Freddie Mercury: An intimate memoir by the man who knew him best

by Peter Freestone

  He ended up quite pleased that he had been made to stay on.

  We were royally amused.

  Almost a year to the day later, on July 11 and 12, 1986, the band returned to Wembley with A Kind Of Magic under their belts. Freddie had flown the New York Daughters specifically to see one of these shows. He knew it was going to be something to be proud of. He hired a coach for the show which left Garden Lodge with all his guests including Straker, Mary Austin, Wayne Eagling, Gordon Atkinson, Gordon Dalziel and Graham Hamilton, Barbara Valentin and Trevor Clarke. It was my job to ensure that the coach was laden with goodies for the trip out for the guests and on the trip back when Freddie himself joined in. This was to be the start of one very long party. I don’t think there are many stars who would indulge in this kind of behaviour. I don’t know that there are that many of his equivalent status who would have that many friends who would come together at one time to celebrate their friend’s success. And they certainly wouldn’t have travelled on a bus!

  Freddie was a master controller but he was a lucky man in that his machinations worked for him as far as his friends were concerned. Freddie was very rarely in a situation which he didn’t control or had not organised to be just ‘so’. Should such a situation arise, he was quick-minded enough to extricate himself from any possible harm but that day must have been one of the happiest of his life.

  On July 12, the second Wembley Show, a party was hosted by Queen and EMI Records at the Roof Gardens which is situated on what was the Derry and Toms building in Kensington High Street. This was the party where a few of the attendant staff wore nothing but body paint designed to look like clothes. There were girl attendants in the gentlemen’s lavatory and vice versa. However, once again, to disprove reports which circulated at the time, there were no dwarves with bowls of cocaine. Of course there were drugs around. Drugs went with the territory but the excesses which were noised abroad were never excesses at all. This was the famous occasion when Freddie jumped up on stage with Samantha Fox and they duetted ‘A Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, as the band played live.

  I was there on August 9, 1986, when the band played Kneb-worth Park. This was my second helicopter ride, this time in the wonderfully painted machine which has been seen in photographs so often. I was obviously there should Freddie need anything done that Joe was too busy to do but this show gave me an opportunity to see the band at their best. The show was a huge success except for the record British traffic jams following and in hindsight was perhaps the best last show that the band could have possibly had. Queen showed themselves to be quite simply the best stadium rock band in the world. They didn’t expect this to be their last show and I’m sure all of them in their hearts were planning their next tour because this, the Magic Tour had gone so well.

  Freddie’s Christmas letter to the fan club seems to bear this out:

  “Hi there!

  I’ve finally got a chance to write to you. It’s been a pretty fab year-

  The tour was fun and a great success although I must admit I

  had to be coaxed into doing it, I’m glad I did it now.

  Since then I’ve been to Japan for a three week holiday. I had to

  get away from everybody and everything to do with business. The

  result was a fabulous time and I damn well deserved it!

  The band are now working on the Budapest Live Show to be

  out on video cassette early 1987. I’m also working on a solo

  project – it’s so secretive even I don’t know what it’s about.

  Anyway, time to buzz off.

  Have a super Xmas everybody.

  Take care. Lots of love…”

  Chapter Two

  It’s time I tried to give an insight into the recording processes which characterised the making of Queen’s and Freddie’s records because without the recordings, there would be nothing to tour, nothing to make a video of, nothing to design an album cover for. I would like this next chapter to show what was put in by the four performer/composers and what the process demanded from them.

  Hot Space was the first Queen album I was involved with. It was really exciting because it meant living abroad for an extended length of time as opposed to merely touring abroad when our lives were still based in England. In those days there were still significant tax advantages in spending whole years at one time out of England. Very loosely, for every month you were out of the country, you were allowed back in for one day. So while I wasn’t a tax exile, I also reaped the advantages by being paid in England while living on per diem expenses abroad. I therefore managed to save most of my salary.

  Hot Space was recorded in both Montreux and Munich. The Mountain Studios in the Casino complex in the lakeside town of Montreux had already been purchased by Queen, both as an investment and as a utility. In the end it was used more as an investment and used by people like David Bowie. For two weeks every year the studio was commandeered for the recording of the internationally famous Montreux Jazz Festival.

  On the first day of recording, the instruments and sound equipment would already be set up in the studio. The equipment would have arrived a few days earlier from London with the road crew where it had been in storage in the Queen warehouse in William Road. Rock’n’roll recording isn’t a Monday through Friday nine-to-five routine but like most other schedules, to start at the beginning of a week is logical even though weekends often didn’t count as weekends. Recording was done as and when the band members felt like it. Most bands before going into a recording studio would have some idea of what they wanted to produce. Queen, however, very rarely, if ever, did. They would go in and just see what would come into their heads. The date and timing of the recording of any album would be as the result of a band meeting with Jim Beach. Obviously, the band had to fulfil any contractual obligations to EMI and to the other record distribution companies with whom licensing deals had been signed. In the band’s overall schedule, there would be a minimum of six months set aside for recording. This would allow time for exhausted brains to relax and recharge in between the arduous and often tortuous sessions. In those days, Queen recorded beneath the ultimate luxury of the twenty-four hour lock-out umbrella which denied any other band or artist access to the studio for as long as their contract with the studio lasted… Six, nine months. Even a year.

  I was initially surprised that even at this point in their career seldom would all four members of the band be in the studio at the same time. When they were, it was often for a band meeting. We would joke that Queen must be the only band in the world who would pay a thousand pounds to have a band meeting; the most expensive in the world, maybe? Even though they had a perfectly good office headquarters, the chances of getting all four together around a boardroom table were vastly less than catching them all together in the studio.

  Other than for these band meetings, Jim Beach was an infrequent visitor even though he lived and worked in Montreux, although Paul Prenter, then the band’s personal manager, would be in attendance all the time. I would be there as well as Freddie’s current beau, friends of the other band members and the usual quota of hangers-on. There could be upwards of a dozen people floating around. On creative sessions, there were no standard personnel combinations. It wasn’t a Freddie and Roger only or Brian and Freddie next arrangement. The daily roll call depended very much on the degree of excess of the activities of the previous night. It was up to the producer / engineer and the tape operator to always be promptly behind the recording desk for a two o’clock start. The presence of the production team was the only certainty as they waited for their charges to arrive. Rheinhold Mack was the producer and engineer on Hot Space. Mack, as he was always known, lived in Munich and worked frequently with Giorgio Moroder in Munich’s Musicland Studios which Moroder owned.

  With Queen, although the recording day generally started about two o’clock in the afternoon, there was an open-ended finishing time to the day’s session. In other words it could, and often did, go on al
l night into the early hours of the following day. Depending on the output, the working week could often last the full seven days. Queen took to recording like a flock of ducks to water although they took to composition as easily as blood being wrung from a stone. For this reason, there is, contrary to a lot of anticipation, not a large treasure haul of previously unheard tracks waiting to be unearthed in some studio vaults.

  Because composition came hard and recording was often fraught, the length of sessions was unpredictable. For example, the first of the two sessions for ‘Under Pressure’ was twenty-four hours and the second, a couple of weeks later and four thousand miles away in New York when Freddie and Bowie finished off the track at the Power Station, was a session which lasted another eighteen hours.

  ‘Under Pressure’ came about purely spontaneously. Bowie, who was living in Montreux, heard that Queen were in town and just called round to the studio. Roger and Bowie got on very well anyway, although the lyric and title idea came from Freddie and David’s collaboration.

  The impromptu jam session soon assumed the twenty-four hour marathon shape I’ve described. I was overjoyed in New York when Freddie took up my suggestion of the two octave vocal slide which I had noticed being so successfully used on another current chart disco track.

  But not all tracks took shape as quickly as ‘Under Pressure’. Generally speaking – although with Freddie and Queen as with any band there are always exceptions – a typical Freddie track came together something like this. As an example, the creative process which marked the emergence of the strangely autobiographical ‘Life Is Real’ started thirty thousand feet up in the air over the Atlantic.

  We were flying back from New York to London on our way to Switzerland, paying no particular attention to anything when Freddie turned round and said, “Where’s your paper and pen? I’ve just come up with some words.” I always had to ensure that I carried with me, wherever we were, paper and pen for just such an occasion as this.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Cunt stains on my pillow,” he replied sotto voce with that naughty grin. I think my face must have given away something because he then turned round and said, “D’you think that’s too much?”

  He then changed the words to, “Cum stains on my pillow?”

  To which I replied, “Next!”

  To which he replied with a giggle, “Oh, really! This is too much!”

  I can see us now, reclining on the first class chairs at the front of the plane. He thought about it for another couple of minutes and finally came up with what is now the classic line, “Guilt stains on my pillow!”

  For the next hour or so, Freddie’d come out with phrases, not necessarily sequential but always following the same concept. We therefore disembarked in Montreux with several pages of entirely unconnected lyric lines for a song without a title. Freddie often took the opportunity himself to jot down a couple of lines which had come into his head. On my pad there is a sheet where he has written: “Please feel free, Strain all my love from me…”

  To the best of my knowledge, this couplet was wisely filed away for future use…

  When we finally got into the studio from the airport, he sat down at a piano and just started playing. He would let his fingers play over the keys until a tune with which he was happy was finalised. Tape was always rolling in case a gem should get away. Perhaps he might just play chords and then progressions from those chord bases. The rhythm was dictated by the feeling and mood of the lyrics of the song and the time signature and beat dictated by the metre of the dominant lyric lines. Every song had a working title although the final choice would not be made until the end. Everyone would throw ideas for song titles into the arena. Only the fittest survived.

  Once Freddie had decided on the tune, he started on what he thought of as ‘the hard part’ of the song, getting the lyrics into an understandable structure which made sense. Often, when I hadn’t heard all that had gone on in the studio that day, Freddie’d come home at five in the morning and he’d say, “Come on. Listen to this!”

  He’d then read out the lyrics and he might say, “Look there are just three words that don’t fit.”

  We could then spend a couple of hours trying to find other words that both rhymed and scanned that meant the same things as the words with which he was unhappy. And I mean a couple of hours. At least. It would often be daylight before he’d go to bed satisfied.

  What started off as one idea might end up being the starting point of a better and different idea. He was completely pragmatic. Nothing was sacred. Everything was there to be used.

  As I’ve said previously, he was very much the perfectionist. He would spend hours making sure that there was no better way of constructing the song, no better tune to express the feeling that he wanted to put over. His music first and foremost was for himself. It gave him the chance to express his feelings and be himself. Being a musician, he was in a position where other people could enjoy the results of his expression. Of course it mattered what the fans thought, but he wouldn’t let anything pass muster that he wasn’t a hundred per cent satisfied with himself. Although he was well aware that there were many different ways to say musically what was in his mind and that his end result might not be to the taste of others, it was his perfection he was seeking, not other people’s. And after all, it was his music.

  Once he’d got the tune sorted out in his mind, he’d put it down, record it, using the piano and then everyone else would listen to it. The rest of the band would then begin, under Freddie’s supervision, to put their own contributions to the song down on tape on other tracks. This would start with Roger recording what Freddie called the ‘click’ track, the backbone of the song which was the basic beat against which Freddie would polish his initial piano track. Freddie always used to say that although drum-machines are supposed to be infallible, Roger could be guaranteed never to miss even one single beat.

  Once this basic structure was sorted out, Freddie would begin the whole process of assembling all the other necessary components to achieve the song. No overall vision of how the song would ultimately sound ever arose before the very basic skeleton had been assembled. So often, the end result would bear little resemblance to the original concept. A prime example of this was ‘Radio Ga Ga’ which sounded to me when Roger played his initial tape more like the Ave Maria from Verdi’s Otello - but that’s to come. Incidentally, titles of tracks often changed between conception and fledging. ‘Radio Ga Ga’ on one of the original cassette boxes is called ‘Radio Ca Ca’.

  Freddie always liked the input from the rest of the band. He never believed his was the only, perfect way. Each Queen track is the result of four people’s input even though it might be formally accredited as a composition to only one person. Of course, from The Miracle onwards, all tracks were credited to Queen collectively except on Made In Heaven but, again, that comes later.

  Freddie never knew anyone better at working out harmonies than Brian and always relied on him for the end results where musical harmony was concerned. John was always John. Freddie knew John was like the proverbial rock and could always be relied on. The bass line was put on very close to the beginning after which the guide vocal track was laid down around which the other instrumental colouring and harmonies would be created.

  This whole process could take months. Just because the band had started on a track didn’t mean that they would carry it through to the end in one fell swoop. There would be times when they’d get fed up with a track and it would be left on the back burner. Any time a new and exciting idea was brought into the studio, small developments were made to it so that the original thoughts wouldn’t be lost and the band would always be in a position to come back to it. If for any reason at all, it was forgotten about, then the original idea couldn’t have been much good anyway. Over the years, there were quite a few examples of ideas gathering dust on the shelves. Where these substandard and rejected ideas are now, who knows?

  The atmosphere in the stu
dio varied. It was often never the same two days in a row. Sometimes, you could sense the tension and the excitement when those who were there were really thrilled with an idea and other days, it could feel like a dull day at the office. You have to remember all the way through that the studio was their place of work. This was Queen’s office.

  There would always be at least three members of the road crew there. The three personal roadies (now called Technical Crew, ‘Teks’ for short), Ratty, Jobby and Crystal. Respectively, Peter Hince looked after John and Freddie’s instruments, Brian Zellis was there for Brian May and the ubiquitous Chris Taylor was always there both for Roger and a good laugh! Crystal could always sense when tension was building up and would always be able to defuse most potentially explosive situations with a joke which brought a laugh. He also knew when not to be around, as did the rest of us. One learned very quickly. Of course there were the times when the explosions happened. One such being in Munich when, I forget which album, Brian was being very particular about his guitars and the stereo sound. It was something about not being loud enough because volume seemed to be the root cause of most of the arguments between the band members whether in the studio or on stage. Freddie on this occasion reached a point where he decided he couldn’t take Brian’s fussiness any more and he exploded. I think he must have seen a Fawlty Towers episode in the near past for he exclaimed: “What the fucking hell do you want, hey? A herd of wildebeest charging from one side to the other?” I believe with that, he turned on his heel and walked out. Collecting Freddie’s utterances and sayings became a habit in the household and we would write them down, an example on my pad being: “…the diva of rock’n’roll and a mouth to gobble the Volga.”