by Mark Blake
Still buzzing with the success of Live Aid and ‘One Vision’, EMI ended 1985 with Queen: The Complete Works, an embossed box set which, for £70, included every Queen LP to date, a bonus disc of previously unreleased tracks, and a map of the world, marked with places in which Queen had played or territories conquered.
Queen picked up the album sessions in January 1986, and would spend the next three months between Musicland and Mountain, with extra work at London’s Sarm West, Townhouse and Maison Rouge studios. The band members had split themselves between two producers: Mack would work with Mercury and Deacon at Musicland; David Richards would do the same for Taylor and May at Mountain. For Mack, though, this was the opposite of the ‘Four Musketeers’ approach that had made his first Queen project, The Game, such a success. ‘Everybody was doing their own thing now, in their own studios,’ he sighs.
By now, the original concept behind the album had also changed. ‘We did all the music for the film first,’ explained Deacon. ‘Then, when we came to do the album, we rearranged a lot of the tracks, made them longer, wrote more lyrics and tried to arrange them into fully-fledged songs.’ ‘There was an extraordinary collaboration between Michael Kamen and the band,’ recalled Mulcahy. ‘It wasn’t just like we finished the film and asked for a song. Queen were very much involved in edit and during the months of post-production.’
The finished Queen album, A Kind of Magic, would include nine songs, with alternative versions of six, including the title track, used in the Highlander movie. Outtakes from the album would include Roger Taylor’s much-regarded ‘Heaven for Everyone’, a song he would record later with his own side-project The Cross. Michael Kamen and Steve Gregory weren’t the only outsiders involved with the record. The new Queen album would also find a home for touring keyboard player Spike Edney, singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading and string arranger Lynton Naiff.
As well as ‘One Year of Love’, John Deacon had paired up with Mercury and written another soul track, ‘Pain is So Close to Pleasure’; a song that Brian May tactfully described as ‘very unusual for us’. The guitarist would feel more affinity with Deacon and Mercury’s flag-waving ‘Friends Will Be Friends’. Meanwhile, at Mountain, David Richards helped May and Taylor with their material. As well as the heroic ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’, May came up with ‘Gimme the Prize (Kurgan’s Theme)’, a song named after Highlander’s anti-hero, filled with schlock-horror sound effects and an over-the-top guitar solo. Back at Musicland, Mercury would revisit Queen’s past life himself with ‘Princes of the Universe’, a chest-beating rocker of the kind he hadn’t written in years.
Representing the Drum Department at Mountain, Roger Taylor would get two of his songs onto the finished album. ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’ (with a backing vocal from Joan Armatrading) was by-numbers synth-rock with a lyric preaching against the perils of driving under the influence, possibly inspired by the Bass Department’s encounter with a breathalyser. Far better was Taylor’s ‘A Kind of Magic’. The song’s title had been plucked from a line in the Highlander script. A different version of the same track would be used over the film’s closing credits, but the album version would end up as one of Queen’s purest pop songs. While ‘A Kind of Magic’ would be solely credited to Taylor, Mercury had a significant part to play. ‘Freddie got a bee in his bonnet and said [to Roger], “You go away and I’ll make a hit,”’ said Brian May in 2010. ‘I knew he was going away to LA for a week,’ recalled Mercury. ‘And I got hold of it and changed it around completely.’ As with ‘Radio Ga Ga’, the singer took the drummer’s song, believing that it had greater commercial potential than anyone realised. ‘We were knowingly making a pop record, a commercial record,’ said Taylor.
Released as a single in March 1986, ‘A Kind of Magic’ raced to number 3 in the UK, helped by Russell Mulcahy’s video (a ‘thank you’ gesture from the director for Queen’s involvement in Highlander). Here, a wizardly Freddie Mercury transformed his down-at-heel bandmates into swish rock stars. The song’s optimistic lyric sounded immediately familiar to Queen’s support band Airrace from the year before. ‘Our album had been called Shaft of Light,’ says guitarist Laurie Mansworth. ‘On The Works tour, Freddie commented that he liked the name of it. He said that the title would make a great line to use in a song.’ Sure enough, in the first verse of ‘A Kind of Magic’, Mercury could be heard singing about how one shaft of light showed the way. Meanwhile with Highlander due to open in America before the UK, Queen opted for ‘Princes of the Universe’ as their US comeback single, enlisting Highlander star Christopher Lambert to appear in the accompanying video. But America looked the other way and the single failed to even break the Top 50.
Further evidence of Capitol’s confused relationship with Queen came when Mercury met up with the band’s old friend Billy Squier to work on tracks for Squier’s next album, Enough is Enough. ‘Freddie and I collaborated on two songs,’ says Squier now. ‘We were both on Capitol at the time, and there seemed to be a lot of excitement at the label when they heard we were working together. The head of A&R even flew over to London to express his enthusiasm for our little project.’
Squier and Mercury spent a productive night in Kensington working on the songs ‘Lady with a Tenor Sax’ and ‘Love is the Hero’. ‘As dawn broke, Freddie sat down at the piano and threw off a new intro for “Love is the Hero” that totally blew me away,’ says Squier. ‘Yet, when I delivered the record, the label execs decided they did not want to include it.’ The intro comprised a high-camp, high-drama Mercury vocal. ‘They mumbled something at the time about it being “confusing for my audience”.’
Squier, himself, had already run into trouble with the video he’d made for his 1984 single ‘Rock Me Tonite’. Squier performed a solo dance routine, based on a young Tom Cruise’s tongue-in-cheek performance in the movie Risky Business. Unfortunately, Billy’s cavorting hadn’t gone down well with his audience. ‘It was anathema to those who saw me as a no-frills rock star and guitar slinger,’ he admits. ‘I’ve always thought Capitol were concerned about Freddie’s image problems, and the fan reaction to “Rock Me Tonite”, and feared he might drag me down once and for all. But from my perspective, having one of the biggest stars in the world lending his extraordinary talents to my record seemed like a pretty good idea.’
With a new single in the chart, and the album almost complete, Queen did their customary disappearing act in four different directions. Mercury completed his recordings for Dave Clark’s Time and showed up for the premiere of the musical at London’s Dominion Theatre, camping it up in the interval by attempting to sell ice creams in the audience. Before long, he was casually tossing tubs of ice cream towards his customers without asking for payment. As one of Mercury’s entourage explained: ‘Freddie wouldn’t have been able to give anyone their change. I don’t think he knew what a pound coin looked like.’
Clark had already asked Mercury to appear in Time. While claiming to be impressed by David Bowie’s recent theatrical performance as the Elephant Man in New York, Mercury was aware of his limitations. ‘He declined,’ explained Clark. ‘He said, “For one thing, my darling, I don’t get up until 3 p.m., so I can’t do matinées. For another, when I do a show, I sing my butt off for three hours and then I drop dead. So it would be impossible to do eight shows a week.”’
In the meantime, Taylor joined David Richards to produce the Queen-influenced rock band Magnum, while John Deacon became one third of a trio called The Immortals, cutting a chirpy pop single ‘No Turning Back’ for the soundtrack to the First World War flying ace movie Biggles. Neither the single nor the film made any impact. Meanwhile, in London, Brian May would have a fortuitous meeting with the woman who would become his second wife, actress Anita Dobson, at the premiere of the Hollywood comedy Down and Out in Beverley Hills. At the time Dobson was playing fiery pub landlady Angie Watts in the BBC’s hit soap opera EastEnders. At the premiere, May and his wife Chrissy squeezed past Anita to reach their seats. Chrissy had coaxed Br
ian into watching EastEnders, and he had become hooked. ‘I said [to Anita], “Excuse me, I think you’re wonderful,”’ May later told Smash Hits magazine. “I asked if she’d like to come to our concert at Wembley Stadium … and she said, “Er, thank you very much.”’
Queen had lined up two Wembley Stadium concerts in June, with other outdoor shows arranged for Dublin’s Slane Castle, Newcastle’s St James’ Park and Manchester’s Maine Road. Tickets sold out almost immediately, prompting promoter Harvey Goldsmith to confirm another date in August at Stevenage’s Knebworth Park, the scene of Led Zeppelin’s final UK concert seven years earlier. The Magic tour would also include a run of shows across Scandinavia and Europe, before culminating in Ireland, the UK and Spain.
On 11 May, the band made another appearance at the Montreux Golden Rose Pop Festival, where they mimed to tracks from the new album. Mercury woke up to a copy of the Daily Mirror and a photograph of himself performing at the show under the headline ‘FLABULOUS FREDDIE’. ‘Freddie always took great pride in his trim waist,’ recalls EMI’s Brian Southall. ‘But there was this one picture of him leaning to the side and showing a tiny bit of flab. Of course, the good Daily Mirror sub had come up with this headline. Ray Coleman had written the piece, which talked about Queen’s excellence and majesty and largesse. But because Ray was the person Queen knew at the Mirror, Ray was the one they attacked. Ray got very distressed, and got on to the Mirror to explain and made them apologise, so he could be let back into the Queen camp.’
In May, Queen had bedded down at a rehearsal studio in Wembley to prepare for the tour. Though now pushing forty, Mercury could still get away with the cutaway vest and jeans he’d worn at Live Aid. Nevertheless, his friend, the costume designer Diana Moseley was hired to dress the whole band for the tour (‘You had to be gentle with Queen,’ she recalled. ‘You couldn’t just rush in and push things. Brian needed a little coaxing.’) Among Moseley’s creations would be a huge ermine gown and crown, which Mercury intended to wear during the band’s final curtain call.
‘One Vision’, ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’, ‘Friends Will Be Friends’ and the title track would introduce the setlist. In came a snippet of the nowarchaic ‘In the Lap of the Gods … Revisited’ and an acoustic rock ’n’ roll medley that included ‘Tutti Frutti’, Ricky Nelson’s ‘Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart)’ – a song Mercury had first played in India with The Hectics – and Lieber and Stoller’s ‘(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care’.
Mindful of what it took to hold a stadium audience’s attention, the Magic set was an extravagant construction that included a 64-feet stage flanked by a pair of 40-feet runways. ‘We are going to play on the biggest stage ever built at Wembley,’ enthused Roger Taylor, whose girlfriend Dominique gave birth to their daughter Rory just days before the tour began. The drummer’s parting shot was that Queen’s new spectacular would make ‘Ben Hur look like The Muppets’. Gerry Stickells and Queen’s road crew would now be tasked with managing three separate stages; a process nicknamed ‘leapfrogging’. While one stage was being used, the second was being built, and the third was being transported to the next show.
A Kind of Magic, Queen’s eleventh’s studio album, was released in the UK and US just before the tour opened in Sweden. What the band later called ‘The Live Aid Effect’ hadn’t diminished, and it shifted 100,000 copies in its first week alone, eventually seeing off Genesis’ Invisible Touch and Simply Red’s Picture Book to reach number 1 in the UK and Ireland.
Meanwhile, America slipped further away. ‘A Kind of Magic sounds like hard rock with a hollow core,’ wrote Rolling Stone’s Mark Coleman. The album went as far as number 46, then stopped. Once again, America would be absent from Queen’s tour itinerary. On home turf, The Times applauded Freddie’s ‘Diana Ross impersonation’ on ‘Pain is So Close to Pleasure’, but concluded that A Kind of Magic was ‘as chic as a set of flying ducks on a wall’. ‘I’d be a liar to say I’m not hurt by criticism,’ admitted Mercury. ‘But that’s the way of the world. Before, I used to get really mad and start tearing my hair out, but now I don’t have any more sleepless nights.’
The album’s confused origins made for a somewhat uneven listening experience. Even Mercury sounded bewildered when attempting to explain the record: ‘For the first time in Queen’s life we actually made a film soundtrack, but we’ve also made a Queen album, so, we had to try to let people know that it’s not just a soundtrack, because we’ve got other songs as well …’ To confuse matters still further, the 1985 single ‘One Vision’ (which had already featured in the Iron Eagle soundtrack) reappeared as the album’s opening track. Much like Highlander’s immortal hero, only the title cut and ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’ were songs that would survive the album’s natural shelf life. Like every Queen record since Jazz, A Kind of Magic was a so-so album, cleverly loaded with two or three potential hit singles. ‘There was some scraping the barrel,’ says Mack, drily.
Onstage, Queen made a grand entrance, through billowing clouds of dry ice, straight into ‘One Vision’ and ‘Tie Your Mother Down’. New songs were threaded in between the hits, with ‘A Kind of Magic’ cueing up ‘Under Pressure’. The final part of the show was wisely given over to the same six songs they’d played at Live Aid. Exuding their usual over-confidence, Queen’s next single ‘Friends Will Be Friends’ would later be dropped in as an encore between ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are the Champions’. ‘I can’t believe we did that,’ murmured Brian May, revisiting the setlist years later.
After the opening night in Stockholm, Diana Moseley took a call from Mercury. The singer’s mood could hardly have been helped by the gauntlet of anti-apartheid protesters outside the stadium, but instead he was fussing over the performance and suggesting that it needed ‘an extra something’. Mercury asked Diana to bring the newly commissioned ermine gown and crown to France in time for the Paris Hippodrome show a week later. Prior to the gig, Mercury spent an afternoon swishing up and down the corridor of the Royal Monceau Hotel, trying out his new outfit. At the end of the show, as the band scrubbed their way through the final bars of ‘We Are the Champions’, Mercury promenaded on from the wings, trailing the gown over his shoulders, doffing the crown and waving to the minions below. Billy Squier watched the concert from the wings. ‘It was a great feeling,’ he says. ‘I’d just recorded with Freddie in London, and I was just offstage at the end of his grand piano, watching my friend lay out this huge crowd.’ It would be the last time Squier ever saw Freddie Mercury.
The crown and ermine would become Mercury’s final flourish for the remainder of the tour. As always, he remained the focus of the show, tirelessly working the enormous stage. ‘He’s the pivot of what it’s all about,’ said an earnest Brian May at the time. ‘It’s all channelled through Freddie, so we look after him.’ ‘It was just before Fred turned forty,’ remembers Peter Hince, ‘and he was still smoking, still drinking vodka and still doing other things that were not good for him but still managing to run around for two hours a night.’ There were moments when it looked as if the years had started to catch up on the singer. Queen’s huge lighting rig could have an illuminating effect on Mercury’s slightly thinning hair (‘It’s a double-crown, dear,’ Freddie would protest). Backstage, Mercury was never without a steam inhaler, always aware that the nodes on his vocal cords could flare up at any time. If his health was suffering for any other reason, he told no one.
Among Queen’s support acts at the Paris Hippodrome were the UK rock band Marillion. Fronted by larger-than-life Scotsman Derek Dick, aka Fish, Marillion were signed to EMI and had just had a number 1 album with Misplaced Childhood. ‘I knew Roger Taylor from the London club scene,’ says Fish now. ‘We were always in the Marquee and I think we went out with a couple of the same girls, but I’d never met the others before.’ At the aftershow party in Paris, Fish, to the chagrin of his bandmates, was whisked away to share the ‘glamour table’ with Queen and Duran Duran’s John Taylor and Nick Rhodes. ‘Freddie
was charming and affable and very funny,’ he recalls. ‘Brian and I got into a very deep conversation about South African politics. Queen had been absolutely hammered for playing Sun City and I remember being very impressed by Brian’s intelligence and passion. To be honest, “Deaks” was a bit weird. Marillion’s bass player was off his face and kept coming up and trying to talk to him about what gear he was using. John Deacon kept moving away, and after about three or four times he turned round and just said, “Who the fuck are you?” Very funny. There was an apology the next morning.’
In Mannheim, Fish was invited onstage to join Queen for ‘Tutti Frutti’. ‘I kept thinking, “How the fuck does it go?”’ he says. ‘Freddie had let me use his radio mic earlier with Marillion, which is an unusual thing for any singer to do, and he’d watched our show from the side of the stage. He welcomed me on for ‘Tutti Frutti’, and then really put me in my place. Not in a nasty way, but the sheer presence of the man onstage. He owned it. He was the big brother. I didn’t stand a chance.’
Four days later, in Berlin, Queen threw in a version of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’. Later, they’d dust off Shirley Bassey’s ‘Big Spender’, the song that had so impressed their Trident paymasters at the Forest Hill gig fourteen years earlier. The Spencer Davis Group’s ‘Gimme Some Lovin’, a tune Fred Bulsara used to pester his college friend to play on the church organ, would also be thrown into the set. These were all flashbacks to Queen’s past.
