In his personal life, he had the best of both worlds – something he managed to maintain almost to the end of his life. Mary Austin, although no longer his sexual partner, still loved him and worked closely with him in her role with Goose Productions. At the same time he indulged in the sexual freedom that he had exchanged their relationship for. With his escalating drug abuse, his existence had become a cliché of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. It was a lifestyle fraught with dangers, some of which he must have been aware. But not of AIDS. It would not be long, however, before the word would begin to be mentioned in whispers throughout the gay communities of the world.
NINE
Shifting Sands
Mercury’s intention to keep in touch with Tony Bastin had to be put on hold for the first quarter of 1980. Work at Musicland Studios, on both Queen’s new album and the Flash Gordon soundtrack, kept him in Munich; a situation that suited him. The city’s reputation for a notoriously uninhibited nightlife was well deserved, and Mercury formed some of his closest friendships there. But weeks of excess, of combining heavy recording sessions with hectic nightclubbing, had begun to take their toll. It was fortunate that, in March, Mercury had to make a quick return trip to London.
The new single ‘Save Me’ had been greeted by the rock critics’ usual disdain, but it scarcely mattered. Reviews had long ago served as the least reliable gauge of the band’s global popularity. ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, in addition to having topped the US charts, had repeated this success in five other countries. But Mercury’s flying visit to Britain was not business, nor was it purely pleasure. He was primarily honouring a promise to Kenny Everett to make a rare television appearance on one of his zany weekly shows. As Everett announced contenders for the ‘British Eurovision Violence Contest’, a leather-clad Mercury joined him on set, holding a can of carbonated drink. He promptly yanked off the can’s ring pull, so close to Everett that the fizzy contents spurted all over his face. ‘Good start,’ quipped Everett and carried on talking to the camera. Clearly unscripted, Mercury sprang on the comedian, wrapping his arms and legs around Everett’s body and unbalancing them both. As they crashed to the studio floor, they rolled around in a mock brawl.
Mercury’s friendship with Everett would survive into the mid-eighties, but tales would later surface of their acrimonious split after a bitter row over drugs. This, however, appears to owe more to fiction than fact. In 1995 Kenny Everett died of AIDS, but his agent, Jo Gurnett, says, ‘Kenny admired Freddie like mad and adored everything he did. They were very good friends. Their falling out is a bit of a grey area, but I know that it was a minor disagreement between them, after which they just seemed to drift apart.’
‘Freddie’s career took him away a lot, and certainly Ev’s television work occupied most of his time, too. Kenny didn’t see Freddie latterly. He would have liked to, but it was just one of those things. Then Freddie was too sick, and Kenny himself was too sick … I remember Kenny, in the late stages of his illness, when he knew he was dying, saying about Freddie and their lost closeness, “Oh, well, we’ll all be up there together, and maybe then we will make it up.”’
For some time Mercury’s London base had been a comfortable flat at 12 Stafford Terrace in Kensington, but he had succumbed to the lure of owning a status symbol luxury mansion. He had no desire actually to move house – content simply to possess something sumptuous of his own. Mary Austin had been watching the property market for him, and as it appears that Mercury was unwilling to move out of Kensington, this narrowed his options. Still Austin found a house that hooked him immediately.
Garden Lodge, 1 Logan Place, was a splendid twenty-eight-room Georgian mansion, set in a quarter-acre of manicured garden and surrounded by a high brick wall. Mercury went to view it and stepped first into the large entrance hall, dominated by the sweep of an elegant staircase. This alone was enough to win his heart. Everything had been built to the grand scale that the star adored. Massive double doors flanked the hallway and opened into well-lit spacious rooms. One room, in particular, was spectacular, with long artist-studio windows at one end and a minstrels’ gallery at the other. The extensive garden ensured an appealing degree of privacy, and he swiftly decided to buy, paying £500,000 for it in cash. Garden Lodge had formerly belonged to Hoares, a banking family. As the new owner, Mercury impudently christened it ‘the whore house’. He had great plans for extensive renovations, which he immediately set in motion. He then returned to pick up the reins of his life in Munich.
On 30 May ‘Play the Game’ became Queen’s latest single. It fared respectably in the UK charts, but when its video was released, many fans were clearly unhappy. Their familiar Mercury was slipping away from them – replaced by a singer with cropped hair, no nail varnish and, what seemed to many the last straw, sporting a bushy moustache. In protest they flooded the band’s Notting Hill office with gifts of disposable razors and bottles of black varnish. But Mercury proved impervious to the message.
When The Game followed a month later, their discontent grew. Queen had always boasted that they did not use synthesisers to create their music, yet on this album they had done so. Having made such an issue of avoiding this device, many of their devotees felt let down. They were not prepared to be persuaded by what they saw as the band’s excuse that they had wanted to experiment with new technology. Not insensitive to their fans’ wishes, still Mercury agreed with the others that it would be unwise to be restricted by the past.
A part of his own past was at this time threatening to return. Mary Austin had played a key role in realising Mercury’s desire to own a property of note and was closely involved in all the renovations at Garden Lodge. Perhaps affected by this surface display of domesticity, Austin appears to have wished to rekindle their old romance. She is said to have asked Mercury to give her a child. But, when he’d ended their physical relationship, Mercury reputedly told her, ‘I still love you, but I can’t make love to you.’
For Mercury, four years on, that clearly hadn’t changed, and his response to Mary Austin’s very intimate request was gently to decline. ‘I’d rather have another cat,’ he said, which was not a facetious snub; his passion for cats was real and in time he owned about eight of them.
That summer, Mercury left with Queen to commence a mammoth tour. Starting on 30 June at the PNE Coliseum in Vancouver, it would end on 1 October with four consecutive nights at Madison Square Garden. It was during an internal flight between Boston and New York that Mercury met the handsome airline steward John Murphy. A former soldier, Murphy possessed the he-man physique guaranteed to catch Mercury’s eye. Although they were to strike up a rapport, they slept together only once, in Mercury’s Manhattan hotel suite. Their friendship, however, lasted several years. As with Joe Fanelli, who became one of the star’s closest confidants, being discarded by Mercury as a lover didn’t necessarily mean the end of the association. Mercury had an uncanny knack of turning yesterday’s lovers into loyal companions.
The tour was arduous, while airtight security left the band cocooned to the point of suffocation – especially now that they travelled everywhere in private planes. Pete Brown recalls: ‘Every day it was a case of arriving on a private airstrip, being ferried from the tarmac by limo to some plush hotel, hotel to gig and back the same route. It created a rarefied atmosphere that was driving them all mad.
‘People imagine that it’s a glamorous life, but it’s a damned hard slog. Someone would ask me, “How was Boston?” and I’d reply, “Boston had orange curtains and a blue bedspread.” They’d look at me funny, but that was what it was really like.’
To alleviate the strain, they took a couple of breaks, just long enough to get off the treadmill – and go home if desired – before returning to the relentless gigging. After one break, in August, John Deacon’s ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, was released. Again it was a departure for Queen, but its distinctive bass line overcame fans’ resistance and made it the darling of the discos. It was universally a sm
ash hit, selling 4.5 million copies in America alone. There it presided at number one for five weeks, one of three Queen singles to go platinum in the USA.
Since the song depended heavily on a combination of this powerful bass line and a piece of tight drumming, it was not easy to perform live. But ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ was so popular that it couldn’t be left out of Queen’s repertoire – and, besides, the number gave Mercury an invaluable opportunity. His delivery of ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ revitalised his status as a sex symbol. His performance had an ambiguous appeal to all genders.
At the Forum in Montreal, a well-toned Mercury stalked on stage to a wild reception, wearing only a pair of white shorts, a white baseball cap and a red neckerchief. The shorts were so tight that they later elicited some risqué queries from the press. The star took pleasure in declaring, ‘I don’t have a Coke bottle down there. It’s all mine.’ Barefoot and thrusting out his hairy chest, he ad-libbed during the tricky instrumental section, moving closer to the edge of the stage, repeatedly taunting the audience with the urge, ‘Bite it, bite it hard, baby!’ while he rubbed his taut lower stomach in simulated ecstasy.
In October 1980, at the end of their most gruelling tour to date, Queen returned to Britain. A European trip was scheduled for six weeks’ time, and there were finishing touches to be made to the film score before then. At home, Mercury spent his nights with Tony Bastin and his days, during early November, at London’s Anvil Studios. The cover concept for the album was his work, and he spent time experimenting with designs. When Queen went to Zurich to rehearse for their tour, Mercury surrounded himself with his usual entourage, whose hard core by now included Joe Fanelli, Paul Prenter and Peter Freestone. Only this time his lover went too.
‘Flash’s Theme’ came out shortly afterwards as the single from the soundtrack album, and by making the top ten it far outstripped Elektra’s choice in the US; ‘Need Your Loving Tonight’ languished at a disappointing forty-four in the Billboard chart.
On 8 December Flash Gordon was released to rave reviews. Any pleasure from this, however, evaporated when Mercury heard that John Lennon had been shot – apparently by a deranged fan – on his return from Record Plant Studios around 11.00 p.m.. It wasn’t just a brutal lesson on the dangers of how extreme adulation can mutate into fatal obsession. Recalling Hendrix’s demise a decade earlier, with Lennon’s death Queen felt they’d lost a hero. The following night at London’s Wembley Arena, in tribute they played Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. They were so distressed that Brian May forgot the chords and cut to the chorus. This threw the overwrought Mercury off his stride. If the audience noticed, they didn’t care; many were themselves already in tears. Mercury’s own mark of respect to Lennon was ‘Life is Real (Song for Lennon)’, which would later surface as a B-side to ‘Body Language’.
By the year’s end Queen became the first band to enter the Guinness Book of Records – listed among Britain’s highest paid executives. This achievement in no way diminished their desire for new territories, places where the spectacle of their live extravaganzas would be appreciated. In Rio de Janeiro their manager discussed arrangements with local promoters for a tour that would start in less than two months. The year 1981 was to mark the beginning of their love affair with South America.
Before that, in early February, the band returned to Tokyo. After the Japanese film première of Flash Gordon, Queen performed five sell-out gigs at the Budokan. The country that had started Queenmania had lost none of its enthusiasm, as shown by the annual polls in Music Life magazine. Mercury was voted top of his category, as was John Deacon, while Brian May and Roger Taylor took second place in their sections. Queen itself won the top award for best band, which added to Mercury’s delight at being back in his beloved Japan.
Mercury had been fascinated by Japanese culture for years. By now rich enough to indulge himself, he had become a serious collector of Japan’s art and artefacts. Heaven for Mercury was a shopping blitz there, when he spent money like water – and sometimes with no thought about how he was going to transport his purchases home. The downside of being away was that he missed his precious cats and had lately taken to making long-distance telephone calls to talk to them at all hours of the night.
Ten days separated this tour of Japan from their first visits to Argentina and Brazil. Mercury took advantage of the break to go to America to conduct some overdue business. His love of New York and his frequent trips there meant that he now wanted somewhere permanent to live in the city. He purchased a sumptuous apartment on the forty-third floor of a skyscraper at 425 East 58th Street, which he’d eventually furnish with priceless art treasures.
Queen were scheduled to play just seven gigs in South America, three at the vast Vélez Sársfield football ground in Buenos Aires and two at Brazil’s Morumbi Stadium in Sao Paulo. Mercury later confessed to nervousness at the challenge, admitting, ‘We had no right to expect the works from an alien country.’
But in the course of three weeks they had played to record-breaking audiences, and that tour marked their status as among the prime instigators of stadium rock. Queen didn’t invent this – the Beatles had packed New York’s Shea Stadium in 1965 – but the sixties had only the tinny public-address Tannoy, while Queen were experimenting with the new and sophisticated sound systems. The sheer scale of these events required this new technology.
This trip was certainly unusual. Before Queen arrived, the Argentinian intelligence service had taken a close interest in the tour. The country’s unstable political climate made the concerts a likely target for a terrorist attack. Argentina’s president, General Viola, also contributed to the heightened sense of occasion with a government delegation to greet the band. The mass hysteria at the airport was televised live on the national news.
There were special celebrations in Buenos Aires for Queen. These included a party at the home of the president of Vélez Sársfield – at which the band met the country’s soccer demigod Diego Maradonna – and dinner at General Viola’s official residence. Being treated as a visiting dignitary probably pleased Mercury no end, but perhaps his deepest joy came from their first gig on 28 February. In the middle of ‘Love of My Life’, he stopped singing at the usual point, when, as ever, the largely Spanish-speaking audience took over and sang back to him in word-perfect English.
The road crew experienced a few scares as they organised the transport of tons of valuable equipment through dense jungle. Then at the Brazilian border they encountered an overly bureaucratic customs official. Jim Beach and tour manager Gerry Stickells were worried that the band’s equipment could be confiscated by corrupt officials and made elaborate plans for it to be spirited away immediately after the final gig. But, for all that, the last night at Morumbi turned out to be remarkable, and not only because the band played before the largest-ever paying audience in the world. The brief tour itself also grossed approximately $3.5 million. The prospect of returning later in the year was appealing.
Back in the UK for a short period before work on their new album was due to commence in Montreux, Mercury picked up where he had left off with Tony Bastin. While abroad the star had been fooling around with men and drugs, and Bastin wasn’t as naive as to believe that Mercury had been faithful to him – but still their relationship continued to thrive. When he chose to be, Mercury could be very romantic and admitted, on occasions, to feeling intensely vulnerable when he imagined himself to be in love. He would lavish diamonds, luxury cars and substantial sums of cash on his man of the moment and felt that his best creative work flowed then, too. Yet he was also prone to dramatic outpourings on the raw deal he believed he suffered in affairs of the heart.
‘Love is Russian roulette for me,’ he once mourned, adding, ‘No one loves the real me inside. They’re all in love with my fame, my stardom.’
On the whole he was probably right. But since he could commit serial infidelity from within a relationship, he contributed greatly to the emotional hollowness of which he often compl
ained. For all that, his passion for Bastin was real and would endure for several months more.
By summertime, work was almost done at Mountain Studios. The final album was a disappointment to many fans, but these sessions were to produce Queen’s first number one single since ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. At the Swiss resort, among the select few with whom they frequently socialised was David Bowie.
Resident sound engineer Dave Richards invited Bowie over to the recording studio, where an impromptu jam session started. No one thought much of it until they realised they were co-writing a song. ‘Under Pressure’ would be finalised a couple of months later in New York and released on 26 October. Bowie was to reveal that parts of the single made him cringe, but neither his fans, nor Queen’s, shrank from buying it, and it catapulted to the top of the charts.
It was in New York that Mercury celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday; for the next few years his parties would prove legendary. Although he had purchased a luxury apartment in the city, he took over a floor of the Berkshire Hotel in which to host the event and flew over all his closest friends by Concorde. Typically lavish, it went on non-stop for a spectacular five days.
Queen regrouped mid-month in New Orleans to rehearse for their return trip to South America. With its first date in Venezuela at the Poliedro de Caracas, the tour was called ‘Gluttons for Punishment’. This turned out to be rather apt. Touring the world meant frequent and unusual media experiences, but the slot on the live pop TV show Jim Beach had booked for the band was among the strangest. The show featured a string of lookalike stars, and when Queen were announced, there was confusion about whether or not they were the real thing.
Mercury had refused to appear on the show alongside his bandmates and he must have been relieved that he had refused to go, when the show degenerated into an even worse fiasco. An excitable man rushed on camera and grabbed the mike, announcing that the statesman Romulo Ethancourt had died. A two-minute silence was ordered. Moments later a second man rushed on and announced that he hadn’t died at all. As all this happened in rapid Spanish, none of Queen knew what was going on, and they could only squirm with embarrassment.
Freddie Mercury: The Biography Page 15
