by Mark Blake
‘After the show, the band went absolutely apeshit,’ remembers Peter Hince. ‘They said, “That’s it, we are going home.” Gerry calmed them down and explained the situation: “We have another show tomorrow, then a day off, and then another one after that … If we don’t do the show tomorrow, it’s going to be very hard for us to get the gear out of the country. You won’t see it again. Do the show, and on the day off we will get out.”’
On the second night, the police were instructed to search the crowd, and to confiscate alcohol and batteries from the ghetto-blasters before letting anyone into the stadium. Once inside the venue, the crew spotted that the police had set up stalls to sell back the confiscated batteries and bottles of tequila. Despite this, the second night’s show was relatively peaceful. But due to outside issues, later blamed on ‘problems with tax and currency’, Queen would not be paid for the gig. With more US dollars changing hands to hasten a speedy getaway, the stage was stripped down, the trucks loaded and Queen’s gear driven from Pueblo to Texas under an armed guard. The third show was forgotten, the promoter was irate, but Queen and their crew escaped in one piece.
Back in Munich, there was what Peter Hince describes as ‘an inquisition’. The band had lost a significant amount of money, estimated, by some, at around a million dollars. ‘In a sense,’ says Hince, ‘it bought them back down to earth.’ As Brian May put it, ‘We thought we could repeat what we’d done in South America, but we escaped by the skin of our teeth. All of us.’
After the trauma of Mexico, the band’s nerves were soothed by the success of ‘Under Pressure’ in October. In the meantime, EMI busied themselves for the release of Queen’s Greatest Hits and a corresponding collection of their finest promos, Greatest Flix. Both would be released to mark Queen’s tenth anniversary; the band discounting their first year with other bass players and marking the beginning of the band as 1971, when John Deacon had joined. In November, the band flew to Canada and played two gigs at the Montreal Forum, filmed for their first concert video release, We Will Rock You. By the end of the month Greatest Hits, packaged with a portrait of the band by Princess Margaret’s ex-husband Lord Snowdon, was at number 1 in the UK.
Before Christmas, Queen were back in Munich to complete work on a new studio album. Among the new songs was Deacon and Mercury’s blue-eyed soul number ‘Cool Cat’ and ‘Back Chat’, written by John Deacon and yet another excursion into funk. As with The Game, much of the new material was written to pass what Brian May called ‘the Sugar Shack test’. This time, Mercury was pushing even harder for a change of direction. ‘Fred’s thing was: less is more, make it more sparse, and play less guitar,’ said May. The choice of album title, Hot Space, would seem very appropriate.
Sessions for Hot Space picked up again in the New Year and continued until March 1982. But there was more to contend with than just time-honoured musical differences. ‘Munich became almost another home, and a place in which we lived different lives,’ said May. ‘Emotionally, we all got into trouble in Munich. Every single one of us.’ The band’s after-hours activities had escalated to the point where it was seriously impinging on the working day. ‘We’d go out after the studio and then we weren’t getting back until eight in the morning,’ complained May. ‘So you don’t get much work done the next day … and then it’s time to go out drinking again.’ Interviewed in 2008, even Roger Taylor conceded: ‘We had got fairly decadent by then. We started work at all sorts of odd hours. The days drifted into the nights into this endless cycle.’
The walls of the Sugar Shack were now decorated with gold discs for The Game, and with its glamorous clientele of fellow rock musicians, sports stars and models, it exerted a magnetic pull on some of the band. ‘The latter days in Munich were lost in a haze of vodka,’ recalled May. ‘There were no drugs in my case, but there were so many drugs around.’ After one drunken interlude, May returned to Musicland to complete the solo on ‘Put Out the Fire’, one of the few rock tracks on Hot Space in which he sounds as if he’s allowed to slip the leash.
May fought his corner again on ‘Back Chat’, urging John Deacon to compromise on the song’s pure funk sound. ‘“Back Chat” is supposed to be about people arguing and it should have some kind of guts to it. It wasn’t angry enough,’ said the guitarist. Ultimately, Deacon was persuaded to allow May to ‘get some heaviness into it’. But the arguments wouldn’t end there. ‘I remember John saying I didn’t play the type of guitar he wanted on his songs. We struggled bitterly with each other.’
Mercury had his own emotional distractions to contend with. These included his latest lover, a New Jerseyite named Bill Reid, whose relationship with Freddie was fiery, even in the studio. Yet Freddie could often become what May calls ‘a wonderful diplomat’ by stepping in to mediate. ‘Fred was the only one who could come along and say, “Now dears, we can do this and we can do this, now just fucking do it!” And it would always work,’ said Brian. ‘For a person who was famous for saying, “We don’t compromise, dear”, he was a great mediator in the studio. He would always cut through everything with such humour: “Oh, for God’s sake, what a stupid business!”’ Recalling one such episode during the making of Hot Space, Peter Freestone remembered Mercury losing patience with May’s tireless request for more volume: ‘Suddenly he exclaimed, “What the fucking hell do you want? A herd of wildebeest charging from one side to the other!”’
Mack remembers ‘heated discussions about everything and the whole thing was close to breaking up’. But part of the problem was that everyone was working to a different schedule. ‘Making The Game was the last time the four of them were in the studio together. After that, it felt like it was always two of them in one studio and two of them in another. You’d come in one day and say, “Oh, where’s Roger?” and someone would say, “Oh, he’s gone skiing.”’ Mack became so frustrated over how long the album was taking that he began measuring it against his wife Ingrid’s pregnancy. ‘I told Queen, “It’s easier to conceive and give birth than it is to get this album finished.”’ A week before the sessions were complete, Ingrid gave birth to their first child, John Frederick. Mack immediately asked Freddie to become the boy’s godfather.
The first evidence of Hot Space’s brave new direction came in April with the release of a single, ‘Body Language’. The song reprised the finger-clicks and handclaps of ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, but its synthesised funk rhythm and processed drums put it even further left of field than ‘Another One Bites the Dust’. Furthermore, if Brian May was playing on it, then he was virtually inaudible. The accompanying video was dominated by Mercury and a pack of shimmying dancers, while May looked as if he couldn’t quite bear to make eye contact with the camera. The single’s picture sleeve depicted a close-up of two naked bodies, which caused a fuss in the US, but not enough to stop the single reaching number 11. In the UK, ‘Body Language’ stalled outside the Top 20.
‘I can remember having a go at Freddie because some of the stuff he was writing was very definitely on the gay side,’ said May, when asked about ‘Body Language’. ‘I remember saying, “It would be nice if this stuff could be universally applicable, because we have friends out there of every persuasion.” It’s nice to involve people. What it’s not nice to do is rope people out. And I felt kind of roped out by something that was very overtly a gay anthem. I thought it was very hard to take that in the other way.’
Just a few days before Hot Space’s scheduled release, Queen received an urgent message from David Bowie. As well as ‘Under Pressure’, Bowie had sung backing vocals on ‘Cool Cat’. When Queen informed him that the song was on Hot Space, he insisted they take it off the record, claiming he wasn’t satisfied with his performance. ‘Unfortunately, he didn’t tell us until about a day before the album was supposed to be released,’ said May, ‘I toured with Bowie after he’d recorded with Queen,’ recalls Queen’s then official photographer Denis O’Regan, ‘and he didn’t have great memories of the experience. It was too much of a cl
ash of the titans.’ A version of the song, without Bowie’s vocals, was promptly substituted. But the delay meant that the album wouldn’t be out in time for the first half of Queen’s European tour.
The band would be joined for the tour by an old friend, ex-Mott The Hoople keyboard player Morgan Fisher. ‘I was living in Belgium,’ says Fisher. ‘I was having nothing to do with making music but then I felt the need to get back into it and make some money.’ Fisher sent letters enquiring about work to friends and contacts, including Brian May. ‘Lo and behold, Brian sent me a telegram saying, “Do you want to tour with us?” I’d sent letters to a few Brians, so I was thinking, “Which Brian is that?”’
A couple of days later a box of Queen cassettes arrived and Fisher started practising. Before long, he was in Los Angeles for an audition. ‘But there were only two of us: me and Roger Powell from Todd Rundgren’s band, Utopia. Roger was a synthesiser wizard and way ahead of me, but he hadn’t been in Mott The Hoople, and that’s what got me the job.’
With Hot Space still to be released, Queen faced the task of playing material with which the audience was unfamiliar. The funk track, ‘Staying Power’, was an especially hard sell. The album version included a horn arrangement recorded in New York by Aretha Franklin’s producer Arif Mardin. Onstage, May would inject more of the ‘anger and violence’ he believed missing from the studio version. But Queen’s more conservative audiences were less impressed. When the song’s announcement was greeted with jeers at Frankfurt’s Westfallenhalle, Mercury rounded on the hecklers: ‘If you don’t want to listen to it, fucking go home!’ Offstage, Freddie was living as large as ever, flying his barber, Denny Godber, from London’s hip Sweeney’s salon, into Wurzberg just so he could have a haircut, and inviting him to hang out with them for as long as he wanted.
Queen’s support act were Malcolm McLaren’s latest protégés, punk-pop band Bow Wow Wow. After hecklers threw bottles at the stage, the group took matters into their own hands and threw them back. They were swiftly replaced by a safer proposition, Christian rockers After the Fire. Brian May was appalled. ‘A certain section of our audience found Bow Wow Wow very modern,’ he told Record Mirror. Mindful of the reaction some of Queen’s new material was attracting, he added, ‘Our audience is perhaps a little narrow-minded in that way.’
There were problems, too, for Morgan Fisher. ‘I played the music professionally,’ he says, ‘but something wasn’t working right.’ Both Queen and Fisher had expected to find each other unchanged since 1974’s Mott The Hoople tour. ‘The trouble was I wasn’t the same Morgan Fisher they’d known back then, getting pissed and reading out Goon Show scripts. I had been out of the scene for a while, I was much quieter, I was involved in Indian spirituality and I was meditating every day. Queen weren’t the same, either. Freddie was as outrageous as ever, but the others all had kids. At the hotels, there were mums and dads and babies. It had all become very cool and calculated and professional.’ Nevertheless, one night, as Fisher came off stage, he glanced down and saw that the crew had chalked a large arrow pointing left next to his stool. Alongside it was the word ‘EAST’.
Playing in such large venues, it would take too long to walk from the stage to the main dressing room during the taped section of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and Brian’s solo spot. Queen’s crew had constructed a makeshift mini-dressing room close to the stage, nicknamed ‘The Tent’ or ‘The Doll’s House’, and made out of black fabric draped over scaffolding poles. May’s lengthy guitar solo was a fixture of all Queen shows. ‘Brian would fight the good fight to get his solo into the set and I always think he got the sense he’d had a victory,’ says Brian Southall. While May soloed, the others would congregate in their makeshift hidey-hole.
Fisher, who was now leading an abstemious lifestyle recalls. ‘The trouble is Brian’s solo could go on for fifteen, twenty minutes. I remember one night, Freddie was sat there and he couldn’t stand it any longer. His eyes were rolling upwards, his teeth were sticking out and his hands suddenly flailed forward and he shouted, “For God’s sake, let’s go shopping! Get me outta here!”’
Behind the scenes, business manager Jim Beach had renegotiated Queen’s contract. The band were now signed to EMI on a new six-album deal. Hot Space would finally be released on 21 May, just before their UK shows. It was Queen’s most experimental album yet. Deacon and Mercury’s soul and funk dominated most of the first half, with May all but relegated to the sidelines. Tellingly, all four band members and Mack would be credited with playing synthesiser. Mercury had celebrated his sexual appetite in the past on songs such as ‘Get Down, Make Love’ and ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. ‘Body Language’ and ‘Staying Power’ would do the same on Hot Space. ‘It’s all narcissism of a decidedly tongue-in-bumcheek style,’ wrote Sandy Robertson of Sounds.
Mercury showed more restraint on ‘Life is Real (Song for Lennon)’, and Taylor offered a haunting feelgood pop song, ‘Calling All Girls’, that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Fun in Space. But, for the first time, there would be no Taylor or May lead vocals. Mercury sang lead on everything. May nudged the album closer to hard rock with ‘Dancer’ and ‘Put Out the Fire’, before turning the clock back to A Day at the Races era with the album’s most traditional-sounding track, ‘Las Palabros de Amor’. With an English sub-title of ‘The Words of Love’, this would be Queen’s next single. It was a scarf-waving anthem, but the fireside guitars and Spanish title evoked a slight air of the Costa del Sol and, oddly, Abba’s hit ‘Fernando’. Surprisingly, Queen performed it on Top of the Pops, their first real-life appearance in five years on what Roger Taylor called ‘that shit programme’.
In the press, Hot Space would be both praised and denounced. Rolling Stone pointed out that ‘Queen have always been ruled by sound instead of soul’, while the Washington Post saluted the album’s ‘mesmerising rechauffé disco’. For many fans, though, the change of direction was too much. ‘Hot Space wasn’t easy,’ said May. ‘But I’ll stand by it. It got us out of a rut and into a new place.’ Roger Taylor’s judgement remains coloured by the album’s cover as well as the music inside. Taylor and Mercury wanted Hot Space to mimic a design they had seen on an old Motown record sleeve, but something went awry. ‘It’s our worst cover by miles,’ he said. ‘Absolute shit.’ Despite such reservations, Hot Space would make it to number 4 in the UK. Six months after its release, Queen fan Michael Jackson reappeared with Thriller, an album that, like Hot Space, merged funk, pop and rock. Jackson told May he loved Hot Space. As Mack points out, ‘Hot Space is very underrated, and about nine months ahead of its time.’
Back on home turf, the tour ran into problems when Queen were refused shows at Arsenal FC’s home ground in North London and Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium. Amusingly, the reason given was that Pope John Paul II was on his own UK tour and had hired all available portable toilets. Meanwhile, a proposed show at London’s Royal Albert Hall, the scene of one of Smile’s earliest gigs, was knocked back when the venue’s managers saw the scale of Queen’s lighting rig and feared it would damage the historic building.
In the end Queen would manage just four shows, including Leeds FC’s Elland Road stadium and the recently built Milton Keynes Bowl. Tyne Tees TV filmed the Milton Keynes gig, which would eventually find its way out as an official DVD. Seen now, it’s a striking reminder of how contrary and unique Queen looked and sounded in 1982. At the back, Roger Taylor, with his spiky mop and red bandana, looking like one of The Police; at the front Brian May, still the seventies guitar hero, as if preserved in aspic since the days of ‘Killer Queen’; John Deacon resplendent in gaudy turquoise jeans and T-shirt, like an engineer on dress-down Friday; and Freddie Mercury presiding over the show like a camp circus ringmaster. The music, too, is all over the place, pin-wheeling from pomp rock (‘Save Me’) to gospel (‘Somebody to Love’) to heavy metal (‘Sheer Heart Attack’) to the weird white funk of ‘Under Pressure’. Odder still, it works.
The only time Mercury dropped
his guard was to introduce songs from Hot Space: ‘Most of you know we’ve got some new sounds out last week … and for what it’s worth we’re gonna do some songs in the black funk category, whatever you call it … People get so excited about these things it’s only a bloody record.’ Onstage, though, May gave ‘Staying Power’ and ‘Back Chat’ another lease of life. ‘“Staying Power”, in particular, became a fantastic live track,’ he said.
At Milton Keynes, though, one of Queen’s support acts would experience the disapproval of their less tolerant fans. While Joan Jett and The Blackhearts and Heart played user-friendly hard rock, the Liverpudlian psychedelic pop band Teardrop Explodes were a far more outré proposition. ‘The audience were incensed that we were playing,’ said vocalist Julian Cope. ‘We were bottled mercilessly from beginning to end by heavy metal bum boys who shouted at me, “Fuck off, you queer!” Wow, they dig Monsieur Freddie and call me queer?’
Teardrop Explodes wouldn’t be the only ones to experience violence. Mercury and boyfriend Bill Reid had a screaming row before the gig, culminating in Reid sinking his teeth into Mercury’s left hand. The wound was hastily patched up for the show. The singer’s tortuous relationship with Reid was a source of both concern and amusement. Morgan Fisher still recalls hearing the same argument at every post-gig dinner. ‘Every night, sat in the restaurant, Fred’s boyfriend would tell him, “Freddie you have got to stop smoking”, and every night Fred would snap, “Oh, shut up!” and light another cigarette. And so it went on.’ Bafflingly, Mercury had begun smoking in 1980. ‘I don’t know why he started so late in life,’ says Peter Hince. ‘Maybe it was a stress thing, another prop to use. But Freddie never smoked like Keith Richards, like a rock star. It was more like a schoolgirl.’ Mercury himself would tell anyone that asked that he smoked to give himself ‘the husky singing voice’ he so admired in other singers.
