by Mark Blake
‘Freddie didn’t want to go back to America and play smaller venues than we’d been before,’ admitted May in 2005. ‘He was like, “Let’s just wait and we’ll go out and do stadiums in America as well.” But it was one of those things that wasn’t to be.’
By the spring of 1984, Freddie Mercury had returned to Munich with Mack to complete work on what would become his first solo release, ‘Mr Bad Guy’. A month later, Taylor put out his second solo album, Strange Frontier. The drummer had apparently rejected some of his own original songs for the project, and had co-written others with his new production partner, Mountain’s resident engineer David Richards.
For a rock star whose reputation suggested one of carefree abandon, Taylor sounded remarkably dour. Wringing his hands over man’s inhumanity to man and the threat of nuclear Armageddon, one song, ‘Killing Time’, even suggested a bored, dissolute rock star in paradise watching his life pass by. There were covers of Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ and Springsteen’s ‘Racing in the Street’ to sweeten the pill, but Strange Frontier was terribly worthy and not much fun. The album would only just make it into the UK Top 30. In the music press, Sounds offered a rather blunt if ultimately fair assessment: ‘He can write the songs, but he can’t sing them like Freddie does.’
Taylor had even less to smile about when Queen reassembled to make a promo video for their next single ‘It’s a Hard Life’. Filmed in Munich, Mercury enlisted many of his friends and fellow clubbers, including Barbara Valentin, as extras in a lavish set that seemed a cross between an Elizabethan wedding banquet and the Sex Maniacs’ Ball. ‘I didn’t like it,’ said the plain-speaking John Deacon, but the bassist got away reasonably lightly. In one scene, Taylor, trussed up in tights and a regency ruff, looks mortally embarrassed (‘I tried to get my scenes cut out,’ he later admitted), while in another, poor Brian May poses with a skeleton-style guitar.
Meanwhile, Mercury’s costume, a dramatic slashed scarlet tunic decorated with feathers and twenty-six eyes, was modelled on an outfit once worn by the French torch singer Mistinguett. Unfortunately, it made the Queen singer resemble what May later described as ‘a giant amorous prawn’. ‘It was one of my favourite songs of Freddie’s and I remember being terribly disappointed that he wanted to wear this costume,’ he said. America remained equally unconvinced, and ‘It’s a Hard Life’ tanked, while reaching number 6 in Britain.
Then again, Mercury’s ridiculous costume had been the least of his worries during the shoot. He was having trouble walking, after being involved in a fracas in New York, a Munich bar, which had left him with damaged ligaments in his right knee. ‘Some cunt kicked me,’ he explained at a press conference. ‘It might mean I will have to cut down on some of my more elaborate gorgeous stage moves.’
Mercury had spent some time in plaster, but seemed match fit when the tour opened at Queen’s familiar stamping ground, Brussels’ Forest National. Fred Mandel had taken a gig with Elton John, and was replaced for the tour by The Boomtown Rats’ sometime keyboard player Spike Edney, recruited after ‘Crystal’ Taylor ran into him in a London nightclub. Edney was flown to Munich to meet the band. It was a baptism by fire. ‘Come four o’clock in the morning we were in the Sugar Shack club,’ he said. ‘By six o’clock in the morning we were back at the hotel, in Roger’s suite, where the champagne was flowing …’
The Works tour stage set was modelled on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, included Queen’s grandest lighting rig yet, a huge catwalk for Freddie to show off on, and two enormous Metropolis-style cogs. Computerised technology being what it was in 1984, the band decided it would be safer for the cogs to be cranked by hand, giving the road crew another job for the night. The Works tour would take in Europe, the UK, Australasia and, controversially, South Africa, but not America. ‘That’s when the arrogance took over,’ ventures Peter Hince. ‘An attitude of, “We don’t need to tour the States.” I know that Gerry Stickells tried very hard to get them to reconsider.’
In a marked contrast to the Hot Space trek, the set drew on Queen’s heavier repertoire. After an intro of ‘Machines (or Back to Human)’ came ‘Tear It Up’ quickly followed by ‘Tie Your Mother Down’. Snippets of now ancient Queen numbers such as ‘Liar’, ‘Great King Rat’ and ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ would also be played as part of a mid-set medley. In Dublin, Mercury forgot the words to ‘Hammer to Fall’, but on several dates it was his voice rather than his memory that would let him down. Doctors feared a recurrence of nodules on his vocal cords. Mercury was scared that having an operation to remove them would have an adverse effect on his voice.
On top of this, aspects of Freddie’s lifestyle had now been made public, after the Sun printed a story from a former employee. ‘It was Freddie’s old driver, who’d been sacked,’ sighs Peter Hince. ‘It was the strangest thing. Fred could be incredibly tough and ruthless and nasty, but he would just indulge some people, and you’d think, “For fuck’s sake, Fred, why?”’ The story was split across several editions, timed to coincide with Queen’s four-night stand at London’s Wembley Arena and Mercury’s thirty-eighth birthday. It included the revelation that Freddie was spending £1,000 a week on vodka and cocaine. If the singer was concerned about the story, he masked it well. For the encore, Mercury re-appeared in the wig and false breasts he’d worn for ‘I Want to Break Free’. Looking around to see which band member would perhaps least appreciate having his comedy mammaries shoved in their face, he sidled over to John Deacon. The wig-and-boobs routine would become a regular part of the show. Offstage, Freddie carefully deflected questions about claims that he was homosexual. ‘It’s good to be gay if you’re new,’ he told Melody Maker. ‘But if I tried that, people would start yawning: “Oh God! Here’s Freddie Mercury, saying he’s gay because it’s trendy to be gay.”’
In Hanover, a fortnight later, the leg injury Mercury had received in a Munich bar came back to haunt him. Halfway through ‘Hammer to Fall’, his damaged leg gave way on the catwalk staircase. ‘I did a wrong move, fell down, under the spotlights, and they thought it was part of the show,’ he said later, ‘but I couldn’t get up.’ Mercury was carried to his piano where he managed two more numbers before the show was cut short. Mercury joked that he was ‘now too old for rock ’n’ roll’.
In September, having watched Brian May and Roger Taylor struggle to make an impact with their solo projects, Mercury made his debut with the single, ‘Love Kills’, a Mercury/Moroder composition, written for the Metropolis soundtrack. Intriguingly, it was later revealed that May and Taylor and possibly even Deacon had played on the track, leading to speculation that it had started life as a Queen song. But with the song’s dancefloor vibe and the chorus’ macho but camp backing vocal, the finished article sounded like Mercury unbound, unrestrained, and quite clearly not Queen. ‘Love Kills’ would buck the trend of Queen solo projects and chart at number 10. Queen’s next single, ‘Hammer to Fall’, released simultaneously, managed number 13. Onstage, Mercury had begun informing audiences that Queen were not splitting up. A month later, when the band arrived in South Africa, some wished they had.
On 5 October, Queen played the first of a run of shows in Sun City, a luxury hotel and gambling resort near Johannesburg. Sun City was regarded as a ‘whites only Las Vegas’ and a totem of the divisive apartheid regime. As far back as 1957, before the emergence of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Musicians Union had been instructing its members not to perform in South Africa. Queen thought otherwise. ‘We’ve thought about the morals of it a lot and it’s something we’ve decided to do,’ Brian May told a press conference at the start of The Works tour. ‘This band is not political, we are not out to make any statements, we play to anybody who comes to listen.’ Part of Queen’s proviso for performing at Sun City would be that they would only play to a mixed audience. A spokesperson for the African National Congress would later insist that ‘the people who overwhelmingly attended those concerts were white.’
Queen were booked for a run of shows at Sun City’
s 6,200-seater Superbowl. Such was the ticket demand that a further 1,000 standing-room-only tickets were quickly released. But before long, Mercury’s voice would let him down. During the third show, after struggling through ‘Under Pressure’, his voice failed completely, and the remainder of the gig was cancelled. A doctor was flown in, Mercury was injected with steroids and the next two shows were cancelled after he was ordered to rest. While Mercury hid away in his hotel suite with Winnie Kirchberger, waiting to complete the remaining dates, Brian May was invited to Soweto to present at the Black African Awards Show. Meanwhile a decision was taken to release a Queen live album through EMI South Africa and donate its royalties to a local school for deaf and blind children. Yet such gestures cut little ice with anti-apartheid groups, who protested that the South African government were making political capital out of Queen’s visit, regarding it as some tenuous endorsement of their regime. Back in Britain, Queen met a barrage of hostile press, while their old nemesis NME drew a line between the South African visit and what they described as the ‘vile, fascist imagery’ of the ‘Radio Ga Ga’ video.
On the one level, Queen’s decision to play South Africa could be regarded as another example of their wilfully contrary streak. Even now, there’s a suspicion that the visit was partly driven by being told they shouldn’t play, as well as the band’s insistence that they would play music to anyone, anywhere. Brian May would deliver an impassioned speech to the Musicians Union General Committee, insisting that the group were opposed to apartheid but defending Queen’s actions. ‘The general reaction was, at least, “Thanks for coming, we understand why you did it now,”’ he said. ‘But they fined us anyway because we’d broken the rules.’
A year later, Bruce Springsteen’s point man ‘Little’ Steven Van Zandt set up the musical collective Artists United Against Apartheid. Their single ‘(Ain’t Gonna Play in No) Sun City’, was a protest against those that had played the resort, including Rod Stewart, who followed Queen to Sun City in January 1985. ‘I’m sure a lot of people still feel we’re fascist pigs because of it,’ May admitted to Q magazine. ‘Sorry, there’s nothing I can do about that. We have totally clear consciences.’
Queen saw out the year with a video release for ‘We Will Rock You’, the concert film shot in Canada on the Hot Space tour, and a seasonal single, ‘Thank God It’s Christmas’. It could have been interpreted as a comment on what had been a difficult year. If so, none but the staunchest Queen followers would go out and buy it. By the time Christmas rolled around, the song had left the Top 20. Instead, Christmas 1984’s number 1 song would be Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ Forced to act after seeing the TV news coverage of the Ethiopian famine, The Boomtown Rats’ frontman Bob Geldof and Ultravox’s Midge Ure had corralled the likes of Boy George, U2’s Bono, Phil Collins and Sting into forming a charity supergroup and cutting a record to raise money for family relief.
‘We would have loved to have been on the Band Aid record,’ insisted Mercury. ‘But I only heard about it when we were in Germany.’ Inevitably, some muttered that Queen had been deliberately excluded for playing Sun City. Fully aware that Band Aid included the thirty-something Phil Collins and half of the similarly vintage Status Quo, Mercury jumped in with a now familiar joke. ‘I don’t know if they’d have had me on the record anyway,’ he said disingenuously. ‘I’m a bit old.’
Despite Queen’s harrowing experience on the Gluttons for Punishment tour, South America continued to exert a curious pull on the band, and vice versa. ‘Under Pressure’ had been at number 1 in Argentina in May 1982, when Argentina and Britain had gone to war over stewardship of the Falklands Islands. Immediately, the Argentinian leader General Galtieri banned Queen’s music from the country. A year later, the Queen office were back in negotiations with promoters to play more shows on the continent, including Rio’s coveted Maracana Stadium. Once again, though, the deal fell through. ‘Everything was set up,’ explained Roger Taylor. ‘But the promoter went broke virtually the day before.’
Somehow, in January 1985, the money transfer was completed and Queen were booked for the headline slot on the opening and closing nights of the ten-day Rock in Rio festival. The show would be staged at 250,000-capacity venue in Barra de Tijuca, purpose-built for around $11 million, funded by a Brazilian advertising mogul. Other headline acts included AC/DC, George Benson and Queen’s old sparring partners, Yes and Rod Stewart. But even the acts lower on the bill now read like a Who’s Who of eighties rock: Iron Maiden, Whitesnake, Scorpions, Ozzy Osbourne … It was estimated that some three million people would attend the festival over the course of its ten days, immediately earning Rock in Rio a place in The Guinness Book of Records where it deposed 1973’s Watkins Glen Summer Jam, which had seen a mere 600,000 show up to see The Grateful Dead and The Band. As an additional financial sweetener, Brazilian TV station Globo was granted the rights to broadcast the festival, including Queen’s performance. Rock in Rio subscribed to Queen’s favoured policy of ‘bigger, better, more’. They were made for each other.
Booked into the presidential suite of the Copacabana Beach Hotel, where his entourage included both Barbara Valentin and Winnie Kirchberger, Mercury ran on what one tour insider called ‘Freddie time’. On the first night Queen didn’t arrive onstage until the small hours. Behind the scenes, it was claimed that Brian May had been taken ill with flu, which, according to the Sun, led to Queen being helicoptered onto the site ‘at the very last minute’. It all added to the melodrama, though Queen hardly needed it. As Record Mirror’s Robin Smith observed, Queen’s ‘operatic grandeur and style drive the lusty Latins wild’. Playing a re-jigged version of The Works tour setlist, the show was comfortably loaded with hits. Determined to stay visible in front of over 300,000 people, every band member dressed in white. Taylor rocked up in a Katherine Hamnett T-shirt calling for worldwide nuclear disarmament, Mercury fashioned crotch-hugging tights with a red lightning bolt motif on the thighs, while May’s white spandex trousers were offset with an orange sash. The setlist was foolproof: ‘Under Pressure’, ‘Keep Yourself Alive’, ‘Radio Ga Ga’ …
Then came ‘I Want to Break Free’. Presuming that what had worked in front of an audience in Britain and Europe would work anywhere in the world, Mercury re-appeared to perform the song in a woman’s wig, pink jumper and what People magazine called ‘huge plastic falsies’. As Brian May recently said, ‘It was wonderful to have a singer with no compunctions whatsoever. There was nowhere Freddie wouldn’t go.’ According to People, ‘a near riot erupted when the crowd of 350,000 began tossing stones, beer cans and other missiles …’ Interviewed at the time, festival interpreter Maria Caetano explained that ‘the song is sacred in South America because we consider it a political message about the evils of dictatorship.’ Unknown to Queen, ‘Deakey’s golden egg’ had indeed acquired a deeper message in South America. Video footage from the event disproves the theory of a ‘near riot’, but there was enough animosity from some of the crowd for Mercury to realise that he’d misjudged the mood. ‘It surprised him,’ recalls Peter Hince. ‘They couldn’t work out what was going wrong, so they had this chilling flashback to Mexico.’
The singer reappeared for ‘We Will Rock You’, arms outstretched, wearing a flag as a cape, displaying the inside lining with the red, white and blue of the Union Jack, before turning to face Roger Taylor and showing the crowd the orange and blue Brazilian emblem on the back. He was forgiven. Interviewed after the event, Mercury, typically, brushed it aside. ‘They [Rio] were a wonderful audience, and I love their displays of emotion,’ he said. ‘They get over-excited sometimes but I can bring the whip down and show them who’s in control. I don’t know why they got so excited about me dressing as a woman; there are a lot of transvestites here.’
A day later, EMI threw a party for Queen at the nearby Copacabana Palace Hotel, where band members schmoozed with Rod Stewart, Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp and half of Duran Duran. Supposedly, Mercury and Stewart became embroiled
in a game of rock-star one-upmanship by pretending not to notice each other. Others, however, claim that Mercury refused to attend, or put in the briefest of appearances, again fearful of what his friend David Evans described as ‘loss of control’: it was not his party, it was for him, which meant all the old insecurities would come to surface. Meanwhile, a troupe of topless samba dancers were forced to perform with a reduced breast count after some of the dancers were sent home for being too drunk to stand. In a rare display of public tomfoolery, Brian May would be the first to throw himself fully clothed into the hotel swimming pool. Outside the party, besotted fans congregated on the beach, where they spelt out the band’s name in the sand using 1,500 candles. May went down to meet them, and, tellingly, spent more time there than he did among the liggers and beautiful people at the EMI bash.
Interviewed in Rio, Mercury, supposedly flanked by models, praised the ‘beautiful brown bodies’ around him and delivered the now much-quoted line: ‘I’m just an old slag who gets up in the morning, scratches his head and wonders who he wants to fuck.’ During Queen’s stay in Rio, Mercury and his entourage would explore the local gay club scene, though the need for security guards and the hysteria that accompanied any public appearance made the logistics of even leaving the hotel difficult. It was easier, others said, to bring the party to Freddie Mercury. Later, one of Rio’s ‘taxi’ boys, the name given to young male prostitutes in the city, would reveal how he and other males were invited by Paul Prenter to Mercury’s hotel suite. There, they were given cocaine and would, it was claimed, each have sex with the singer, who assumed a passive role in the proceedings. The impression given was of a soulless encounter with a moneyed rock star, who had grown bored of having everything and anything on offer, and was merely going through the motions, though Prenter was cast as the instigator. ‘Paul’s appetite for sex, drugs and alcohol was phenomenal,’ cautions Peter Hince. ‘And he liked to brag about it, especially when he was drunk: “Oh, I had seven boys today!” He could be a nasty piece of work, especially when he’d been drinking.’ Mark Malden once joined Mercury’s entourage on a visit to a gay bar in Toronto. ‘There was Fred, myself, Dane Clarke and Paul Prenter. It became apparent to me that we were not there for Fred or Dane and certainly not for me. We were there for Paul. It was Paul who directed the limo driver. It was Paul who picked up a man there, not Fred. Paul led things. Paul controlled things. Freddie was very strong when it came to his music, but not as strong in his personal life.’
