Mercury and Me

by Jim Hutton

  When the Magic Tour reached Paris I decided to make a surprise visit to see Freddie. It was a gamble. Although Freddie loved springing surprises on others, he hated being caught off-guard himself.

  After work I went home and changed, filled a holdall and set out for Heathrow. I flew to Paris and made my way to the Royal Monceau Hotel. I asked if they had anyone staying in the name of Freddie Mercury or Queen and the receptionists just gave me a blank look. I knew I had the right hotel and guessed that the band were checked in under aliases to avoid the press and fans. (I later discovered that Freddie always booked under the name A. Mason.)

  Happily, I bumped into one of the crew in the lobby and he confirmed that Freddie was indeed staying there. He and the band had gone to the Hippodrome de Vincennes for a sound-check. So I sat and waited. When Freddie returned he looked at me and said casually: ‘Oh, hello.’

  He didn’t seem surprised to see me; if anything he looked angry. Later he had a go at Joe for not telling him I was arriving; he did need to be in control of events.

  The next morning Diana Moseley arrived at our hotel suite. She was the costume designer for the Magic Tour and was delivering for the first time Freddie’s campest costume, a deep red cloak trimmed in fake ermine and a jewelled crown fit for royalty. It was extraordinary to watch him as he threw the cloak over his white towelling robe, put on his crown and strutted around the room.

  Freddie sashayed around regally but said something was missing. Then he grabbed a banana and used it as a microphone. He flounced about, trying to work out the way the cloak fell as he moved. He loved it. And so did all the fans that night.

  As the crowds cheered, I thought: ‘That’s my man!’

  The following Saturday, 21 June, Queen played the Maimaritgelände, in Mannheim, Germany. At about four on the Sunday morning I was at Garden Lodge when the phone rang. It was Freddie, screaming that he’d been locked in his room and couldn’t get out. He was depressed and wanted me to fly out immediately to be with him. When I got to the hotel Freddie seemed fine, if slightly exhausted. It was nice to feel wanted.

  After Berlin we went on to Munich. No sooner had we arrived at the hotel than Freddie flounced out. He’d been given a very plain, drab suite and it was not to his liking. We settled into our hotel rooms, then joined the rest of the band for dinner in a tiny café. We had a raucous meal and all got terribly drunk. I remember talking a lot to Roger Taylor’s roadie, Chris ‘Crystal’ Taylor, and Brian’s assistant Jobby. The party continued through most of the night back at the hotel.

  From Munich the band went on to Zurich, but I headed back to London. On 5 July they played Dublin, where they had the only poor reception of the tour. Several drunken gate-crashers got in and started throwing things at Freddie and the others. After that night Freddie vowed that the band would never return to Ireland again. Nor did they.

  Finally the band played Newcastle before returning to London for a few very special days.

  Friday, 11 July and Saturday, 12 July were milestones in Queen’s career – two sell-out concerts at Wembley Stadium. It was the band’s first time back on the massive stage since their incredible show-stealing Live Aid set a year earlier, and over the two nights 150,000 people would see them.

  Freddie had recurring problems with nodules on his vocal cords, the price he paid for being a singer. That meant he toured with a small machine, a steam inhaler in which he firmly believed. He also sucked Strepsils throat lozenges all the time. On the first night of Wembley Freddie had some throat problems, but dismissed them as not drastic enough to stop the show. As always, I watched from all over Wembley on both nights.

  The after-show party on Saturday was held at the Roof Gardens Club in Kensington and, because the press would be there, Freddie wanted Mary on his arm. It was a rare deceit that he was not in love with me, and he apologised for it.

  ‘It’s got to be this way because of the press,’ he said.

  I understood completely, and followed at a safe distance a few paces behind them.

  The party was a characteristically lavish Queen affair. Hundred of bottles of champagne were emptied, and the final bill was over £80,000.

  The five hundred or so guests were greeted in the lifts by girls dressed in nothing more than body paintings by German artist Bernd Bauer. Plenty of famous names turned up: Jeff Beck, Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Paul King, Limahl, Cliff Richard, Gary Glitter, Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones, Janet Street Porter and Fish from Marillion, someone I really took to.

  At one point Queen took to the stage to belt out rock and roll numbers and Freddie stole the show with an unlikely partner, Page Three model Samantha Fox. He hauled Sam on to the stage and they tore into ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘Sweet Little Rock and Roller’. When I met her afterwards she was still shaking with excitement.

  Next stop on the Magic Tour was Manchester’s Maine Road football stadium on Wednesday, 16 July, and I flew up north with Freddie and the band. For the show Mary, Phoebe and I wanted to sit in the audience. A steward escorted us to three seats. About ten minutes later three people turned up and claimed the seats were theirs. Mary flew into a rage and tried pulling rank, telling them she was Freddie Mercury’s girlfriend. It wasn’t a clever move; her remark didn’t cut any ice. In fact, she found herself at the receiving end of an unpleasant tirade from an obnoxious man. (I was later told he was Peter Moores, heir to the Littlewood’s Pools empire.) In the end we gave up the seats and watched the rest of the show from backstage.

  After the concert we were escorted through the cheering crowds of fans. At one point there was a serious risk that the band would be mobbed, so we resorted to a double-decker bus with a difference – instead of ordinary doors you got in through a custom-built ‘tunnel’. To make a quick getaway, Mary and I and some others from the team were waiting on the coach ahead of the band. When they ran on we all hurried upstairs to see the sea of cheering faces stretching back in every direction. What a send-off!

  We pulled off with a police escort, sirens blazing and the night sky lit up with flashing blue lights. We had a clear run out of the city and our escort went on for miles past the city boundary. During that journey back to London I pondered the scenes I’d just witnessed. They reminded me of the newsreel footage of the Beatles being mobbed by fans in the sixties. For the first time I fully appreciated how frightening it could sometimes be for Queen, and why they needed such elaborate security arrangements to escape a mob of tens of thousands of thrilled but over-excited fans.

  After the Manchester concert Freddie left with Joe for the next leg of the tour – Cologne and Vienna. Queen were playing Budapest on Sunday, 27 July, making history as the first major Western rock band to perform in an open-air stadium behind the Iron Curtain. The band decided to take a river cruise down the Danube for a few days before arriving in Budapest in great style on President Gorbachev’s personal hydrofoil.

  Mary rarely accompanied Freddie on tours, but on this trip he wanted to give her a short holiday, so he invited her to Vienna to join him for the cruise. Mary was very worried about leaving Jerry, the cat she’d inherited from Freddie, so I volunteered to stay in her flat for a few days to keep an eye on him.

  But I wasn’t planning on missing ‘The Hungarian Experience’, as it had been dubbed. The Queen office in London arranged for me to fly to Budapest a few days early, on the Friday. Terry and Joe were waiting for me at the airport with a chauffeur-driven car; we went directly to the hotel, where Freddie had claimed the Presidential Suite. It was magnificent, with a vast balcony, and was crowded with people including Mary, Freddie and Queen’s manager Jim Beach, Brian May, John Deacon, Roger Taylor, who was having his neck muscles worked on by the band’s physiotherapist, and paparazzo Richard Young.

  After making a sound-check we all headed out for a huge Hungarian feast, with every damn thing tasting of paprika. When we returned to the hotel, I sloped off for a quiet stroll around the streets of this enchanting city before finally turning in
for the night.

  It was difficult enough in Hungary to buy records and cassettes, so heaven knows how impossible it would have been to buy any of the eighty thousand tickets for the concert. For most of the inhabitants of Budapest, the tickets were too expensive – they cost the equivalent of a month’s wages.

  As a special treat for his audience, Freddie decided to thank Queen’s dedicated followers by singing ‘Tavaszi Szel’, a moving and traditional Hungarian song. He was only given the lyrics late on the afternoon of the show, so he spent all his time striding around the suite or balcony frantically trying to teach himself the words. They didn’t come very easily.

  Queen’s presence in Budapest had set the place buzzing, and when we left for the stadium our police escort brought the city to a complete standstill. We made the twenty-minute journey at breakneck speed in the first of a fleet of limousines flanked by scores of police outriders. We screeched around corners, jumped lights and seemed to fly through the city. Terry, Joe and I were nervous about the speed, but Freddie was quite oblivious to being tossed around so roughly. He was still trying to remember the words of the Hungarian song, humming to himself and repeating the lyrics beneath his breath.

  The concert that night was sensational. There were police everywhere at the Nepstadion to control the massive crowd. I watched the first half of the set from the wings; but after the interval I went out front and spent the rest of the evening lost among the ecstatic crowd. I watched my man, spellbound, from all points in the stadium. The stage was massive and Freddie used it all, exhaustively working the audience. Above the stage were vast torches belching flames, and the whole thing looked spectacular.

  When Freddie came to sing the folk song, he was astounding. He had scribbled the lyrics on his hand and resorted to them openly, but it didn’t matter. As soon as the first words sprang from his mouth, the whole audience of Hungarians went wild, stunned that a foreigner had braved their most famous and difficult song. At the end the crowd erupted and, even though he was no more than a dot on the horizon, I could tell that Freddie was relieved to have got through it. Towards the end of the concert, Freddie strode out in his ermine cape and crown and the stadium exploded into total euphoria. For hours after that show Freddie was on an unstoppable high.

  Next morning Joe had a slight drama. He wore contact lenses but had forgotten to bring their small cases on tour, so instead he placed them to soak in two glasses of water. He was not in his room when the chambermaid called and she emptied the glasses into the sink, flushing his lenses away.

  ‘Hopeless fool!’ said Freddie. I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the chambermaid or Joe.

  When I got back to Britain I read a feature by David Wigg in the Daily Express. He reported Freddie’s response to Mary’s desire to have a baby by him: he would sooner have another cat. David also reported that Freddie was unattached. Freddie always felt that keeping to this line made things simpler for the two of us, and he was right. However, he did say in the article: ‘For the first time I’ve found a contentment within myself.’ He told me he was referring to our relationship.

  Freddie felt Mary had long since become a public part of his life in the papers and knew she could deal with it easily enough. But he always tried to shield me from the press. He looked on fame as a double-edged sword.

  After work on Friday, 1 August I flew to Barcelona to join Freddie. He told me he’d been interviewed by Spanish television and declared cheekily that the main reason he was in Spain was in the hope of meeting their great opera diva, Montserrat Caballé. Phoebe had converted Freddie to opera. He had a large collection of opera CDs and probably everything Montserrat Caballé had ever recorded. Freddie would spend hours listening to them and asking Phoebe to explain the characters, plots and sub-plots.

  After the Barcelona concert we all went out to a fabulous fish restaurant. At one point I asked Roger Taylor how the tour was going.

  ‘Well, Freddie’s different this year,’ he said. ‘What have you done to him?’

  He told me Freddie was a decidedly changed man. He’d stopped trawling the gay venues while the others went back to their hotel, and he’d stopped burning the candle at both ends.

  Roger’s comment spoke volumes. I took it as a reassuring nod of approval which was very much appreciated. Coming from one of Freddie’s closest friends, and one of the band, I saw it as a vote of confidence in our affair. To me it said: ‘There has to be something serious going on here, Jim.’

  From the restaurant we went on to a stylish nightclub co-owned by a stunning-looking woman in a rather revealing dress. She decided she wanted to join our party and made a bee-line for Freddie, forcing herself between Freddie and me. Her right buttock was precariously perched on half of his chair and her left on half of mine. She then crossed her legs and, every so often, her hand slipped to her side as she yanked her hemline a little higher up her tanned legs.

  ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’ she asked Freddie.

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ he replied.

  ‘Have you got a wife?’ she asked.

  He leaned across her, put his hand on my knee and said: ‘Yes. This is the wife!’

  With that the poor woman almost died! She babbled hurried excuses and ran off into the crowd to hide.

  The next date of the tour was a Sunday night in Madrid. Before we left Barcelona I arranged for some flowers to be delivered to Freddie’s hotel room in Madrid ahead of our arrival. The message on them was to read: ‘From the wife!’

  When we got to Madrid there was no sign of the flowers anywhere. They turned up several hours later and looked to be in a sorry state: a scruffy little bunch of half-dead roses. Worse still, the message said something about a ‘Whiff’. Freddie spent most of the day trying to fathom out what ‘Whiff’ meant, so in the end I put him out of his misery and told him of my intentions which had gone wrong. He burst out laughing.

  Back in Britain, Queen were due to play Knebworth Park, in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, on Saturday, 9 August. It was the last concert Queen ever played. That was a corker of a day and the whole event was a great way for any rock legend to bow out from live performances. I flew up with Freddie, Brian, Roger and John in a helicopter from the helipad in Battersea. There were said to be 120,000 at Knebworth that day, and some sources reckoned it was as many as 200,000. The traffic jams brought the whole of the surrounding countryside to a halt. Still some miles from Knebworth, I looked out of the helicopter window on to the endless ribbons of tiny cars, sitting bumper to bumper.

  ‘Are we causing all this?’ Freddie asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh,’ he said softly, grinning.

  When the helicopter landed, cars were standing by to ferry the band directly to their dressing rooms. I followed in another car and met Freddie in his room. He was always nervous before a show. In the minutes before it was time to go on he seemed to have too much nervous energy in him and would become terribly on edge. This restlessness lasted right up until the very second he hit the ramp to the stage; but once he’d seen the heads of the fans, he was fine. He was theirs.

  At the other concerts I’d often go into the audience and head for the sound tower to clamber up for a perfect view. At Knebworth I couldn’t even get to the tower through the dense crowd. I milled around on the edge for most of the night. Towards the end of the concert, a familiar face approached me. It belonged to a guy I’d met in Budapest who told me he’d been granted special permission to fly from Hungary to attend the Queen night at Knebworth. I was so touched that I took him backstage to meet Freddie, and the Hungarian was overjoyed.

  As always, the concert was followed by a legendary Queen party, though Freddie and the band couldn’t stay all night because the helicopter was standing by to fly us back to London. During that flight we heard a rumour that a fan had died, the victim of a stabbing. Because of the sheer numbers of fans it had not been possible to get him to an ambulance in time to save his life. When Freddie heard about this he was v
ery upset.

  With Freddie in the grounds of Garden Lodge in 1985, the very first time he took me to see the place.

  With Freddie in Munich, 1985.

  With Freddie and feline visitor Dorothy in Munich, 1985.

  With Freddie and Dorothy.

  Left to right: Roger Taylor’s assistant, Chris ‘Crystal’ Taylor, with John Deacon and Freddie playing Scrabble on the tour-bus, 1986.

  Banana in hand for a pretend microphone, Freddie swanned around excitedly trying out his new regalia the moment it arrived for the 1986 tour.

  Freddie’s jubilant costume designer, Diana Mosely.

  Just as Mary Austin and I posed for this picture, taken during the Magic tour, Freddie leapt on top of me.

  Sparring partners – Freddie and me during the Magic tour.

  With Freddie in Japan for our £million ‘holiday of a lifetime’.

  Freddie and me with just one day’s Tokyo shopping – probably worth around £250,000.

  Misa Watanabe, our Japanese hostess, with Freddie.

  Where’s my dinner? Freddie hungry for his supper.

  At the Geisha school with Freddie. The make-up fascinated him, so did the kimonos.

  Freddie at the Geisha school.

  The next morning Joe confirmed Freddie’s worst fears; it was now official. A fan had died after a knife attack. Freddie seemed very subdued but appeared to cheer up once friends arrived for Sunday lunch. When I went out for the Sunday papers I was expecting the worst from the tabloids, dreading what they would have to say about Queen’s farewell concert. To my amazement I couldn’t find a single bad word about them, despite the fan’s tragic death. The good coverage in the press cheered Freddie up a little, but the death continued to prey on his mind. He only ever wanted his music to bring happiness.