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

by Peter Freestone

  “I’m not prepared to give up my life for what could be six months before you tell me it’s over and ship me back. Sorry, Freddie.”

  We all liked Vince a lot. Freddie never went back to LA to pick up any possibilities which might still have remained untidied. Basically he allowed Vince to get away.

  But Vince was certainly around at Freddie’s next big party which was the occasion of his thirty-seventh birthday, September 5, 1983, which was celebrated in Los Angeles.

  Freddie wanted Joe Fanelli to cook for the party and Joe duly arrived from London. The occasion marked the rapprochement between Freddie and Joe who had been working independently as a chef in several London restaurants including September’s in Fulham Road since the break-up of their relationship.

  Jacqui Brownell, who worked at Elektra Records and who also looked after Roger’s LA house as she was the downstairs tenant, had a female lover who became our cleaner at Stone Canyon Road. The lover had been at one stage of her career in charge of security at a San Francisco annual Gay Pride parade. These really are huge affairs and the responsibility was considerable. She had three or four of her friends become the waitresses for the night at the birthday bash, each dressed in white shirts and black trousers as they all pointblank refused to wear skirts for anyone.

  Some of the hundred or so guests included Rod Stewart, Elton John and Queen’s former manager John Reid, and Jeff Beck. Freddie was never into ‘star’ parties. For his personal parties, there was no current ‘A’ list. He always, always kept to friends.

  The house was smothered with Stargazer lilies, those huge trumpetlike pink blooms with red-striped inner petals whose pollen always falls and always indelibly stains anything and anyone touching it. But for all that bother, the aroma is heavenly. No entertainment had been planned. This was a basic eat and drink and be-merry party. The food Joe prepared included Freddie’s favourites. Prawn Creole, Coronation Chicken – that British Empire staple favourite – Potato Salad, Rice Salad and a huge array of cold cuts. The party was a welcome high-point partway through the recording schedule and all the band and their wives came.

  But time came for the court of Queen to move on and they left LA and flew to Munich. It was during the completion of the recording of The Works in the Musicland Studios in Munich that Freddie first met Barbara Valentin who was to become so involved with his life from then on. The band rehearsed for their forthcoming world tour after completing The Works and it was also at this time that Freddie’s love affair with Munich and all things Bavarian began in earnest.

  One thing Bavarian we have already encountered for whom Freddie had fallen was Winfried Kirchberger, a restaurateur whose premises Freddie was to come to frequent nightly. Many a night was started there before continuing on to sample the delights of the multitude of Munich’s bars like Pop-As, The Eagle and Mrs. Henderson’s which was seen in its full glory in the video of ‘Living On My Own’. Winfried, Winnie, fitted the bill in a very timely way. Freddie had just rid himself of that other Bill, the infamous Bill Reid whose exploits have already been briefly catalogued. Winnie was everything Freddie liked, chunky and hunky and a relatively blank slate, someone upon whom Freddie could leave his mark.

  All the signs were that The Works was indeed, as planned, a ‘good’ album. Hopes were high. When ‘Break Free’, with its accompanying video images of Freddie and Roger and Brian and John in various states of character drag – Freddie especially pushing a vacuum cleaner – appeared, those high hopes were immediately dashed as far as America was concerned. Freddie found it very hard to understand how the band having fun and doing no one any harm could cause such an unfriendly backlash. The Works wasn’t finally released until 1984 and for a couple of years, until Live Aid, it seemed the steam had gone out of the Queen engine after the failure of ‘I Want To Break Free’ in America. The previous single, ‘Radio Ga Ga’, had been a huge hit both in America as well as the rest of the world and Queen benefited from this impetus as they set out on the world tour promoting The Works.

  The disappointment became contagious and the other members of Queen were very depressed. I think there must have been times when they could even have called it a day as far as Queen was concerned. Freddie, fired up anyway to pursue his solo project, thought that this was the right time to call for a Queen sabbatical. He wanted something the others didn’t. A more up-beat, disco flavoured future and this direction was one the others weren’t keen to follow, given the proven lack of success of the disco-inspired Hot Space.

  Freddie started the series of recordings which ended up as Mr. Bad Guy financing it himself while Jim Beach set about finding the right distribution company with whom to work. Because of the strange nature of this whim of Freddie’s – which Freddie never intended to result in a solo career – Jim’s job to sign a one-off album deal with anyone must have been difficult. However, when the deal was completed with CBS it was for the highest single advance yet paid for one album. There must have been an option for more work, however, because Freddie ultimately bought himself out of the contract when it came time to consider an outlet for ‘Barcelona’.

  Over an extended period in Munich – like monntthhssss – Freddie created what he considered some of his best tracks. Produced by Freddie and Mack, the album was recorded at Musicland Studios. His favourite track varied each time he played the album but he was especially proud of ‘Mr. Bad Guy’ with its integral multi-layered orchestration. Freddie did all the vocals and most of the piano and synthesiser work which American Fred Mandel augmented where the music was most complicated. Fred had been auxiliary keyboard player on a couple of Queen tours and he and Freddie had developed a very friendly rapport. Paul Vincent played some lead guitar and bass guitar was played by Stefan Wissnet whom Freddie had got to know while Stefan had been Musicland’s engineer. Joe Burt, one of Mary Austin’s boyfriends, played fretless bass on ‘Man Made Paradise’… It was all very much in-house. As the dedication implies, the rest of Queen stayed tactfully away.

  ‘Love Me Like There’s No Tomorrow’ was written with Barbara Valentin specifically in mind. Barbara is an actress and one of her more celebrated roles was in a film whose translated title becomes, Kiss Me Like There’s No Tomorrow. Not all of Freddie’s songs were about specific people although like every composer, he had these aberrations from time to time!

  We stayed at the Arabellahaus Hotel, a depressing concrete block of a building from the top of which numerous people had both successfully and unsuccessfully attempted suicide because life there was so bleak. Thinking back on the place, it wasn’t the most conducive environment to encourage the flow of creative juices. Freddie loathed it because of the continuous aroma of Arabic cooking. The middle-Eastern residents had taken to cooking on portable stoves in the hallways so that the smells wouldn’t permeate their living space. But screw anyone else’s sensibilities!

  However, the Arabellahaus was convenient, for it was a part of the complex containing the studio, although Freddie’s dislike of staying there soon caused him to move in to Winnie’s apartment which was in the heart of old Munich, the area containing all the easily walkable gay bars which Freddie loved, including the ’Frisco and the New York.

  It was the first time Freddie had ever lived with anyone else under a roof that wasn’t his own and even though he expected me to go in everyday and do the laundry and clear up after him, he was happy with Winnie. He took a great delight in living with someone. He always knew in the back of his mind that if the worst came to the worst there was always the hotel or Barbara’s apartment to fall back on and so he knew he was safe but it was the only time in his adult life that he knew what it was like to live a relatively ordinary life with another man.

  He must have felt safe because it was while living with Winnie that on two occasions Barbara, who had been called first by Winnie, telephoned me to go over to help Freddie who had seemed to have suffered a sort of fit.

  He had apparently just blacked out but then had displayed symptoms of se
vere shaking. We just had to hold him steady and still until the tremors passed whereupon he would regain consciousness. Doctors were obviously called and they diagnosed the results of too much alcohol and use of drugs. Freddie being Freddie merely brushed the episodes aside when we asked him about them and how he was feeling. There was no pattern for these attacks and Freddie displayed no concern. He was quite, quite happy with his life as it was.

  Maybe it appeared to take so much longer to record the Mr. Bad Guy album than an average Queen album because there was only the input from one direction. Four people’s involvement may indeed be more constructive and productive even though causing a greater degree of friction. Too many cooks can occasionally turn out the perfect broth! When it’s down to just one person, there is no one else to point out the weaknesses or errors and supply alternatives and also no one else to blame if the decisions are wrong. When Freddie was working on his own, the results had to be even better than perfect. I have to add that both Mack and Stefan Wissnet, producer and engineers respectively, did fulfil to an extent the function of absent band members as far as supportive creative input was concerned.

  That Mr. Bad Guy was not patently as successful as any other Queen album did not faze Freddie at all. He was not expecting it.

  He knew that when any individual band member breaks away from an established unit, the end result is never as accepted a product by the general public as the band product. The buyers of Freddie’s album would in the main be Freddie fans after all and Freddie, as he preferred, was only one quarter of Queen. The disco direction of the material would surely have deterred the heavier rock fans in the massive Queen following. There are the obvious exceptions to this pattern of course, notably Sting and Phil Collins.

  During his stay in Munich for Mr. Bad Guy, Freddie had been introduced to a petite American singer who I believe was working with Mack at his Musicland Studio. During conversation, she had mentioned that she really admired Freddie and his music and so Mack, as per his metier, engineered a meeting. Freddie met Jo Dare one evening at a city restaurant. He was really taken with her. They shared the same mischievous sense of humour and Freddie readily agreed to do some work on the album she was recording. She was one of the comparatively few people in the music business, other than Billy Squier of course, whose career, in the time I knew Freddie, he kept abreast of. As he did with Billy, Freddie provided Jo with some vocals and helped with a few compositional ideas when she became stuck. He really got a kick out of doing it. Perhaps if his life had been different, production might have been a direction he would have taken when his performing days were over.

  A footnote to this period of individual recording comes in the small but perfectly formed person of David Geffen behind whom Freddie and I found ourselves seated on one trans American flight. Geffen turned round part way through the flight and very ostentatiously flung open his cheque book.

  “I want you to sing on my label,” he announced. “Just fill in the amount yourself!”

  Freddie didn’t. He was, for one of the very few occasions in my knowledge, stuck for words. The reason he didn’t take up the pen is one he would never be stuck for and that was his loyalty to the band and the institution of Queen. He knew he could never leave.

  Although in the first part of 1985 Queen as individuals seemed to be as musically far apart as they had ever been, there was still the lure of a good offer and the chance of doing another film soundtrack was too good to be missed. The recordings for the film Highlander thus became the basis for their next album, A Kind Of Magic which more directly came about as a result of the Live Aid concert in July 1985. Part way through the year, at a point where Freddie was distinctly bored, prospects brightened when an invitation arrived through the promoter Harvey Goldsmith to appear at a concert which Harvey, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure were organising to aid famine relief work in Ethiopia.

  At first, Freddie didn’t think too much of the idea, thinking it was just another of those self-aggrandizing manoeuvres for publicity purposes. After a short period of time when news filtered through of the actual scale and importance of the show vis-a-vis the huge worldwide television coverage involved, the band wholeheartedly agreed to participate. You have to remember that at this point they weren’t really into doing anything as Queen.

  The band were given a twenty minute slot just like everybody else. Then the hard part came trying to decide what to perform to give the very best of Queen in twenty minutes when one of their shows which obviously showed the band at its very best normally took anything up to two hours. They decided on the content and running order of the set and stuck to that throughout rehearsals even though, as we all know, Brian and Freddie came on again later in an auxiliary spot to sing ‘Is This The World That We Created?’

  I think the reason that Queen came off best from that concert on the day was due to their professionalism and their instinctive realisation that even for a twenty minute set, extensive rehearsals are a hundred per cent necessary. It would never have occurred to them not to rehearse.

  The band hired the Shaw Theatre on Euston Road and rehearsed solidly for a week. It was a mini-tour atmosphere which was created, their appearance having brought back so many of the tour crew like Gerry Stickells from America as well as Trip Khalaf and Jim Devenney, taking care of the outfront sound and stage monitors respectively as well as the sound and lighting crew the band already knew.

  The resulting publicity from the Live Aid appearance made the band aware that they were still wanted and brought about a change in their thinking regarding their future as Queen. So, while it wasn’t exactly as reported in the press that the band thought they would ‘cash in’ on their renaissance, it certainly became the platform for a new adventure and got their creative juices flowing.

  ‘One Vision’ was the first track, which was subsequently used on the film Iron Eagle. I imagine the inspiration came from the Live Aid experience because ultimately, Freddie’s original opinion on the gig was worn away and he actually appreciated what the whole project was about. Freddie was always of the opinion that there were at least two motives for anything; he was a cynic in the true sense of the word. The band really loved getting back to work as Queen, instead of just fulfilling their solo ambitions.

  ‘One Vision’ was begun in Munich at Musicland Studios and the association with the cinema was continued when ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’, ‘Gimme The Prize’, ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’ and ‘Princes Of The Universe’ were used in the hugely popular film Highlander starring Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery.

  This album also furnished another of the band’s crowd-pleasing anthems, namely ‘Friends Will Be Friends’. The co-composition credit on this track and on ‘Pain Is So Close To Pleasure’ was merely because John Deacon insisted that Freddie’s contribution be recognised and acknowledged. John’s honesty and integrity would not have allowed him to do otherwise.

  It appears that all bands travel the recording road with one producer for a while until the ideas from their collaboration have been exhausted and so after five albums, Dave Richards took over the role of nanny, which is basically what the co-producer on any of the Queen albums had to do for the band.

  After A Kind Of Magic and the tour promoting that album, once again Queen as a collective went their separate ways to pursue their individual projects.

  I really don’t know when Freddie and Dave Clark first met but word came to Freddie that Dave Clark would like to have Freddie involved in a project that he had initiated. His show, Time, was already a hit in London’s West End at The Dominion Theatre, starring Cliff Richard. Dave wanted an album made of the songs but had decided not to make it one of the routine ‘cast albums’ because these were usually made on a Sunday, the cast’s day off and the quality tended to suffer a little.

  Dave hit upon the idea of having guest singers of celebrity status to participate in the recording of the show’s songs. Freddie was approached and performed three songs one of which was pronounced so good tha
t it was released as a single, entitled ‘Time’ on the EMI label. It wasn’t the first time Freddie had contributed a couple of songs to the soundtrack of a show. A couple of years earlier in 1984, Freddie had been approached by Giorgio Moroder, Mack’s partner who successfully persuaded him to sing two tracks on his new musical reworking of Fritz Lang’s classic film Metropolis which was re-released to cinemas in its newly colourised state. Although there was an album released of the Metropolis soundtrack, Freddie’s contributions, one of which was called ‘Love Kills’ were never included by him anywhere else. Freddie was not usually one to show interest in singing other people’s songs. He had to have a personal involvement as well.

  It was during these Time sessions with Dave Clark that Freddie started what was to become his close musical partnership with Mike Moran. Other than being associated with Lynsey de Paul and the Eurovision Song Contest, Mike was celebrated for having originally been associated with Blue Mink, the famous Seventies band of top session musicians which included Messrs Greenaway and Cook and Madeleine Bell. Mike is one of the music world’s gentlemen. He is also an amazing technician, can play keyboards like you wouldn’t believe and has his feet planted firmly on the ground. He has been professionally involved with just about all of the luminaries of the London musical stage and has created a lot of music for use on television and, when Freddie met him, was playing keyboards for the Time sessions at the Abbey Road Studios of EMI.

  For all Freddie’s talents and ability, he found working entirely on his own very difficult. He had to have a sounding board. Perhaps it was that he didn’t have enough self-confidence in his own abilities? All the songs he had created before now had always been the result of collaboration with the rest of Queen, except of course for his own album, Mr. Bad Guy. That was the way they worked. He wasn’t a hundred per cent sure of his own judgements. But, as has been shown, given the right set of circumstances, the most amazing work could be produced. It’s like Freddie was the firework that needed to be lit but which once up in the sky explodes into all those glorious colours. You know the one, always the biggest one at the climax of the display.