That rare question-and-answer session between Freddie Mercury and Simon Bates took place in London, after work ended with the American superstar. Aware that Mercury was notorious for not giving interviews, Bates asked him anyway. He didn’t look for the reason why when the star unexpectedly agreed to meet him. The interview took place at Queen’s offices. When Bates arrived Mercury greeted him graciously, making him comfortable and plying him with Earl Grey tea in exquisite china cups. They talked about art, among other things. A formal ninety-minute interview followed.
‘He was almost Victorian in his manner,’ says Bates, ‘very quiet, extremely polite with the tea and biscuits and chatting – and I don’t say that as a criticism. He was very much the middle-class man entertaining a guest, and it was all quite charming. He also went out of his way to show an interest in what I liked. He was fascinated with art and clearly very knowledgeable.’
That Mercury was nervous quickly communicated itself to his interviewer, as Bates recalls: ‘Yes, he was a little insecure. I had a Radio One producer with me, and when it came to the moment to start the actual interview Freddie didn’t want to talk in front of him. We had to be alone.
‘I asked him if there were any areas he’d rather not stray on to, and he asked me instead to run through what I wanted to cover, and when I’d finished he said he didn’t want to talk about his parents. There were no preconditions as such, but he would indicate that he’d rather not discuss such-and-such. The gay issue never came up, and why should it? It had no bearing on his work as a musician.’
During the interview Mercury relaxed. Far from putting on his standard performance, he revealed quite a lot about himself. ‘He was happy to talk about himself,’ confirms Simon Bates. ‘He freely confessed to being a party animal, and that he liked to enjoy life to the full. He also liked to travel with Queen’s touring commitments, to get away from Britain as often as possible, he said. He believed there were three of him. One was professional and hard-working, the second was the party animal and the third liked to be alone.’
Although Queen had temporarily disbanded, they remained in touch. For the past six months each member of the band had been involved in their own personal projects. In July they got together at the instigation of Jim Beach. In addition to being Queen’s manager, Beach had links with the film world and approached the band with a proposition. A film of John Irving’s novel The Hotel New Hampshire was in progress, starring Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster. Would Queen like to record its soundtrack?
Mercury was interested at once, and, with John Deacon, he flew to Canada to meet director Tony Richardson. Having read the darkly bizarre tale during the flight out, the meeting in Montreal went well, and they agreed to start work on material for the film score. Fixing a date in August, Queen met at Record Plant Studios in Los Angeles. They had never recorded together in America, and the novelty of this combined with the break from each other had rejuvenated them.
As far as translating this new vigour on to the soundtrack went, however, the initial enthusiasm quickly fizzled out. Tailoring their music to the novel wasn’t easy. They liked the work itself, and for a while they persevered. But it proved a mismatch. Disappointed, the band had no option but to pull out of the project.
Recently Queen had signed to the US label Capitol Records, so they concentrated on making their new album. Recording was at the Musicland Studios, with a release date set for early 1984. The first single chosen from the album was a Roger Taylor number, ‘Radio Ga Ga’. The video promo, extravagant even by Queen’s standards, reached epic proportions. Director David Mallett used five hundred extras, all recruited at short notice from the band’s fan club, and the shoot took place one late November day at Shepperton Studios. The fans were all identically dressed, and at each chorus their role was to clap their hands in sequence above their heads. It wasn’t complicated, and they were soon performing like professionals – unlike Queen. Led by Mercury dressed in black trousers and jackboots with what looked like strips of a red bandage as a shirt, all four band members at one point messed up a take by clapping out of time. The finished product, however, was a tight-set routine that was later adopted by concert crowds the world over.
Mercury’s thoughts were preoccupied by his solo album, which he had begun to work on in Munich at the start of the year. As producer Mike Moran, later one of the star’s closest friends and co-songwriter, reveals, Mercury never deliberately set out to distinguish his solo work from his work with Queen. But Mercury’s heart lay more in ballads, and while recording his own material he intended to explore this fully. He admitted he wrote commercial love songs, maintaining that what he felt strongest about in life was love and emotion. ‘I’m not a John Lennon who sleeps in bags for I don’t know how long,’ Mercury insisted. ‘You have to have a certain upbringing and go through a certain amount of history before people will believe in what you’re writing about.’ Be that as it may, Mercury never allowed any of his lyrics to reflect his personal experiences too accurately.
At this time he was still leading a hectic social life, and one night in particular stands out in Peter Stringfellow’s memory: ‘My Hippodrome club had been open for about a year when I held my first Monday night gay night. There was a specific sound in music then, which was very high energy and exciting and closely associated with the gay scene, and this was blasting out. I was on the balcony with my girlfriend on my way to have a meal when suddenly a weird atmosphere came over the place. There was a big buzz of excitement and everyone, about 2500 people, had stopped whatever they were doing and turned to look at something. I wondered what on earth it could be, then I found out. Freddie Mercury had arrived. He was dressed all in white, and it was literally as if the Queen of Sheba had walked in. The crowd went absolutely berserk.
‘It was a powerful example of Freddie’s personal power because, make no mistake, he had that power. A thunderous round of applause got up, which, of course, Freddie took entirely as his due. He wasn’t at all embarrassed. In fact, quite the reverse. His attitude was, “Well, of course! I’ve just walked in. What can you expect?” A great mass of people surged forward, but his bodyguards immediately closed ranks, and you couldn’t get near him any more. He moved off with his entourage and set up court at a far off table.’
According to Stringfellow, Mercury would never stay in his clubs if he himself wasn’t present. He adds, ‘But Freddie had changed since that first time we met in Leeds. By now he lived in his own world, doing his own thing, and few people got near him. I became, like so many others, a Freddie-watcher, and he was the biggest star. Really, no one could touch him.’
Unless, that was, he chose to reach out himself. Before Mercury returned to Munich he was to meet a man who was to become very important to him. He had gone to one of his favourite haunts, the Cocobana, a gay basement club in South Kensington. Quite late in the evening he approached a stockily built, dark-haired man who was propping up the bar. Mercury offered to buy the stranger a drink, to which the man replied, ‘Fuck off.’ Never one to press unwanted attentions, Mercury walked away to rejoin his noisy entourage, without even discovering the man’s name.
He was in fact Jim Hutton, an Irishman who worked in a barber’s shop concession in London’s Savoy Hotel and shared a house with his lover in south London. When Hutton’s boyfriend joined him at the bar, he was quick to reveal the identity of just who he had so rudely rebuffed. Like Winnie Kirkenberger, with whom Mercury was still involved – and despite the sort of reaction Peter Stringfellow had witnessed – Hutton maintained that the name Freddie Mercury was not familiar to him. Mercury, at a quick glance, had looked quite skinny, and Hutton didn’t fancy him anyway. For Mercury this couldn’t have been the first time he had been rejected, and he probably forgot about it.
‘Radio Ga Ga’ was released on 23 January 1984 and went straight in to the charts at number four, rising two places, but ultimately denied the top slot by Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’. It marked another milestone within the
band, however, as now all four members of Queen had a top ten hit to their credit. Roger Taylor’s success was to be marred briefly a week later, though, with an incident in Italy during Queen’s first live performance in fifteen months.
At the beginning of February Queen headlined at an annual music festival in San Remo. It was there, backstage, that a row developed between May and Roger Taylor, which almost resulted in a fight between the two friends. When asked later about this, Mercury described it as a ‘very heavy scene’ that developed from some tomfoolery. ‘It was Roger squirting Brian in the face with hairspray or something,’ he said. ‘They nearly came to blows. It was a very tiny dressing room, very hot, and the whole thing just snowballed.’
To Mercury it confirmed how much tension remained among the group. Quick to recognise the potential gravity of the situation, he leapt between the feuding men and poked fun at them mercilessly. Initially neither May nor Taylor was in the mood for Mercury’s antics – which could have fanned the flames – but he was so relentless that they eventually dissolved into laughter, and sanity returned. Onlookers have since credited Mercury with more than rescuing the moment, convinced that, in fact, he saved the entire future of Queen. But if a story Mercury once told is to be believed, he didn’t always get away with sending up his friends.
‘One night Roger was in a foul mood, and he threw his entire bloody drumset across the stage. The thing only just missed me. I might have been killed!’ Mercury exaggerated. That night in San Remo, ‘Radio Ga Ga’ went down a storm with the delirious crowd. Days later, on 7 February, Capitol Records released it in America as their first Queen single, where it lodged in the chart at number sixteen. In Britain ‘Relax’ refused to budge but in nineteen other countries the song hit number one, in some cases remaining there for weeks.
Having learnt the lessons of Hot Space, when their new album, The Works, was released later that month, it gave fans exactly what they wanted – lots of harmonies, a meticulous production and the usual clever musical arrangements. Above all, though, the material was much gutsier, mainly thanks to May’s insistence. Their reward came when it stormed into the album charts at number two.
To follow on from ‘Radio Ga Ga’, the second single from The Works was ‘I Want to Break Free’, the video for which was again to be directed by David Mallett. So far Queen’s videos had been imaginative, even outlandish, and certainly expensive, but on this occasion they decided to have some fun. Granada TV’s Coronation Street is the longest-running soap on British television, and Roger Taylor suggested that they should each dress up in drag as one of the female characters from the show.
The video was split into three separate sequences. The first showed Queen in a crowd of moronic-looking futuristic miners. Filmed one chilly March day in a warehouse at Limehouse Studios in London’s Docklands, it again featured hundreds of fan-club volunteers as extras. The next day the second and main section was shot in a Battersea studio, and for this the band dressed up in drag. Responsibility for this was automatically attributed to Mercury. But he shrugged this off, and when asked by one TV presenter how he had persuaded the rest of the band to dress in women’s clothing, he quipped, ‘They ran into their frocks quicker than anything!’
John Deacon became a buttoned-up, disapproving granny. Brian May emerged a vision in a long nylon nightie, with fluffy slippers on his feet. While Roger Taylor transformed himself into an alarmingly convincing, sexy schoolgirl, complete with gymslip and stockings. But still it was Mercury who was the most hilarious. Opting to send up the Street’s barmaid, Bet Lynch, he wore a candy-pink skinny-rib sweater, over an enormous false chest, and a saucy PVC, split-sided miniskirt. Whenever he took great sweeping strides, there was a flash of white knickers. He had originally attended dress rehearsals in ambitious six-inch stilettos, but couldn’t stand up in them and had to settle for lower heels. He once impudently announced that if he weren’t a rock star he would have nothing to do, adding with a twinkle, ‘I can’t cook. I’m not very good at being a housewife!’ In this video, he certainly knew how to use a vacuum cleaner.
But if the Battersea shoot was a lark, the third and final sequence, which featured Mercury without the rest of the band, meant the most to him. Especially because he worked for a second time with his friend Wayne Eagling. ‘Freddie was inspired a lot by ballet,’ says Eagling. ‘He had wanted for a long time to appear as a great dancer, and this was his chance, so we made him Nijinsky. Trying to choreograph for someone who is not a ballet dancer is difficult, and it wasn’t easy for Fred. Sometimes in frustration, I’d end up saying to him, “Well, just do what you would normally do then.” But he was the ultimate professional and determined to get it right.’
Derek Deane picks up, ‘Wayne had recreated the ballet L’après-midi d’un faune for Freddie, which had been made famous by Nijinsky. It begins with Freddie looking as if he’s sitting on a rock, but it’s really made up of a pile of bodies, which one by one come alive. Later there’s a shot of Freddie rolling on his stomach on top of a line of rotating bodies along the floor. Now he loved that bit!’
Although filming the ballet scene took a whole day, it features less than a minute in the final cut. Mercury had shaved off his moustache for the part and altogether enjoyed the experience. When it was over, he wanted to repay Eagling for his efforts, but the dancer refused money: ‘I did it as a favour for a friend,’ he says, ‘and didn’t want to be paid, but Freddie kept asking me if there was anything he could do for me, and I replied, “Well, I can’t sing, but I’d love to sing a song with you.”
‘So Freddie and I wrote and recorded a number together called ‘No, I Can’t Dance’. I was never so nervous in all my life. If you feel inadequate I think you’re like that, and being beside Freddie in a recording studio I certainly felt inadequate. But the funny thing was, I could sing with him next to me. We had a great time.’
The critics had fun, too, when the video for ‘I Want to Break Free’ was released on 2 April 1984. It was obviously meant as a lark, but self-righteous accusations about outrageous transvestism and ludicrous claims that such blatant homosexual behaviour could corrupt Britain’s youth were made. It didn’t stop the single from reaching number three in the UK, as well as becoming a huge hit throughout Europe. Some South American countries even adopted it as a freedom anthem.
Although by this time Mercury considered Munich to be very much his home, he began commuting to London at weekends. He still showed no signs of slowing down socially and in some ways had even reverted to the reckless hunger he had often displayed during those extended American tours. Come April he was to meet Jim Hutton again by chance, according to Hutton. Mercury was eating out at a smart restaurant in Earls Court and spotted Hutton among the other diners. From that moment, it is said that Mercury tracked Hutton’s every move relentlessly.
Coincidentally, Jim Hutton’s two-year relationship with his live-in lover was ending. Hutton’s home was Surrey, but he liked to drink in a gay pub in Vauxhall, south London. Mercury frequented Heaven, a nightclub under Charing Cross Station, but he had apparently started to instruct his chauffeur to detour first to Vauxhall. Hutton believed that Mercury had made it his business to discover where he socialised, and that he would send his personal assistant Joe Fanelli into the pub simply to satisfy himself that Hutton was there and alone. After this Mercury would continue on to Heaven. If this were true, Mercury himself was far from ready to admit it. In one of his coarser moods, he bragged about his life then, ‘I’m just an old slag who gets up every morning, scratches his head and wonders who he wants to fuck.’
By summer 1984 Mercury was in training for the demands of a forthcoming European tour. The band flew into a storm of controversy by announcing that they intended to play at the Sun City Super Bowl in South Africa. This immediately antagonised the Musicians’ Union, anti-apartheid groups and the press. Queen’s publicists tried to offset this by insisting that the band was not political, and that the gigs would be before mixed audiences. But
nothing made any difference, and Queen were not to emerge from this furore totally unscathed.
It was ironic that the title of their new single was ‘It’s a Hard Life’. The video was a study in screen decadence and included, among the extras, the voluptuous Barbara Valentin. But it took more than a four-inch cleavage to upstage Mercury in his scarlet costume elaborately decorated with a profusion of Cyclops eyes.
The Works tour started in Belgium on 24 August and welcomed among its session men newcomer Spike Edney, who had lately worked with the Boomtown Rats. Edney had been introduced to Queen by Roger Taylor’s personal assistant, Crystal Taylor. ‘They asked me to an audition in Munich,’ Edney recalls, ‘and I went assuming there would be a queue, only to find I was the only one. I knew all their stuff anyway, so that was me in. I was more or less with Queen from that tour right through to Knebworth two years later.’
On 10 September, between the last of the four dates at London’s Wembley Arena and their German gig at Westallenhalle, Dortmund, Queen’s new single ‘Hammer to Fall’ came out. That day also marked the release of Mercury’s first solo single in his own name. Co-written with Giorgio Moroder, and one of the tracks from the Metropolis soundtrack, ‘Love Kills’ was a rock/disco number. Convention decrees that solo work often fares worse than a band’s material. But Mercury’s single defied this tradition by reaching number ten in the UK charts. This was three places higher than ‘Hammer to Fall’, a typical Queen rocker normally guaranteed to have vast fan appeal. ‘Love Kills’ also became a massive hit in London’s gay clubs and elsewhere in Europe.
Freddie Mercury: The Biography Page 17
