by Mark Blake
More than a year after his death, the posthumous Freddie Mercury/Queen industry rolled on. The Five Live EP, featuring George Michael and Queen’s version of ‘Somebody to Love’, raced to number 1; Mercury’s childhood stamp collection, once pored over by his first English friends at Isleworth Polytechnic, was sold at Sotheby’s auction house for £8,000, while India heralded Freddie as ‘The First Asian Pop Star’; a role he had, frankly, never acknowledged in his lifetime.
There was still one other unresolved issue. There was enough material in the vaults for Mercury’s bandmates to consider releasing another Queen album. A prescient Roger Taylor referred to the dormant Queen album as ‘the difficult child’. Interviewed on Virgin Radio in June 1993, Brian May told the DJ Richard Skinner that ‘there is a bit of material, but probably not enough for a whole album’, admitting that the whole issue of another Queen record was ‘something we don’t find it easy to agree about at the moment’. Not for the first time, May would insist that ‘there cannot be a Queen without Freddie’.
However, in September, with May away on tour, Taylor and John Deacon had played together at a charity gig at West Sussex’s Cowdray Park. In the New Year, the pair booked a studio and began sifting through Queen’s leftover songs. At some point they began adding drums and bass to the material. At which point, Brian May stepped in. ‘The remaining new material is very precious stuff,’ he said in spring 1994. ‘The most important consideration is that this final collection must be worthy of the name Queen, so I’ve been delving very deep.’ Later, May would admit: ‘I took the tapes off them [Deacon and Taylor], felt that they’d done it wrong, and spent months putting it all back together.’ It was a process that would carry on until the early part of the following year. But May had relented: there would be another Queen album.
In May 1994, BBC radio listeners voted ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ number 1 in their All-Time Top 100 Songs. In the same month, Roger Taylor released a new solo single. The track, ‘Nazis 1994’, was unlikely to make even the staunchest fans’ All-Time Top 100 Songs. ‘I thought at my stage in life I might as well write about something I believed, that meant something,’ he explained, adding, ‘You can’t write pop songs all your life.’
‘Nazis 1994’ was an attack on Holocaust deniers and the recent rise of far right politics. However good its intentions, it was hamstrung by some extremely poor lyrics, and open to misinterpretation. Asked what he thought of the song, Brian May was guarded. ‘You have to be clear what signals you put out,’ he said. ‘If you say a word like “Nazis”, people’s ideas are triggered. You can’t make subtle statements like that in our market. It’s a pity because Roger’s message was the opposite from how it was perceived.’
In September, Taylor followed the single with another solo album, Happiness?, recorded in his newly built home studio, Cosford Mill. Taylor’s concerns ranged from fascism, to the starving poor, to personal alienation. Like Brian May’s ‘Nothing But Blue’, one song, ‘Old Friends’, was inspired by Mercury, while ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’ was a tirade against the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose newspaper the Sun had been among Mercury’s most ardent pursuers. Sales were encouraging, and Happiness? shifted more copies than any of The Cross albums, persuading Taylor to go out on what would be his first solo tour, playing Europe, the UK and Queen’s old stronghold Japan. Songs from the new record would be mixed with ‘A Kind of Magic’, ‘Radio Ga Ga’, ‘I Want to Break Free’, ‘We Will Rock You’ … And it was that back catalogue which always drew the biggest applause of the night.
In the summer of 1995, after months of speculation, Queen announced their plans to release another album. ‘It has not been easy,’ confessed John Deacon. ‘As Roger, Brian and myself see things differently, and coming to an agreement between us takes time.’ Queen immediately invited members of their fan club to suggest titles for the album. Roger Taylor’s friends from Cornwall, Pat and Sue Johnstone, had started Queen’s fan club in 1973. Since 1982, the club had been run by Jacky Smith (née Gunn), who had co-authored with Queen expert Jim Jenkins, the group’s semi-official biography, Queen: As It Began.
In the end, the album would be titled Made in Heaven, after one of its songs. But the title also seemed like a mawkish acknowledgement of the circumstances in which it had been made. Made in Heaven would run to thirteen complete songs, with one track, ‘Yeah’, lasting just four seconds. ‘It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle,’ May told Q magazine. ‘But I wouldn’t have put my seal of approval on it if I hadn’t thought it was up to standard.’ The jigsaw had been assembled from more than a decade’s worth of material by a crack production team of Queen, David Richards, Justin-Shirley Smith and Joshua J. Macrae. The oldest song, ‘It’s a Beautiful Day’, was a relic from 1980’s The Game; the newest, ‘Mother Love’, had been from Mercury’s final recording session, and was an incredibly assured vocal performance from what had been a dying man. The song’s closing seconds were said to include sped-up snippets of every Queen song ever recorded
Ultimately, it was Mercury who saved the day. Even the weakest material was salvaged by that voice. The Mercury-sung versions of Roger Taylor’s ‘Heaven for Everyone’ and May’s recent hit single, ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’ knocked both originals into a cocked hat. The rest of the album was a tribute to his bandmates’ and producers’ diligence. Somehow, they had laboriously stitched it all together to make a coherent record. ‘It was a huge job,’ admitted Brian May. ‘Two years of my life finding a way of developing the songs, but at the same time using the limited input we had from Freddie. Sometimes there was just a complete first-take vocal, while other times there were no more than three or four lines.’ May also admitted: ‘It took a couple of weeks to get over the sound of Freddie. The worst thing were the little spoken ad-libs between the takes.’ The album included a final, hidden track: an instrumental, near-ambient piece of music that lasted for over twenty-two minutes on the CD version, and ended with Mercury’s voice uttering the single word ‘Fab’. The front cover artwork showed a silhouette of sculptor Irena Sedlecka’s statue of the singer, which was officially unveiled at Lake Geneva the following year. In the absence of conventional promo videos, Queen had also commissioned directors from the British Film Institute to produce short films to accompany each track.
Released on 6 November 1995, Made in Heaven emerged just weeks before The Beatles’ posthumous single, ‘Free as a Bird’; a John Lennon demo that had been completed by his bandmates and producer Jeff Lynne. Queen would enjoy less of the goodwill extended to The Beatles in what The Times called ‘the battle of the bands with dead singers’. Of the music papers, NME was the most visceral in its criticism: ‘Made in Heaven is vulgar, creepy, sickly and in dubious taste.’ It was the circumstances of its creation, the sleight of hand and what NME called ‘the multi-tracking like mad’ that made some reviewers uncomfortable. ‘The immediate question must be: what manner of tasteless, barrel-scraping are the surviving members of Queen involved in now?’ asked Q magazine, before praising Made in Heaven as ‘a better album than Innuendo.’
There was, however, something almost relentless about Queen’s latest campaign. Barely a week after the posthumous collection came another box set, Ultimate Queen, presented in a wall-mounted case for those fans with especially deep pockets and questionable judgement in home furnishings. On top of this came the Queen video documentary Champions of the World, a Channel 4 documentary about Queen, and a BBC Radio 1 special. Showing great foresight, though largely unreported at the time, Queen also launched their own website in November.
Whatever doubt critics and fans may have had about Made in Heaven, the evidence suggested that, to quote Spinal Tap at the Mercury tribute concert, ‘Freddie would have wanted it.’ Interviewed in German Rolling Stone, co-producer David Richards insisted, ‘If he [Freddie] wouldn’t have wanted this album so badly, he wouldn’t have recorded so many songs. The fact that Freddie wanted this album finished gave us strength.’ Brian May followed the same partyline. But wi
th some reservations. ‘The last album is one of the most ridiculously painful experiences creatively I have ever had,’ he told Radio 1. ‘But I’m sure the quality’s good, partly because we did have those arguments. Whether it’s healthy for life or not is another matter.’
Made in Heaven didn’t disappoint the band or EMI. Another number 1 hit, it also yielded five Top 20 UK singles, although one, ‘Let Me Live’ (conjured out of a snippet of Mercury from 1983), was banned from the BBC Radio 1 playlist on the grounds that Queen were too old for the station’s new young demographic. In America, though, Made in Heaven only just registered in the Top 60. Brian May’s parting shot from 1995 suggested that he planned to move on in his life and career, without Queen: ‘Having had twenty years of this very volatile democracy, I don’t feel I need it in my life any more.’ This would prove easier said than done.
Without Queen to distract them, the surviving members went back to real life. For John Deacon, it was an easy transition. His brood now included a sixth child, Cameron, born during the Made in Heaven sessions. Asked what he did with himself these days, the lapsed bass player said, ‘I am mainly involved with looking after the children at home.’ Roger Taylor also had a new addition, a daughter named Tiger Lily, born in 1994, but, before long, he was writing songs for another solo album.
Brian May filled his time with guest spots, tracks for children’s movie soundtracks, charity gigs and records, Jimi Hendrix, Shadows and Mott The Hoople tribute albums … It was Mott The Hoople’s ex-keyboard player Morgan Fisher that approached May for the tribute disc. ‘R.E.M. and Aerosmith were supposedly up for it,’ he chuckles. ‘But I was living in Japan and I had no lawyer, no management … So it ended up becoming a Japanese Mott The Hoople tribute album with Japanese bands. By then, Brian had already done “All the Way from Memphis”. I had to write and say, “Look, I’m sorry, the project’s off, I have to do a Japanese one.” To his great credit, he came back and said, “Put my song on anyway. I can be your guest foreigner.”’
Fisher had toured Europe with Queen in the early 1980s, before being told his services were no longer required. May’s involvement with the tribute album was a rapprochement of sorts. Yet when Fisher crossed paths with Roger Taylor at rehearsals for a tribute concert to Mott’s late guitarist Mick Ronson, ‘there was not much spoken between us.’ Then again, as May once put it, ‘I’ve always been too much of a nice guy, I’m such a pleaser. Freddie was never like that. A kid could be waiting outside for five hours, and Freddie would be like, “Oh, fuck off, darling, I need my rest.” I’m the nice guy who sits there signing everything that’s put in front of me.’
Though nobody knew it at the time, there was also a pattern emerging to some of May’s outside work. In October 1991, a month before Mercury’s death, Brian had played at the Guitar Legends concert in Seville. For the show’s finale, May had joined vocalist Paul Rodgers on a version of Free’s ‘All Right Now’. Two years on, May had played on Rodgers’ album, Muddy Water Blues: A Tribute to Muddy Waters. In February 1994, May joined him during his gig at London’s Kentish Town Forum, and again that summer at Rodgers’ show in Montreux. But it would be some time before both parties chose to make the arrangement more permanent.
In January 1997, the Queen trio made their first public performance together since the Mercury tribute concert. Deacon, May and Taylor joined Elton John to close the opening-night performance of a new ballet, Le Presbytère (A Ballet For Life), partly inspired by Mercury and his fight against AIDS. The quartet would perform ‘The Show Must Go On’ in Paris at the Théâtre National de Chaillot. Brian May would scoop another Ivor Novello award that year for ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’, while the more May-centric end of the Queen songbook was revisited for the Queen Rocks compilation album. ‘We wanted to remind people that we were always a rock band,’ he explained. ‘Personally, I’d rather people just bought Queen II.’ Nevertheless, Deacon, May and Taylor joined forces to record a new song for the compilation. The ballad, ‘No One But You (Only The Good Die Young)’ was the album’s one moment of restraint.
Back at his Allerton Hill home studio, May was completing a new solo album. Another World was released in June 1998. It had begun life as a covers record, but ended up containing a mix of original material (including songs originally written for TV and the Gwyneth Paltrow movie, Sliding Doors) alongside Mott The Hoople’s ‘All The Way From Memphis’ and Jimi Hendrix’s ‘One Rainy Wish’. There were special guests, including Jeff Beck, Ian Hunter and Taylor Hawkins, the Queen-worshipping drummer with US rock band Foo Fighters. Just two months before release, May was holidaying in Africa when he learned that Cozy Powell had been killed in a car accident. It was a dreadful blow. ‘I get very depressed quite often,’ he admitted, ‘and Cozy could always lift you out of it.’ He remixed one song, ‘The Business’, as a tribute to Powell, waspishly telling Q magazine, ‘I’m sure that somebody somewhere will complain that I’m trading off his memory.’
With Powell’s replacement, Kiss drummer Eric Singer, The Brian May Band went out on the road for the rest of the year, playing the UK, Europe, Russia, Japan and Australia. Another World made it into the UK Top 30, selling to ardent Queen fans and guitar aficionados. ‘Truthfully, I’d love somebody to come up to me and say, “I love your new record … it’s new and it’s different,”’ said May, ‘rather than, “How do you do that guitar effect on A Night at the Opera?”’
Just two months after May’s Another World, Roger Taylor returned to the fray. Never shy about making his views known, Taylor had just donated £10,000 to the campaign by Manchester United Supporters Association to stop broadcasting giants BSkyB from taking over their football team. BSkyB was owned by media giant Rupert Murdoch, whom Taylor had savaged in his song ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’. Meanwhile, his new album, Electric Fire, found him sticking the boot into lazy journalists, greedy lawyers and wife-beaters. The music vaulted from hard rock to pop to ballads to a cover of John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’; some of it let down by what one music magazine described as ‘our host’s baffling lyrical conceits’.
Electric Fire was promoted with a concert from the drummer’s home studio, re-named The Cyberbarn, and broadcast across the internet. It received a record number of 595,000 online views. In March, the following year, Taylor returned to play a brief UK tour, joined onstage in Wolverhampton by Brian May for ‘Under Pressure’. But the album still stalled outside the Top 50. As Taylor pointed out: ‘Mick Jagger is one of the biggest stars and he can’t sell a solo record.’
Another World’s sleeve note had included a dedication to Brian May’s personal assistant Julie Glover for ‘management, therapy and day care’. Julie had been a mainstay of Queen Productions before working exclusively for the guitarist. It was she who broke the news to May that Freddie Mercury had died. In August 1999, the Sunday Mirror ran a story claiming that Brian had been having an affair with Julie (‘his glamorous Girl Friday’) behind his partner Anita Dobson’s back. All parties remained silent over the story, but Glover quit her job soon after.
Before long, another newspaper wrote that May had booked himself into the Cottonwood Clinic in Tucson, Arizona, a retreat describing itself as ‘the premiere holistic behavioural health and addiction treatment centre’. The reason: his so-called ‘addiction to lover Anita Dobson’. Again, neither May nor Dobson would comment. But in recent interviews May had talked candidly about his emotional problems. ‘I was always screwed up about sex,’ he told Mojo’s David Thomas. ‘I got married at totally the wrong time. In the midst of all this, I’m trying to be a husband and a good father to my kids. So that really excluded me from being wildly promiscuous. But emotionally I became utterly out of control, needy for that one-to-one reinforcement, feelings of love and discovery, and that’s what I became addicted to.’
It was also odd, if illuminating, to read the guitarist pouring his heart out to a celebrity magazine. ‘I’ve had serious battles with depression,’ he told OK’s Martin Townsend. ‘It sounds st
upid, because people think, “Poor little rich bastard.” But it doesn’t make any difference what your situation is.’ Asked about his on-off relationship with Anita Dobson, May volunteered the titbit: ‘I didn’t think I could ever be with someone that didn’t like Led Zeppelin! And the stuff she likes I got dragged into by my heels … the whole world of musical theatre made me physically ill … and still occasionally does.’ Like his earlier statement that ‘there cannot be a Queen without Freddie’, May’s comment about musical theatre would come back to haunt him. Interviewed some years later, May quietly acknowledged the Cottonwood Clinic for helping him out of the depression ‘so deep that I had to admit powerlessness, and ask for help’. In November 2000, after spending several months apart, May married Anita Dobson at a private ceremony in Richmond register office.
Away from his troubled private life, the guitarist seemed to spend his free time playing live with anyone that asked: Motörhead, Foo Fighters, Spike Edney’s rock ensemble, the SAS Band … EMI managed to squeeze out another Top 5 album with Queen’s Greatest Hits III, while Roger Taylor enraged ‘some crusty old duffers’, when his image appeared behind Freddie Mercury’s on one of the Royal Mail’s Millennium stamps. As one prominent philatelist pointed out: ‘The Royal Mail has broken the strict rule that no living person other than a member of the Royal Family may appear on a postage stamp.’ Others complained that Mercury, ‘a hedonistic gay man’, was on a stamp in the first place.
In spring 2000, the Queen duo came back to work together, ruffling feathers by performing ‘We Will Rock You’ with the all-singing, all-dancing pop group 5ive at the BRIT Awards. Some fans griped about their heroes demeaning themselves by performing with a boy band. Yet the look on both musicians’ faces when the stage curtains parted, the dry ice plumed and they crashed into the song’s mid-section suggested May and Taylor missed the thrill of playing live.
