘So they pleaded with me not to sing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”.’
In the end, Queen walked onto a stage flanked by armed soldiers. However, nothing could quite prepare them for the response from the audience. Every Queen album was now in the Argentine Top 10 and every song they played was treated like an encore, with the language difference no barrier to the 54,000-strong crowd echoing every word. Despite the stifling heat, Mercury performed part of the set in his leather bike jacket, over a vest branded with the logo of the London gay club Heaven. (His companion for the South American stint was a male model who also worked as a bouncer at Heaven.) The second night’s gig at Valez Sarfield would be broadcast live to a TV audience of over 30 million in Argentina and Brazil. Backstage, the band were introduced to Argentine football hero Diego Maradona, who would, five years later, handball the English football team out of a quarter-final world cup victory.
Photo opportunities with local sporting heroes were all part of the game; but so too was dinner with General Viola. Amnesty International had earlier estimated that anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people had been tortured or abducted at the behest of the Argentine military junta. But, in the end, all of Queen, bar Roger Taylor, dined with Viola at his home.
So successful were the shows at Vélez Sársfield that Queen would return a week later to play a third night. In the meantime, they holed up in Rio de Janeiro and waited for their next move. With gigs in Cordoba cancelled, they rolled out the artificial turf for shows at the municipal stadium in Mar del Plata and Rosario, playing to over 76,000 people. Still determined to play the 81,000-seater Maracana Stadium, negotiations only broke down when Queen’s offer of a fat donation to the governor of Rio’s wife’s favourite charity was refused. ‘That one was a case of “hurry up and wait”,’ recalls Hince. ‘We are playing … we’re not … we are … we’re not.’
Two more shows had been confirmed at Sao Paolo’s Morumbi Stadium for 20 and 21 March. The band decamped from Rio, while the crew began the Fitzcarraldo-style task of transporting over 100 tons of equipment to Brazil by road and through the jungle. At the Brazilian border, Customs officials were determined to examine every piece (a process that would have meant cancelling both shows). Somehow a deal was struck, presumably involving US dollars, and the trucks were allowed through with just thirty-six hours to go before the first night. In São Paulo, John Deacon’s personal security guard introduced himself with the information that he had killed over two hundred people. Queen had been assigned bodyguards drawn from Brazil’s infamous ‘Death Squads’. ‘They were the heavy, heavy police who actually kill people at the drop of a hat,’ recalled Mercury. ‘Someone took a photo of John with “Doctor Death”,’ says Peter Hince. ‘There’s Deakey and there’s this guy with a gun stuffed down his trousers.’
Backstage before the first night at Morumbi, the redoubtable Gerry Stickells finally cracked. Infuriated by the lack of a working telephone, he tore one off the wall and threw it out the window. The police were called and Queen were forced to remain in their dressing room until minutes before showtime. In the end, they would perform to more than a quarter of a million people across two nights in Brazil. Alongside their own gear, Queen were loaned spotlights by the show’s organisers. On closer inspection, they saw that they were stenciled with the words Earth, Wind & Fire, and had been impounded during their tour a year before.
Fearful that Queen’s equipment would be confiscated, the crew took emergency measures. While the stadium staff were busy helping themselves to the band’s artificial turf, the crew broke down the stage and managed to transport all the gear to the airport. ‘Our freight agent in LA had chartered a jumbo jet from a company called Flying Tigers,’ recalls Peter Hince. ‘It had a top deck and the guts of the plane had been turned into a hold. Unfortunately, when we arrived with all the gear, we discovered that they didn’t have the right pallets to fit the equipment.’ Hince spent eighteen hours at the airport, guarding the precious load, before it was flown back to the US, via Puer
to Rico. Despite running costs of between £20,000 and £25,000 a day, Queen grossed $3.5 million for their South American venture, and scored a major PR victory. ‘SOUTH AMERICA BITES THE DUST!’ proclaimed the trade magazine Music Week. ‘Clinical and machine-like they may be,’ wrote Melody Maker. ‘But what matters more is that Queen did it.’ Seven months later, they would try and do it all again, but with rather different results.
With a planned Greatest Hits album deferred until the end of 1981, Roger Taylor’s solo debut, Fun in Space, surfaced in April, preceded by a single, ‘Future Management’. The album sleeve showed a goggle-eyed alien. Unknown to both parties, the model had been created by Taylor’s old Smile bandmate Tim Staffell. ‘I didn’t know what it was for, and I didn’t discover until years later,’ said Staffell. ‘That was peculiar.’
When ‘Future Management’ inched into the UK Top 20, Taylor appeared on Top of the Pops, miming uncomfortably with an electric guitar. ‘My God!’ he groaned in 2008. ‘I always hated Top of the Pops.’ The song had shades of The Police’s white reggae, and both the single and album demonstrated Taylor’s love of the musical here and now, but neither would really trouble the charts. Fun in Space was the first evidence that Queen as a whole was worth more than the sum of its parts.
In May, Chrissy May gave birth to a daughter, Louisa. Just weeks later, Brian joined the rest of the band and Mack at Mountain Studios. As with the first sessions for The Game, there was no pressure to complete another album. Mercury was busy collaborating with John Deacon on a pure soul track titled ‘Cool Cat’, which was even further removed from seventies-era Queen than ‘Another One Bites the Dust’. For Brian May, Queen’s rock conscience, the sessions would mark the start of an especially challenging period. ‘It wasn’t easy,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t easy at all.’
July brought the welcome distraction of another Montreux Jazz Festival and an encounter with David Bowie. Mountain’s engineer David Richards had worked on Bowie’s Heroes album, and Bowie had booked a session at Mountain to record the track ‘Cat People (Putting Out Fire)’. It was almost inevitable that he would drop by a Queen session. ‘David came in one night and we were playing other people’s songs for fun, just jamming,’ recalled Roger Taylor. ‘In the end, David said, “This is stupid, why don’t we just write one?”’ According to Freddie Mercury, talking about the Queen/Bowie collaboration ‘Under Pressure’ in 1985, the resulting session lasted nearly twenty-four hours, fuelled by ‘a few bottles of wine and things’. Mack’s memory is clearer: ‘There was so much blow [cocaine].’
Interviewed in 1984, John Deacon largely credited ‘Under Pressure’ to Mercury and Bowie, while claiming that it was Bowie who composed the song’s now much-sampled bassline (Deacon: ‘It took me a certain amount of time to learn it’). Roger Taylor said that nothing was written in the studio and that the song was originally titled ‘People on Streets’. Another unreleased Queen track, ‘Feel Like’, from the same sessions, included a piano line that would end up on ‘Under Pressure’.
‘We felt our way through a backing track all together as an ensemble,’ recalled Brian May. ‘When the backing track was done, David said, “Okay, let’s each of us go in the vocal booth and sing how we think the melody should go – just off the top of our heads – and we’ll compile a vocal out of that.” And that’s what we did.’ Some of these improvisations, including Mercury’s memorable introductory scatting vocal, would endure on the finished track. Bowie also insisted that he and Mercury shouldn’t hear what the other had sung, swapping verses blind, which helped give the song its cut-and-paste feel.
‘It was very hard,’ May admitted in 2008, ‘because you already had four precocious boys and David, who was precocious enough for all of us. Passions ran very high. I found it very hard because I got so little of my own way. But David had a real vision and he took over the song lyrically.’
Bowie also decided that instead of ‘People on Streets’ it should be called ‘Under Pressure’. On hearing of the collaboration, EMI/Elektra were delighted. Two weeks later, Bowie, Mercury and Mack were at New York’s Power Station studios trying to agree on a final mix. ‘Roger was also along to keep the peace,’ remembered May. ‘I had given up by that time.’
‘I started mixing with Bowie, and there’s him out there and me in here,’ laughs Mack. ‘It didn’t go too well. We spent all day and Bowie was like, “Do this, do that.” In the end, I called Freddie and said, “I need help here”, so Fred came in as a mediator.’
‘I wasn’t involved, but the desk broke down,’ revealed May. ‘The song was cobbled together and it was a monitor mix that went out as a single, which was fiercely battled over by David and Freddie.’ At some point, Bowie wanted to re-do the song; at another point he was reluctant for it be released as a single. In the end, ‘Under Pressure’ would be released October, giving Queen and Bowie a UK number 1. ‘“Under Pressure” is a significant song for us,’ said Brian May in 2008, ‘and that is because of David and its lyrical content. I would have found that hard to admit in the old days, but I can admit it now … But one day, I would love to sit down quietly on my own and re-mix it.’
After the chaos that accompanied the recording of ‘Under Pressure’, the offer of a return trip to South America in September offered a welcome break from the sessions. Not that Mercury needed much persuasion. Prior to the trip, the singer celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday with a five-day party at New York’s Berkshire Place Hotel at which £30,000 worth of champagne was consumed. Mercury was now in the process of buying an apartment in the city. With his hangover only just subsiding, he joined the others in New Orleans for rehearsals, before Queen flew to Caracas, Venezuela, where they were booked to play three nights at the indoor sporting arena, Poliedro de Caracas.
However, they arrived just as Venezuela’s ex-president and national hero, Romulo Betancourt was dying in a hospital in New York. The gigs went off without a hitch, and Queen were invited to appear as non-performing guests on a live TV pop show on 28 September. Mercury categorically refused, but the others agreed. Unable to speak or fully understand Spanish, May, Taylor and Deacon looked confused as an announcer dashed onstage to declare that Betancourt was dead, and demanded a two-minute silence. With the cameras still rolling, a second announcer appeared just minutes later to declare that it was a false alarm: Betancourt was still alive. In the end, the ‘Father of Venezuelan Democracy’ passed away later that night, plunging the whole country into a period of national mourning. ‘This meant no music for two weeks,’ explains Peter Hince. Queen’s remaining shows in Venezuela were immediately cancelled, leading to a fall-out over their fee with the promoter.
The next run of gigs was due to take place in Mexico nearly ten days later. The band decamped to Miami, Florida, before an eighteen-strong group of crew members made their way to Loredo, Texas. From here, they travelled to the Mexican border. ‘Under normal circumstances you can visit Mexico on a US driver’s licence,’ says Peter Hince. ‘But the crew were told that we all needed visas.’ To complicate matters further, they were also informed that the authorities could only issue a total of six visas a day. ‘The official line on the visas was that we were “assisting Mexican technicians”. I still have the visa application and there was some unbelievable stuff on there: a mugshot, a profile picture, fingerprints, mother’s maiden name, shape of eyes … It was just an excuse for someone to get some cash.’
After the visas, and more money, had been successfully negotiated, the crew were ferried into a no-man’s land compound outside the border and ordered to wait. ‘My mate and I got bored, wandered through a gate into Mexico, bought an ice cream and came back,’ laughs Hince. ‘Eventually, they let us through, and we drove about 60 miles before we reached another checkpoint … and more money had to change hands.’
Queen were booked to play the 56,000-capacity Estadio Universatario stadium in Monterrey, nicknamed ‘The Volcano’. ‘Tickets had only gone on sale two days before, and they were selling the ticket
s through supermarkets,’ says Peter Hince. ‘The organisation was terrible.’ After the gig, a bridge outside the stadium collapsed as the crowds were leaving. There were no fatalities but some fans sustained injuries. ‘So the police locked the stadium gates and wouldn’t let us leave. Once again, so someone else could get some money. If it hadn’t been for Gerry Stickells, we would never have got the gear out of there.’
A second gig at ‘The Volcano’ was cancelled. A week later, Queen arrived at Pueblo where they would play two nights at the 22,000-capacity Estadio Ignacio Zaragoza. Asked about Queen’s trip to Mexico, Brian May told Mojo magazine in 2008 that ‘a whole lot of trouble happened that I don’t even want to go into.’ Roger Taylor said: ‘It was a miracle we made it; there were some monstrous corruption issues.’ One rumour has it that the promoter was kidnapped following the gig in Monterrey. But according to Queen: As It Began, the 1992 book ‘written in co-operation with Queen’, the band’s ‘promoter was arrested and thrown in jail the day before the Pueblo gig. They had to pay $25,000 to get him out of bail so the tour could continue.’
There was worse to come at the gig itself. ‘The stadium had been built for the Olympics and it was virtually defunct,’ says Hince. ‘The pitch was covered in rubbish and there were no working toilets.’ To aggravate matters, the crew had been billeted in the worst hotel in town (‘When you flushed the chain, the shit came back up through the shower’), leading to cases of food poisoning and dysentery. With nearly twice the capacity crowd inside the stadium, and many in the audience ‘out of their heads on mescaline and tequila’, the atmosphere before the show was dangerously tense. It didn’t improve when Queen arrived onstage. Many in the audience had been allowed to bring in ghetto-blaster cassette recorders, with which they were recording the gig. When the batteries ran out, they began throwing them at the band. Before long, the stage was covered in batteries, rocks, dirt and even shoes. ‘It’s not that they didn’t like the band,’ ventures Hince. ‘It’s just that a rock gig was an excuse to go completely wild.’ Queen managed to complete their set, but Mercury was incensed: ‘Adios, amigos, you motherfuckers!’
