Freddie Mercury: The Biography

by Laura Jackson

  From previous experience, no one seriously anticipated glowing reviews. But neither did they expect the music press to savage them. One reviewer described their debut album as ‘a bucket of stale urine’, and it was hard to imagine going further down than that. They were slated as lacking depth and feeling, even denounced as ‘the dregs of glam rock’. Fortunately, the critics were once more out of step with the public, who were nightly enjoying the gigs. At the critical point of live contact between band and audience, Queen were thriving, which was essentially what mattered most.

  Keeping this in mind, Queen concentrated on perfecting their art. Each member of the band worked on his individual performance, carving out his own particular niche, though it was clear that Mercury was the band’s dynamo. He dominated the stage, a hugely flamboyant and captivating front man.

  The band was never known as Freddie Mercury and Queen. Tony Brainsby says that Mercury never tried to lord it over the rest of the band, and in interviews Mercury himself would correct any slip of the tongue and talk of how he enjoyed singing ‘our songs’. Nevertheless, on stage, as he paraded and pirouetted in an electrifying performance before an audience that came to number hundreds of thousands, he must have felt uniquely potent.

  Those who knew Mercury are unanimous that he was quiet and reserved in private and among strangers. This didn’t stop his alter ego from giving free rein to his increasingly mercurial moods, both on stage and at after-gig celebrations. Queen were halfway through their tour when, at Stirling University, one of only two gigs they played in Scotland, a riot broke out. The pitched battle in the hall resulted in four people being hospitalised, two with stab wounds.

  With the press already tagging them with lurid headlines, they performed further south on the Isle of Man at the Palace Lido, where they courted controversy again. In Douglas a party spun out of control, and, it was said, a hotel room was wrecked. Their subdued return to the mainland the next day was brightened by the news that their new album had got to number seven. Furthermore Queen, which had so far disappointingly underperformed, benefited from Queen II’s popularity and enjoyed a passable number forty-seven in the top hundred albums.

  Although press accusations of inciting riots were unwelcome, there is no doubt that the coverage helped to publicise the band’s existence. By the tour’s end, their shows were regularly sold out, and fans were becoming vocal in their adulation. Queen were now keen to play the bigger venues, and the prestigious Rainbow Theatre in London certainly fell into this category. Their gig there on 31 March was special, even though it was marred earlier on in the day.

  Perhaps it was fatigue setting in at the end of a hectic tour or his first taste of fan adulation going to his head, but in the afternoon Mercury began behaving like a prima donna during the sound check. It was enough to goad the normally patient Brian May into calling him an old tart. Mercury responded by stalking off and staying away just long enough to make everyone anxious. Calls from May over the mike got Mercury back on stage, peeved but prepared to return to work. It wouldn’t be the last time tensions emerged among the four, but it appears that Mercury would usually emerge as the peace broker.

  Their Rainbow gig, before a capacity crowd, turned out to be one of their most memorable. Sound engineer John Harris experimented to brilliant effect with the hall’s acoustics, while Roger Taylor poured beer on top of one of his drums, so that each time he struck it, it sent up a frothy spray. Freddie Mercury, in the Zandra Rhodes creation he called his ‘eagle suit’, shone that night. At every opportunity he spun round, swirling his arms to show off the mass of silky knife pleats that splayed out behind him. The sheer panache of the performance was enough to silence many of their critics in the music press and elicited a second good review from Rosemary Horide.

  Elated by the experience, the news that Queen II, newly released in the States, had struggled to reach number eighty-three was in no way deflating. Mercury was confident that his stage triumphs would be repeated in America, where they were touring as support to Mott the Hoople. The US tour was due to kick off in under a week. Apart from the odd European gig and their recent trip to Australia, they hadn’t had much opportunity to win over an overseas audience. The American market was massive, and it was vital for Queen to make their mark. It sounded like fun, especially with the bonus that they got on so well with Hoople. But they must have been aware that after their album’s slack performance, they had a lot to prove from Elektra’s point of view.

  Flying out on the 12th, the tour started four days later. They travelled from Denver to Kansas City, St Louis to Memphis, initially with a muted reception at each gig. Because Queen records had done nothing in America so far, it wasn’t surprising that the crowds didn’t recognise the songs. Their stage image, too, was not what American audiences expected, and Freddie Mercury, pouting and posing in clingy costumes, did not fit the stereotype of heterosexual rock. The crowds took quickly to Queen’s music, though, and what began as diffident acceptance grew warmer as each night progressed.

  Life on the road was tougher than they’d been used to. The distances covered by travelling between cities were much greater than in Britain, and, once there, things didn’t necessarily go smoothly. At the Farm Arena in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for example, an argument erupted between Queen and the American band Aerosmith. They had both been booked to play support that night, and bickered about who was entitled to go on stage first. With professional pride at stake, neither side wanted to budge. But, essentially, such vanity was of little consequence.

  Then something occurred unexpectedly to blight their entire trip. Three weeks into the tour they played New York City, with six consecutive nights at the Uris Theatre. Halfway through, Brian May began to feel unwell, and after the final gig on 12 May he collapsed. Attributing this to fatigue, he was advised to rest before their next performance in Boston. But the first morning he awoke in the city’s Parker House Hotel, it became clear his condition was more serious.

  May turned out to have hepatitis, which came as a bombshell to Mercury. Besides his natural concern for May, he had been worried that they might need to pull out of a couple of their imminent gigs. On discovering it was a potentially dangerous, certainly contagious, illness, he realised that their first assault on the American public was over.

  Dispatched back to Britain, May was hospitalised, while all those with whom he had been in contact were immunised against the virus. Mercury refused to see developments as having ruined their chances in America, maintaining, ‘We did what we had to do. Sure, a whole tour would have helped us more, but there’s no such thing as, “We lost our chance.”’ Encouraged by the write-ups they went on to receive, he was convinced that their time there would come again. Reassuring May that he had not let them down, the other three band members started to write some new material.

  To put these ideas into practice, work began at Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, early in June, by which time Brian May had decided he was fit to join them. He spent most days, however, being sick and was visibly weak. When recording began on their third album at four different studios the following month, his fragility culminated in collapse. Rushed to King’s College Hospital, he underwent emergency surgery for a duodenal ulcer. Because of his need to convalesce, Queen’s planned return to the States had to be abandoned.

  Mercury was aware of how inveterate a worrier May was, and guessed correctly that while they were busy in the studio with producer Roy Thomas Baker, he was convincing himself in hospital that the band would consider replacing him. So again he visited him there to put his mind at rest.

  Superficially jokey and quick to clown, privately Mercury saw himself as mothering the band. For years he had proved to be a trusted confidant to friends, and he could as effectively heal a row within Queen as much as cause one. When it came to health, he was acutely conscious of May’s needs. In response to press queries about the band’s reaction to their abortive US tour, Freddie said, ‘Brian has got to look after himself in the
future. We all want to make sure something like that never happens again. So he’ll have to eat the right things and steer clear of hamburgers. I tend to worry about him a lot because he’ll never ask for anything if he’s not feeling well.’

  While they put the finishing touches to their new album at Sarm Studios, Queen II earned the band a silver disc. It had sold in excess of 100,000 copies during the first six months. This heralded an upsurge in media interest: interest that they greeted with caution, considering the journalistic treatment meted out to them so far. Brian admits: ‘I still had the naive belief that if you opened your heart to the press, they’d be fair to you.’

  It had also been over six months since their only hit single, and a decision had to be made about which of the intended thirteen new album tracks should be extracted first. As on the previous albums, Roger Taylor had contributed a track; John Deacon made his songwriting debut with ‘Misfire’; and ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ was the first number to be credited collectively to all four members. Brian May made his regulation four contributions, while the rest were Mercury’s, and it was one of his songs that became their autumn single release. A fortnight later, on 26 October 1974, ‘Killer Queen’ raced up the charts to number two, only blocked by the David Essex hit ‘Gonna Make You a Star’.

  David Essex later considered Queen the best British band to have come out of the seventies: ‘Freddie’s voice was absolutely unique. Image quickly took over from music, but with Queen their musical ability obviously had the staying power, where others vanished.’

  ‘Killer Queen’, in particular, is Essex’s favourite Queen record: ‘With their stacked-up voices and guitar work, it was extremely well produced and very clever.’

  This is a view endorsed by Oscar-winning lyricist Sir Tim Rice, who a decade later would become personal friends with Freddie Mercury: ‘I hadn’t particularly liked “Seven Seas of Rhye” at first, although I got to like it better when I knew the band, but it was “Killer Queen” which really turned me on to Queen. The composition of its lyrics was quite sophisticated, particularly for its time. I have absolutely no doubt about Freddie’s immense talent as a songwriter.’

  Mercury was proud of what he dubbed the ‘bowler hat, black suspender belt number’. ‘People are used to hard rock, energy music from Queen,’ he declared. ‘Yet with this single you almost expect Noël Coward to sing it.’ With a number two hit to their credit, the public assumed that Queen had reached the big time. But although ‘Killer Queen’ was a turning point in their career, they were still impoverished, as the state of some of their living accommodation proved. But the illusion of success had to be maintained, and for this Mercury’s gift for exaggeration came in useful. Without a scrap of modesty, he would say proudly, ‘The reason we’re so successful, darling? My overall charisma of course!’ Years later the tables turned when, genuinely wealthy, Mercury annoyed the rest of the band with boasts that they were all ‘simply dripping with money’.

  As Zandra Rhodes reflected, a large part of Queen’s initial success lay in their look. But it was a visually challenging time, with each act adopting a gimmick – be it Leo Sayer dressing up as the French pantomime character Pierrot, or Mud in their zoot suits and brothel creepers. At a college dance one night Mercury was struggling with an ancient microphone stand when its heavy base suddenly fell off. Left with only the top half of the chrome shaft, he realised it wasn’t only much lighter to manoeuvre, but easier to move suggestively over his body and face. By the time he sang ‘Killer Queen’ on Top of the Pops, twisting the shiny rod skywards, his fingertips groping their way sensually up its length, this had become as much his hallmark as his long black feathercut hair and scoop-neck leotards.

  Mercury’s stage act was a polished extension of his image on the college-band circuit, when his performance was heavy with homosexual overtones. A lead singer usually has his strongest on-stage affinity with the band’s lead guitarist, and Mercury was fond of sliding his shoulder up against Brian May’s right side, apparently deriving an ambiguous pleasure in the process. At the height of the glam era, he wasn’t the only one perpetuating a bisexual image, but whereas Sweet, for example, were taken to be joking, Mercury’s intentions were less clear.

  He wanted to reinforce this image when Queen embarked on a European tour at the end of October. From Manchester to Barcelona, the trip had been arranged to replace their abortive return to America. Undeterred by their experience in Australia, the performance included an impressive light show, with an experimental fireworks display. Fans loved it, but music-press critics were quick to dismiss it as pure theatrics.

  Pure showbiz probably most accurately describes Mercury’s approach to performance, and he would have stormed the Edwardian music halls. He saw no reason to apologise for his enthusiasm for expression. At times, especially during the punishing US tours, that enthusiasm would be tested, but performing came as naturally to Freddie Mercury as breathing. His desire to draw the very last ounce of response from his audience drove him to establish a unique emotional bond with the fans, sometimes to a dangerous extent.

  Nine days into the tour, fans at Glasgow’s Apollo Theatre were chanting and waving, just below the footlights. In a second’s mistiming, Mercury got too close, and in a flash, a sea of hands had pulled him off stage and into the hysterical mob. Security guards plunged after him and retrieved him, breathless and frightened, but unharmed. Learning that Mercury was in their midst, however, fans at the back had surged forward in a stampede that turned ugly. With Mercury rescued, frustrations erupted, and fights broke out, resulting in a few bruises, and damage to several rows of seats.

  That same day, 8 November, saw the release of Queen’s third album, Sheer Heart Attack. Four days later it went on sale in the States. Then the following week they returned to London’s Rainbow Theatre. Originally just one gig had been planned, but the huge demand for tickets had ensured a second consecutive date, and it was also decided to film, as well as record, them. If nothing else, this could provide a live album later.

  Queen left for Gothenburg soon afterwards to commence the European leg of their tour, playing sell-out gigs and reaping the rewards with rising album sales. Although it was difficult to deny their increasing popularity – voted by Sun readers as Britain’s Best Live Act of 1974 – their old adversaries continued to confront them. It got to be a no-win situation. Given their track record, all four band members were wary of talking to journalists they felt were ready to trap them. The press in turn took this lack of compliance as further proof of Queen’s conceit. And Mercury, in particular, with his provocative posturing and pronouncements, remained their biggest target. He was close to refusing interviews, which was a problem for Tony Brainsby.

  ‘Over the years a myth has grown around Freddie, that from the start he rarely gave interviews,’ says Brainsby. ‘That’s not true. In the very early days, of course he did them. Any aspiring pop star has to, otherwise they don’t get their name known. Freddie, for example, did tons of stuff for Jackie and the teeny-bop magazines. He’d wave and throw around a few “my dears” and really give out his great fruity laugh. One of the things I remember most about Freddie is his rich resonant laugh.

  ‘There were no set preconditions, but every time Freddie was asked about his background he’d toss back an answer, without really answering. For a long time no one in the press had a clue even what his real name was. Freddie avoided at all costs mentioning Zanzibar, I think because he thought it might make him look a bit too Asian. It wasn’t meant in a prejudicial way. He just didn’t think it fitted the image. He desperately didn’t want to be thought of, or seen as, an unlikely rock star.’

  As 1974 drew to a close, on the band’s return to Britain, they became involved in another round of frustrating talks with Trident. There had been salary disagreements for some time, and with a third album out and their popularity growing, Queen’s horizons were higher than ever.

  Mercury and Mary Austin were still living together in Kensington in r
easonable comfort. Home for Brian May was a dingy room in the basement of a rambling old house, while John Deacon had become engaged to his longtime sweetheart, Veronica Tetzlaff. They hoped to start married life in something more salubrious than Deacon’s current home.

  The band was also concerned about mounting debts for lighting and sound services. This was not peculiar to Queen, and indeed it became no better for many later bands. Queen had no intention of standing still, however, and when the Sheffields proved impervious to their pressure, they hired music-business lawyer Jim Beach to examine their contracts for a way out of their association.

  Glad to escape this tense predicament, Mercury anticipated the new year ahead. He had recently declared the need for a break but added, ‘You’ve got to push yourself. We’re at a stage in our careers, my dear, where it’s just got to be done. I shall be resting on my laurels soon.’

  On 17 January 1975 their fourth single, ‘Now I’m Here’, written by May while recovering from his operation, was released. In early February, at last, Queen’s first headlining tour of America and Canada began, followed closely by their first tour of Japan. They were set to kick off on 5 February with a gig at the Agora Theater in Columbus, and Tony Brainsby fully understood why they felt nervous.

  ‘Queen’s effect on America had been slow,’ he admits. ‘But this happened with most bands. It goes back to the sixties, when US bands couldn’t get arrested in their own country. Only British bands counted, and, I think, come the seventies, that it was simply a backlash of this; that Americans, in simplistic terms, got their own back by being downright cool to any English band.’

  Steeped in hard-rock machismo, US audience reaction to Mercury’s foppishness, too, was hard to gauge. Certainly one bemused TV presenter declared Mercury, ‘One of life’s originals!’ adding, as a camera trailed him sashaying through a deserted shopping mall, casually flicking a bull whip, ‘So far Freddie Mercury shows no signs of succumbing to conservatism!’