by Mark Blake
On the one hand, it seems bizarre that Mercury would keep his condition a secret from a group of people he’d spent so much of his adult life with. Yet Mercury had always been an enigma, even to his bandmates. His origins, his childhood and his sexuality had all been areas of his life that he had, at times, kept private. His health issues were the same. ‘He obviously wasn’t well,’ says John Brough, assistant engineer on The Miracle. ‘But no one spoke about it, and we were expected not to.’
‘I personally didn’t know that he had AIDS,’ said David Richards, who co-produced the final recordings. ‘I speculated he had cancer. I think everyone involved pushed aside the fact that it was really that serious. Everyone still had that glimpse of hope that at the end maybe a miracle would happen.’
In June, Brian May’s father Harold died. ‘The two worst things I ever did in his eyes were: one, give up my academic career to become a pop star and two, live with a woman,’ said Brian. After barely speaking to each other for a year, the relationship had thawed, and Harold had supported his son’s choice of career. As May pointed out: ‘My dad was always trying to stop me going into the rock business but he built my guitar – the thing that propelled me into it.’
The shock of his father’s death was compounded by the guitarist’s marital problems. The birth of a daughter, Emily, came at the beginning of 1988 but before long, May had left Chrissy and his three children, moving out of the family home and into a house on his own. Although his relationship with Anita Dobson was now public, he claimed that he ‘couldn’t admit it to myself, and didn’t allow myself to be with her.’ For May, the end of his marriage and the loss of his father cast a shadow over the Queen album sessions. ‘I was in a complete state of mental untogetherness,’ he said. ‘What I did play I was quite proud of, but my input to the material wasn’t as good as it could have been.’ Stories about the ‘millionaire rocker’ and ‘Angie’ (Dobson was still better known by her EastEnders character’s name) were soon splashed across the tabloids. May channelled some of his ire into a new song, the stagey mid-paced rocker ‘Scandal’. Though not everyone was a fan: ‘Not one of our better ones,’ said Taylor.
When he wasn’t working with the band, May seemed to spend every waking hour playing music with anyone else that asked. Just days after his father’s death, he joined Elton John and Eric Clapton at the Royal Albert Hall for The Prince’s Trust Gala concert. In the months that followed, he became a guitar-for-hire for the likes of Holly Johnson, Black Sabbath and boyhood hero Lonnie Donegan. ‘You need distractions,’ he admitted. ‘Being busy is one of the great therapies.’
In October, with The Miracle still in progress, Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé released their duets album, Barcelona. Even now, there’s still something compelling about hearing ‘The Fallen Priest’ and ‘The Golden Boy’ in which the self-taught Mercury pits himself against Caballé’s mighty soprano, and still manages to get away with it. Reviewing the album for Q magazine, David Sinclair made an insightful observation: ‘Barcelona has more to do with Cats and Time than Tommy or La Traviata.’ The long road to We Will Rock You: The Musical began here. Barcelona would spend a month in the UK charts, just outside the Top 20.
On the day of the album’s release, Mercury and Caballé were the main attraction at La Nit, an open-air concert in Barcelona in front of Spain’s King Juan Carlos, to celebrate the arrival of the Olympic torch. Also on the eclectic bill were Jerry Lee Lewis, Dionne Warwick and the ubiquitous Spandau Ballet. It would be Freddie’s final live appearance, but, again, the duo chose to mime. Among the press corps gathered to cover the event, there was talk of a ‘throat infection’ and ‘AIDS’. In a post-show interview Mercury protested: ‘If my voice was not to come up to scratch I’d be letting her down. I didn’t want to take any chances.’
Three weeks before Christmas, The Cross played the Queen Fan Club party at London’s Hammersmith Palais. John Deacon and Brian May joined them onstage for a handful of blues tracks. There was no sign of Freddie. At the Barcelona concert, Mercury had been able to maintain the façade. Just. But beneath his immaculate tuxedo, he had a wound on his right calf and a lesion on the ball of his foot, which, due to his depleted immune system, would never properly heal.
Recording for The Miracle finally wound up in the New Year. Ten songs were culled from what Roger Taylor called ‘a good crop’ of thirty tracks, with some extras being held over for the CD and cassette formats of the album and future B-sides. The first single, ‘I Want It All’, emerged in May and put Queen back in the UK Top 5; its heavy-metal guitar riffs sounding like a gauntlet thrown down to the such fashionably heavy bands as Guns N’ Roses and The Cult. The album followed in June, with a sleeve designed by Queen’s art guru Richard Gray. Using a forerunner of the design programme that would eventually become Photoshop, the four band members’ faces had been morphed into a single image; an unnerving montage of eyes, noses and mouths.
The Miracle went straight to number 1 in Britain, and 24 in the US. Despite Brian May’s emotional distractions, he was all over the album. There were no shortage of guitar solos on ‘I Want It All’ and ‘Breakthru’, but even on the beach-bar calypso of ‘Rain Must Fall’, May played like a man trying to blow the song up from the inside. Like Queen’s guilty conscience, the troubled guitarist cropped up again and again, salvaging the throwaway opener ‘Party’, messing up the pop-funk of ‘My Baby Does Me’ and ‘The Invisible Man’, and adding extra muscle to the Led Zeppelin-soundalike ‘Khashoggi’s Ship’ (only Queen could write a song inspired by a Saudi playboy and millionaire arms dealer) ‘I can remember whole days sitting there blank, I was in such a depression,’ May said later. ‘I’m surprised how much guitar there is on it.’
For much of the record, Mercury pulled off his customary trick of singing beautifully while giving away very little. Knowing that it’s the work of a man on borrowed time, it’s easy to read more into the lyrics of the more thoughtful material. May described the title track, with its peace-and-love-to-all sentiment, as ‘Freddie’s small masterpiece’. On the album’s final song, ‘Was It All Worth It?’, Mercury reflected on a life of money, excess and the eternal quest for perfection. The Times would write it off as ‘a grotesque stadium-rock equivalent of “My Way”,’ but other reviews for the album were cautiously complimentary, with Rolling Stone praising The Miracle for its ‘snippets of Queen’s former majesty’.
The promotional campaign extended to Queen for an Hour, a group interview with BBC Radio 1 DJ Mike Read. Asked why they wouldn’t tour, Freddie said he wanted to break the cycle of album, tour, album, tour … ‘I am the spanner in the works,’ he declared.
Following ‘I Want It All’, four more singles would be lifted from The Miracle over the coming months. As well as the new CD format, EMI pushed out 12-inch vinyl, cassette and picture-disc versions of ‘Breakthru’, ‘The Invisible Man’, ‘Scandal’ and ‘The Miracle’ title track; only the last two failed to crack the Top 20. Yet making promo videos presented a greater challenge than before. In each promo Mercury sported a beard or heavy stubble. ‘I couldn’t be bothered to shave any more,’ Mercury told the press. ‘It’s as boring as slicing bread.’ According to Jim Hutton, in his Mercury and Me memoir, it helped conceal the signs of Kaposi’s Sarcoma better than layers of make-up. For the ‘Breakthru’ video, Queen were filmed on a customised steam engine racing through the Cambridgeshire countryside. To all intents and purposes, Mercury looked healthy: flourishing the sawn-off mic stand, soloing on an imaginary guitar and pumping his arms as if nothing had changed.
For ‘The Miracle’ video, Queen hired stage-school child actors to play themselves, dressing up their mini doppelgängers in versions of their own stage clothes. ‘It was a joy to make,’ recalled Taylor. ‘We were smiling the whole time.’ But when the real Queen emerged for the finale, Mercury, in his Magic tour yellow jacket, looked visibly older – and frailer – than he had in 1986, as though time had somehow accelerated.
The task of pr
omoting the new album fell to Taylor and May. Talking about the music was easy enough (the party line: Queen were now ‘refreshed and rejuvenated’), but at a press conference in Munich, a German reporter asked Taylor outright whether Freddie Mercury had AIDS. ‘Freddie is as healthy as ever,’ insisted the drummer. ‘The reason we’re not going to tour is because we can’t agree on the process. Everything else is just a stupid rumour.’ Whether the drummer already knew the truth or not, Mercury’s bandmates were becoming adept at stonewalling questions about his health.
Barely taking a break after finishing The Miracle, Mercury, clearly aware of how little time he had left, returned to Montreux, determined to keep working. By the spring of 1989, with The Miracle not yet released, Queen began work on a follow-up. ‘I think we all thought The Miracle was going to be the last one,’ said Brian May in 1992. ‘There were no guarantees how long Freddie was going to last at that time. So we just knew we had to press on and do what we could.’
According to Jim Hutton, it was in Montreux at this time that Mercury finally told the rest of the group about his condition, with a dramatic display in a restaurant. ‘Someone at the table was suffering from a cold, and the conversation got round to the curse of illness,’ said Hutton. ‘Freddie still looked fairly well, but he rolled up his right trouser leg and raised his leg to the table to let the others see the painful, open wound weeping on the side of his leg: “You think you’ve got problems,” he told them. “Well, look at this.” Then, as quickly as he’d mentioned it, Freddie brushed the subject aside.’ However, like many anecdotes relating to Mercury’s final days, this has been called into question, with one unnamed source insisting the singer would never have broken the news to them in such a public manner.
‘At one point he invited us all over for a meeting,’ said Roger Taylor in 2000, ‘and told us the absolute facts, which we were all starting to realise anyway.’ ‘As soon as we realised Freddie was ill, we clustered around him like a protective shell,’ recalled Brian May. ‘But we were lying to everyone, even our own families. Freddie didn’t want the world intruding on his struggle. He used to say, “I don’t want people buying our records out of fucking sympathy.”’ Mercury demanded the same of Queen as he did of Jim Hutton and the inner circle at Garden Lodge: business as usual. ‘He had to be treated normally,’ said Mary Austin. ‘If he found you were flagging or becoming too emotional, you would be pushed back in line.’
May had been planning another solo album; Mercury had songs left over from Barcelona, and there was still material unused from The Miracle. According to Hutton, ‘Queen were dazed by Freddie’s eagerness to return to the studio’, but they agreed, and, for the first few months of 1989, the band worked in two-to-three-week bursts; a schedule partly dictated by their singer’s health. When they weren’t with Queen, May and Taylor seemed unwilling to rest, guesting on charity covers of Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’ and Queen’s own ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’, with Taylor soon moonlighting at Mountain Studios on a second album with The Cross.
No sooner had Queen’s anti-tabloid single ‘Scandal’ dropped out of the chart, than Mercury was back in the news headlines. In November, the Sunday Mirror claimed wrongly that Freddie had offered to be a ‘father’ to Mary Austin’s forthcoming child. At the time, Mary was several months pregnant but refusing to name the child’s biological father. In the same month, Queen made a public appearance together on a TV special, Goodbye to the Eighties, which was scheduled to be broadcast on New Year’s Eve. Queen picked up an award from Cilla Black and a youthful Jonathan Ross for Best Band of the Decade. Fans and critics scrutinised Mercury’s appearance and every gesture. While he stood back on the podium and let Brian May give an acceptance speech, he did not yet look like a dying man.
At the end of the month, Queen went back to Montreux. Mercury had given up smoking on doctor’s orders, and insisted on banning cigarettes from the studio entirely; a popular decision with Brian May, a devout anti-smoker, particularly since the death of his father. In the early 1980s, Mercury had found the chaos and hedonism of Munich preferable to the calm of Montreux; now, however, the slower pace of Swiss life suited him. In his final year, the singer would buy a penthouse flat in Teritet, overlooking Lake Geneva.
Song ideas were pooled, and out of these came Brian May’s frustrated love song ‘I Can’t Live With You’ and ‘Headlong’, an ebullient hard rocker in the style of ‘Breakthru’. ‘At first I thought about it as a song for my solo album,’ he admitted. ‘But as soon as I heard Freddie sing it, I said, “That’s it.” Sometimes it’s painful to give the baby away.’
Mercury’s contributions were typically diverse: ‘Delilah’ was a tongue-in-cheek tribute to one of his cats, while the gospel-flavoured ‘All God’s People’ had started life as a piece for the Barcelona album. John Brough helped engineer an early take for the song at Townhouse Studios, and saw that, regardless of his failing health, Freddie remained a hard taskmaster.
‘It was still a solo track at the time, but Freddie had asked Brian to play a solo on it,’ explains Brough. ‘Brian did a good solo, but decided he could do better and played it again. Freddie said, “No, I don’t like it”, and so it went on, and I could see Brian getting more and more tense. After another solo, Freddie said, “Oh, that’s rubbish.” David Richards, Mike Moran and I were all looking at each other. At the time, it seemed horrific. After another solo, Freddie made some comment like, “Oh, come on! You and that fireplace guitar … play it like you mean it!” So Brian let rip with this great solo, and, of course, Freddie had this big grin on his face. He knew what Brian could do, and he was just pushing him.’
A jam between May, Taylor and Deacon in the Montreux casino concert hall became the starting point for what would become the album’s title track, ‘Innuendo’. Stopping just short of six-and-a-half minutes, ‘Innuendo’ was a Queen marathon in the tradition of ‘Liar’ or ‘The Prophet’s Song’. Mercury sang about crumbling mountains and crashing waves to an opening motif that suggested Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’ colliding with Ravel’s Bolero. Steve Howe, guitarist with Yes, visited the studio, and ended up playing acoustic guitar on the song. ‘It’s a very strange track,’ said May later. ‘Like a fantasy adventure-land.’ The origins of the song’s title were rather less mystical. ‘It’s a word I like to use in Scrabble,’ Mercury later revealed. Although the old-school Queen of Innuendo was still a year away, EMI’s December release of Queen at the Beeb, a compilation of their BBC sessions from 1973 onwards, seemed strangely prescient.
Queen Productions declared 1990 to be the band’s twentieth anniversary, despite the fact that they had celebrated the tenth only in 1981, and on 18 February, the group were finally given the BPI Award that EMI had long been petitioning for. Queen were rewarded during a ceremony at London’s Dominion Theatre. But since their appearance on Goodbye to the Eighties, Mercury had gone downhill. Freddie led the band onstage to the sound of ‘Killer Queen’. He looked swamped by his baggy suit, his hair thinner and his clean-shaven face haggard beneath a layer of make-up. After May’s acceptance speech, and a quick word from Taylor, Mercury leaned hesitantly towards the microphone, quietly said, ‘Thank you, goodnight’, and disappeared into the wings.
At the anniversary party afterwards, more than three hundred guests crowded the Groucho Club in Soho. Inside, Mercury was photographed with Liza Minnelli, the star of what Queen’s first producer John Anthony remembered as Freddie’s favourite movie, Cabaret. Outside, scenting blood, a press photographer snapped the singer leaving the club looking, frankly, terrible. Joe Fanelli’s complaint to the newspaper that Mercury was just ‘a little pissed, like everyone else’ fell on deaf ears. The speculation about Mercury’s health continued.
May found a brief respite from it all, joining his old 1984 bandmates (minus Tim Staffell) at bassist Dave Dilloway’s house. ‘Brian hadn’t changed,’ says Dave. ‘He was sat there, playing away, while the conversation went on around him. At the time, he must have k
nown Freddie had AIDS.’
Before long, Fanelli would break the news that he had AIDS. Freddie had met Joe almost fifteen years before and they had been lovers, but since the end of their relationship Fanelli had been Mercury’s chef. Knowing that Joe would have to leave Garden Lodge after his own death, Mercury brought him a house in Chiswick. It was the first of several magnanimous gestures in what would turn out to be his final year. Jim Hutton would also take the test in secret, only to discover that he, too, was HIV positive. ‘I was dazed,’ he said later. ‘But I didn’t tell Freddie. He had enough to worry about.’ Before long, and to help Hutton and Peter Freestone administer his medication, Mercury would be fitted with a Hickman line on his chest.
Mercury’s bandmates could only wait until their singer was ready to start work again. May began writing the music to the London Riverside Theatre’s production of Macbeth, and Taylor went back to singing in his own band. In March, The Cross put out their second album, Mad Bad and Dangerous to Know. Taylor had found a deal with EMI, and had thrown the songwriting open to his bandmates. The album had a harder sound, with ‘Top of the World’ like a reworking of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’. It was a marked improvement on Shove It, but the group faced the same problems. ‘I’ve never been able to convince people that it’s a group,’ Taylor protested. ‘Everybody writes, everybody shares the money equally, really it’s not the Roger Taylor solo experience.’ The album failed to chart, and every interview with The Cross invariably included questions about Queen, Freddie …
Come July, Queen had decamped to London’s Metropolis Studios, a facility owned by their former engineer Gary Langan. Gary had been there when Queen heard the first playback of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. In 1985, he had stood at the side of the stage at Live Aid (‘When I’m finally popping my clogs, that will be one of the moments I take to my grave’). Langan had heard the rumours, and was shocked by the change in Mercury’s appearance. ‘The whole thing had taken its toll,’ he says. ‘We bumped into each other at Metropolis and had a few words, but he was trying to be as private as possible. It wasn’t a great thing to see.’
