by Mark Blake
When Queen returned to Barra de Tijuca to play the last night of the festival, Rio had been subjected to several days of torrential rain, and the site was awash with mud. Filmed by Globo TV, Queen showboated through the same set as a week before. But when it came to ‘I Want to Break Free’, Mercury had left the wig and plastic breasts back at the hotel. He performed the song stripped to the waist and with a towel draped over his shoulders instead. With more than 600,000 people watching the band across two nights, Queen’s ubiquity was assured. In a candid moment, Freddie admitted South America was ‘a tremendous market. If you crack it here, the amount of money you can make is tremendous.’
Back in London, John Deacon would spend some of that money on a new Porsche. Driving back from a Phil Collins show at the Royal Albert Hall, Deacon was stopped by the police and breathalysed. He failed the test, was fined £150 and banned from driving for twelve months. Just days later, Brian May guested on DJ Roger Scott’s Capital Radio show, playing some of his favourite records. May chose Stevie Wonder’s ‘Don’t Drive Drunk’, offering a waggish dedication to ‘John, whom some of you may know has had a little problem with his car recently.’
There seemed less to smile about when Queen flew to New Zealand for the first of a nine-date tour, taking in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. NZTV reporter and music journalist the late Dylan Taite conducted a television interview with all four before the first night at Auckland’s Mount Smart Stadium. Mercury did most of the talking, May had his head down and studied his fingernails, Taylor kept his sunglasses on throughout, and all of the band, bar May, cradled a cigarette. Deacon, in particular, struggled to suppress a knowing smirk when Taite raised the subject of money. ‘We are all extremely wealthy,’ said Mercury. ‘But this is a very delicate question and you’d have to ask us individually … Wealth brings a lot of problems and we all have different problems. The money we make brings a lot of problems.’
If Mercury’s speech sounded just a tad slurred, there was a valid reason: he had been drinking. On the afternoon of the show, Freddie palled up with Spandau Ballet’s lead singer Tony Hadley. The New Romantic pop group, at the height of their powers after 1984’s platinum-selling Parade album, were on an unplanned break after an Australian tour. With nothing else to do, Hadley and Mercury opened a bottle of vodka, finished it, and then cracked open a bottle of vintage port … Come showtime, Freddie was flat on his back and needed to be helped into his stage clothes by Joe Fanelli. Once onstage at the 30,000-capacity Mount Smart stadium, Mercury began ad-libbing wildly: ‘My voice is fucked,’ he informed the crowd, despite having promised New Zealand ‘a motherfucker of a good time’. Later, ‘Hammer to Fall’, Brian May’s anthemic party piece, was introduced as ‘one for all you heavy metal fans to have a good jerk-off to!’ When a similarly inebriated Hadley joined Queen onstage for ‘Jailhouse Rock’, more chaos ensued. Unable to recall the lyrics, Hadley began singing Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ instead. Many in the Queen camp said it was the only time they had seen Mercury drunk before a gig.
The fun and games continued in Sydney, where Queen had sold out four nights at the Entertainment Centre. Drunken hijinks on a hired pleasure cruiser led to one of the road crew jumping overboard for a bet and having to be rescued by the coastguard. As the incident had delayed traffic in and out of Sydney Harbour, Queen were hit with a $5,000 fine. ‘There was a lot of slackness around The Works tour,’ admits Peter Hince. ‘It was getting out of control because the money was there and people were abusing it.’
In Sydney, Elton John joined Mercury and Taylor for a night on the tiles. Mercury had told friends that Elton had been especially supportive in Queen’s difficult early days and Taylor and Deacon would both play on Elton’s 1985 album, Ice on Fire, and the following year’s Leather Jackets. Later, Elton would cite the albums he made in the mid-1980s as some of his poorest, blaming this in part on cocaine. Recounting past wild times in an interview with Uncut magazine, Elton admitted: ‘Freddie Mercury could out-party me, which is saying something. We’d be up for nights, sitting there at eleven in the morning, still flying high. Queen were supposed to be catching a plane and Freddie would be like, “Oh fuck, another line, dear?” His appetites were unquenchable.’
Then again, Mercury had something to celebrate. On 29 April, Queen’s last night in Sydney, Columbia released Freddie’s debut solo album, Mr Bad Guy. It had taken Mercury the best part of two years to piece together with co-producer Mack. Queen’s touring keyboard player Fred Mandel contributed piano on some tracks, while session musicians, including Mary Austin’s new boyfriend, bass guitarist Jo Burt, took care of the rest. Breaking one of Queen’s cardinal rules, Mercury even used an orchestra on the title track. In the sleeve notes, Freddie thanked ‘Brian, John and Roger for not interfering’, and included a dedication to all three of his significant others, Mary Austin, Barbara Valentin (‘for big tits and misconduct’) and Winnie (‘for board and lodgings’). Most of Mr Bad Guy was closer in feel to Queen’s Hot Space than The Works. Freddie, in his gym vest and shades, pulled a brooding pose on the cover. The music inside matched the cover. Mr Bad Guy was glossy, flash and completely of the moment. With its dance and funk rhythms, it seemed a lifetime away from the feather-boa-clad pomp metal of Sheer Heart Attack or Queen II. ‘It’s very beat oriented,’ Mercury told Record Mirror. ‘It’s a very natural album.’
Nevertheless, some of the songs, including ‘Man Made Paradise’ and ‘There Must Be More to Life Than This’, had been kicking around Queen sessions since The Game. When session player Paul Vincent let fly with a very Queen-like guitar solo on ‘Man Made Paradise’ it was difficult not to wonder why Mercury hadn’t just let Brian May play it instead. Overall, Mr Bad Guy’s mood shifted twitchily from the self-aggrandising title track to the heart-on-sleeve closing ballad ‘Love Me Like There’s No Tomorrow’, which had been written especially for Barbara Valentin. Mercury was only too aware of the schizophrenic nature of his writing. ‘Most of the songs I write are love ballads and things to do with sadness and torture and pain,’ he said. ‘But at the same time, it’s frivolous and tongue in cheek. That’s basically my whole nature.’
A lead-off single, ‘I Was Born to Love You’, had reached a respectable number 11 in Britain in April. Mr Bad Guy debuted in the UK chart at number 6, and managed a fortnight in the Top 10. In America, it flopped at number 159. ‘Mr Bad Guy was just something I wanted to do,’ Mercury explained later. ‘I wanted to do all the things I wasn’t able to do within the band.’ With no plans to tour the record and with Mercury conducting few press interviews, it was hardly a shock that it failed to equal Queen’s success. While his drug buddy Elton John would painstakingly note down the chart positions of each and every one of his singles and albums and would then pore over the data, Mercury took a more flippant view of the business. As one EMI insider explained: ‘If one record didn’t work, get another one out. No one song was so special that Freddie ever said, “That’s it … I’ll never do better than that.”’ Mercury, it seemed, also knew where he worked best. ‘I won’t be splitting up with Queen,’ he insisted, before adding, ‘Without the others I’m nothing.’
At the end of The Works jaunt, Deacon joined Taylor on the Balearic island of Ibiza, where the drummer had acquired a property and indulged his new passion for powerboat racing; May and his family stayed on in Australia for a holiday, while Mercury returned to Munich and his tangled personal relationships. Aside from the romantic tug of war between Winnie Kirchberger and Barbara Valentin, Freddie had a new love interest. Two years earlier, he had briefly met an Irish hairdresser named Jim Hutton in the South Kensington gay bar Cocobana. In March 1985, the pair had met again in Heaven. Unaware of who Mercury was, Hutton recalled that the singer’s opening gambit was, ‘How big is your dick?’ Jim responded by telling Freddie to drop the ‘fake American accent’. The two would begin a relationship that, against expectations, would endure until Mercury’s death.
Despite their setbacks in America,
at the end of The Works tour it was difficult to contemplate where Queen could possibly go next. Rock in Rio felt like the ultimate victory lap. John Deacon said as much: ‘When we first started, we were very future-thinking. We wanted to do this or go there. We wanted our albums to be successful here, there and everywhere. But once we’d achieved that and been successful in so many countries in the world, it took away some of the incentive.’
With Deacon’s comments in mind, the timing of Bob Geldof’s phone call to Queen’s business manager Jim Beach couldn’t have been better. Queen’s next challenge was already in place. Following on from the success of the Band Aid record, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure were now organising a multi-bill charity concert to help raise more funds for African famine relief. As with Band Aid, Geldof was determined to attract as many high-profile names to the bill, and was engaged in begging, persuading, cajoling and emotionally blackmailing as many pampered rock stars as he could. Billed as Live Aid, two shows had been confirmed for 13 July in London’s Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, but other simultaneous charity shows would take place in Sydney, Cologne, Moscow and The Hague. Supposedly Geldof made his first approach to The Boomtown Rats’ sometime keyboard player Spike Edney. He asked Edney to sound out Queen about the possibility of playing the Wembley show. ‘I had the opportunity to ask them while we were in New Zealand,’ he said. ‘To which they replied, “Why doesn’t he ask us himself?” And I had to explain that he was afraid they’d turn him down.’
Edney was almost certain that Queen would refuse, but suggested that Bob Geldof telephone Jim Beach directly. Recalling their conversation in 1990, Geldof said, ‘I traced Jim all the way to some tiny little beach, some little seaside resort that he was staying at, and I said, “Look, for Christ’s sake, what’s wrong with them. Jim said, “Oh you know, Freddie’s very sensitive.” So I said, “Tell the old faggot it’s gonna be the biggest thing that ever happened.”’ Beach agreed to pitch the idea to Queen. Initially, they turned it down. John Deacon later recalled changing their minds at a post-gig dinner in Japan, while Brian May remembers Geldof approaching Queen directly at a BPI Awards dinner. ‘I thought it would be almost impossible for him to put together,’ said May. ‘But I said that we were interested. Then he rang me and said he needed a commitment.’ Queen had planned time off after completing The Works shows. ‘I didn’t think we’d tour again for five years – if at all,’ Taylor told Mojo. ‘I think there was a chance the band would have broken up at the end of that tour,’ says Peter Hince, who also recalls that ‘Freddie really needed to be talked into doing Live Aid.’
In the meantime, Columbia Records, eager for a return on their one-off investment, put out another Mercury single. ‘Made in Heaven’ was a theatrical ballad, for which director David Mallet had created a similarly grandiose promo. Freddie, posing in a diaphanous scarlet cape, held court on top of a 60-feet globe and above a sprawl of writhing half-naked dancers. The video was high camp meets Hieronymus Bosch, but the single stiffed in Britain.
In an unaccustomed act of promotion, Freddie agreed to an interview with BBC Radio 1 DJ Simon Bates. There were two provisos: the meeting had to take place on home turf, at the Queen offices, and Bates was not permitted to ask about Mercury’s parents. While the singer’s sexuality was almost an open secret in the business, he still kept it private from his mother and father. ‘The Bulsaras were a very traditional Parsee family,’ explained Mercury’s former aide Peter Freestone. ‘Freddie instinctively knew the limits to which his family would go in being modern. He was very sensitive to them and never wanted them to be compromised. He also felt the less they knew, the less they could tell.’ Although Brian May recalled Mercury announcing before a show, ‘Oh, Mother’s in the audience tonight, I must throw in some more swear words’. When Mercury’s parents came to visit their son at Garden Lodge, boyfriend Jim Hutton would always be briefly introduced to them as his gardener.
After agreeing to a date for the interview, Mercury cancelled, claiming he was too sick. When the meeting finally took place, the DJ was shocked by what he saw when Mercury stuck out his tongue for inspection. ‘It looked as if it had a duffel coat on it,’ Bates told listeners. ‘It was the unhealthiest sight I had ever seen, and it was obvious he was still ill.’ Mercury admitted he had been ‘overdoing it’, but told Bates that juggling his solo album and his commitments to Queen had left him exhausted.
After the first of several vodka and tonics, Mercury became more animated, and was surprisingly candid with some of his answers. He agreed that the ‘arrogant, aggressive’ persona projected onstage was only one part of his character, but that people became confused and believed that he must be like that at all times. He confessed to be a ‘bitch’ in business, insisting that it was almost impossible to make it in the music industry by being nice, and sagely observed that audiences had become harder to shock since Queen’s early days. ‘It takes much more to outrage,’ he said, citing Boy George, the cross-dressing lead singer of the nation’s pop favourites Culture Club, as a sign of changing attitudes. When asked about his life before Queen, Mercury would only go as far back as Ealing art college. ‘So long ago … during the Boer War,’ he joked. There was no mention of India or Zanzibar. Before parting, he told Bates that Live Aid would be an opportunity for Queen to prove themselves without having to rely on a spectacular stage set. For once, Mercury had shown a chink in his armour. Bates came away with the impression that Mercury ‘really cared what people thought of him’.
Mindful of the fact that old friends and rivals such as David Bowie, Elton John and The Who had been confirmed for the bill at Live Aid, Queen’s competitive streak and hard professionalism kicked in. On 10 July, they booked into North London’s Shaw Theatre for three days of painstaking rehearsals. During a break, a BBC interviewer rounded them up for a stilted question-and-answer session. Seeing the four together reprised memories of the New Zealand TV interview from earlier in the year. There was the same nervous cigarette smoking and the same awkward body language. Taylor fidgeted and rubbed his nose, while John Deacon smiled quizzically but said nothing. This time, it fell to May and Mercury to share the ambassadorial role.
When asked if Queen were playing Live Aid because they supported the cause of famine relief or because they couldn’t afford to miss out, Freddie answered, ‘A bit of both.’ Mercury insisted that Live Aid was a good cause and that Queen would have liked to have been on the Band Aid single, but admitted that, as the concert featured ‘some of the biggest and best known groups around the world, why not us?’ On a purely self-seeking level, there must have been some hope that their participation would repair their reputation after Sun City. More importantly, with the group growing even further apart, it might also give them what Roger Taylor called ‘a shot in the arm’.
Asked whether they thought there would be clashes of ego between the bands on the bill, all four started laughing. ‘Oh, we will all try and outdo each other, I guess,’ said Mercury. What songs are you going to play? asked the interviewer. ‘We’re still squabbling over that,’ grinned the singer. As Taylor explained, ‘You have to play things people will know … in Turkey.’ Step one: Queen drew up a list of songs and then worked out how to run some of them into a medley, abbreviating certain tracks so they could include even more. Step two was to ensure that the entire set didn’t exceed their allotted twenty minutes.
‘So I went out and bought some electric clocks,’ explains Peter Hince. ‘We had them wired up and in front of the stage, so we could check to see when we our time was up. Queen were that methodical about it. The attitude was, OK, what are we gonna do? There are no smoke bombs, there’s no light show and we’re going on in the afternoon. Let’s just give people what they want – the hits.’
Four days later, just before midday on 13 July, a pastel-suited Brian May and Roger Taylor, joined by the drummer’s tech ‘Crystal’ Taylor, took their VIP seats at Wembley Stadium, alongside David Bowie, Bob Geldof, George Michael, and Elton John.
BBC DJ Richard Skinner’s voice boomed out of the PA: ‘It’s 12 o’clock in London, seven o’clock in Philadelphia, and around the world it’s time for Live Aid …’ Onstage, the Coldstream Guards blasted a royal fanfare as Prince Charles and Princess Diana arrived to take their seats in front of the Queen entourage. Within seconds, bagpipes had given way to guitars as Status Quo cranked up the opening riff to their hit single ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’. In front of them, a sea of 70,000 people began moving.
Some twenty minutes later, ex-Jam frontman Paul Weller’s new group Style Council arrived with their hit ‘You’re the Best Thing’, replacing Status Quo’s macho rock with some sophisticated Parisienne café pop. By one o’clock, Bob Geldof had left the BBC’s commentary box, where he had been urging TV audiences to pledge their money, and led his own group The Boomtown Rats through two of their hit singles and one new non-hit. There was a pattern emerging. Minutes later, Adam Ant declared ‘the world is watching, let’s feed it’ and then spoiled it all by playing his brand-new single, ‘Vive Le Rock’.
