Freddie Mercury: The Biography (14 page)

Everett’s agent, Jo Gurnett, confirms: ‘Kenny was hugely instrumental in getting Queen airplay for “Bohemian Rhapsody”. He
was incredibly enthusiastic about the record and played it all the time at home too.’

And Tony Brainsby recalls how ‘Everybody now says what a great record, but Kenny Everett was the only person brave enough
to play it at first. It was the kind of record that would either go to number one and make Queen, or it’d die a death and
be their epitaph. My first reaction was, Hey, good number, but who the hell is going to play it? It’s ridiculously long, and
what on earth is Freddie playing at with this opera bit in the middle? I mean, let’s face it, it just wasn’t what was going
on at the time.

‘Freddie realised it was a risky move, but underneath it all he was astute enough to take a chance with it. Other records
were nice and safe and regulation length. This was stunning and a whole EP on its own. But we were sure radio would block
it.’

On 31 October ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, sporting a picture cover, went on sale. It knocked the music industry sideways. Already
1975 had spawned an odd mix of musical styles, but no one was ready for this. From its ballad beginning, the song segued into
complicated multi-tracking harmonic operatics, which had involved almost 200 vocal overdubs, before
exploding into gut-busting hard rock. Incomparable to anything else around, its impact on the music scene resembled that of
the Beatles’ 1967 watershed album
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was Mercury’s most positive creative statement and remained so until the day he died. Future Mercury solo
and Queen compositions forever strived to match it, but despite their subsequent success, this never happened. Mercury’s response
to queries about the inspiration behind it always varied. It had a touch of fantasy about it, he said, and gently scoffed
that people should be taking it so seriously. But at the first hint of criticism, he would bristle, ‘Who can you compare it
to? Name one group who’ve done an operatic single!’ He would grow irritable and snap that it hadn’t been plucked from thin
air. But he refused repeatedly to go into any detail. The grandiose pomp of the song squares with Mercury’s love of drama
and passion, but it is worth considering if there were other forces at work.

In 1969 when he innocently made himself that tea laced with marijuana, friends testified to Mercury’s total avoidance of drugs.
Six years on his horizons had broadened through travelling and meeting new people on tour. His exposure to drugs and drug-taking
must have also increased. Before long he was known to be using cocaine, which had to have started sometime around the mid-seventies.
Is it possible that his early experiments with cocaine coincided with writing this song? He would not have been the first
or last performer to believe that drugs unlocked the mind and released his best work.

Whatever influenced ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, its effect on the public was polarised. A decade later, one Midlands radio station
poll revealed that the single topped both the Best Ever Record and the Worst Ever Record categories. This was typical of the
extreme reaction Freddie Mercury, as a person and performer, elicited all his life. In 1975 reviewers were split in their
response, but what did prove unfounded was the fear that radio would not play the single in its entirety. Demand for it was
so great that it received massive exposure on the airwaves.

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’s’ phenomenal impact had journalists clamouring for interviews. This time, to tackle Mercury’s resistance
to talking to the media, Tony Brainsby adopted a new strategy: ‘By the time Queen started to get themselves a name, then Freddie
began doing just the major interviews. He became a commodity only to be brought out when the big guns were around, like national
newspapers,
NME
front cover, that sort of thing. When they were interested, then I could talk him into doing interviews. Later, Brian and
the others became cover material, but in those days it was very much Freddie who was the focus.

‘Their fame came quickly by comparison to some and with “Bo Rhap”, as it became known, Fred was suddenly a star. Even so we
didn’t have to use him all the time. We simply wouldn’t have dreamt of asking him to do something that wasn’t considered big
enough so we worked around it.

‘In this business you must maintain the mystique, and you just can’t do that by trotting someone out at the drop of a hat.
The fact that this was right up Freddie’s street was a bonus, I guess. When Fred did do an interview, mind you, it wasn’t
that the people got close to him, because he treated these sessions the same as performing. He’d put on a big show for the
journalists and photographers, and be wonderfully colourful and camp.’

As it happened there wasn’t a lot of time to fend off the media, for Queen had a lengthy UK tour lined up for mid-November.
Before that there was other work to do. ‘Bo Rhap’ had entered the charts at number forty-seven and was rising fast.
Top of the Pops
was the obvious next step, but the song’s highly technical make-up ruled out live performance. Director Bruce Gowers, who
had previously filmed Queen at the Rainbow
Theatre, was approached to make a promotional video.

The concept of pop promos had hardly moved on from when bands like the Stones played on a beach and people off-camera lobbed
boulders down a hill behind them. What Mercury and the others had in mind was different. Having already booked time at Elstree
Studios for pre-tour rehearsals, on the morning of 10 November 1975 they put their ideas into practice. What they produced
took four hours to shoot, cost £4500 and required one day to edit. The result was semi-psychedelic and eerily dramatic, the
prototype hard-rock video promo, which, when premiered on
Top of the Pops
ten days later, was to change the face of pop-music marketing for ever.

Already captivated by the single, the public reacted well, and sales rocketed. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ would go platinum, selling
in excess of 1.25 million copies in Britain alone. But amid the gasps, sighs and envy in the music world, there were the odd
dissenters. DJ John Peel admired Queen at the outset but had grown to dislike what he felt was their bombastic style. Having
made fun of them one night on
TOTP,
he recalls that soon afterwards Mercury had told reporters he intended punching Peel out next time they met. Far from concurring
with the rest of the world that ‘Bo Rhap’ was the making of Queen, in Peel’s opinion it was the end of the band. Brian May
has subsequently suggested that it was Peel himself who was too bombastic – and that what Queen actually became was too successful.
‘It’s a problem to do too well in Britain,’ May says.

Someone else who had a mixed reaction to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was Dick Taylor, Pretty Things’ lead guitarist and a friend of
Mercury’s: ‘I think it’s great now. I mean it’s a classic. You can’t argue with it. But, at the time, I kind of fell in and
out of love with it. The first time I heard it, I thought, Blimey! That’s a bit OTT! But that was Freddie, and he was so bloody
good at it.’

The TV première took place one week into Queen’s tour.
The next day the single’s album,
A Night at the Opera,
was released. For the first time Mercury was responsible for the cover concept. Four days later ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ hit the
number one spot in the charts.

It might have been that success had gone to his head, or just that he felt Queen were not receiving the respect they deserved,
but Mercury began to show signs of excessive self-importance. Tony Brainsby was an independent PR consultant, which for him
had advantages: ‘It’s good to handle other people, because it proves beneficial to everyone. If someone phoned me up for a
Freddie Mercury quote that I couldn’t deliver, I might have to say, Well, no-can-do, but I can get you an interview with so-and-so;
it equally worked the other way round. I was always talking to people about Queen and had often got them attention when someone
had rung up looking for another band entirely.

‘The only problem I had with Freddie occurred during this tour. At this point I also represented Wings, and they were touring
the UK at the same time as Queen. As a rule I didn’t go on the road with any band, but this was, after all, Paul McCartney
and on something like only his second tour of Britain in a long time. The media, of course, went mad, and the national newspapers
were giving Wings daily coverage. But although I went on that tour, I was still dealing with all my other business by phone,
and neglecting no one, but Freddie got jealous that McCartney was getting loads of attention.

‘Queen were basking in all their “Bohemian Rhapsody” glory, but they weren’t yet superstars. But, anyway, I got this imperious
summons from Freddie to come to Manchester to see him, and that’s the only time we had – well, I hesitate to call it a falling
out as such, but let’s say he tried to give me a right bollocking. We met in a hotel room, and Freddie paced angrily about
demanding, “What’s going on? Why are you not on the road with us? And why is McCartney getting all this coverage?”

‘Well, what could I say? I told Fred I was getting Queen as much attention as there was to get, and that there was nothing
more to do. He still went on about it, so in the end I told him straight that I was talking incessantly to people about Queen,
but they were queuing round the block to talk to McCartney, and that was that. Freddie just wouldn’t accept it.

‘Harvey Goldsmith was the promoter for both tours, and he was getting it in the neck from Freddie then too. My final word
to him on the matter was that I couldn’t be in two places at the same time and left to rejoin McCartney.’

The fracas with Brainsby over, the Queen tour trundled on through four Hammersmith Odeon gigs, before heading north. Here
they were to run into trouble, as personal manager Pete Brown recalls: ‘They’d played Newcastle and were heading for a few
gigs in Scotland when our coach was stopped on the motorway by police waiting for us. The police mounted roadblocks, sealing
off every exit route, which must’ve cost them an absolute fortune … Nobody had anything, but I remember the silent anxiety
that some silly sod in the entourage might have something, however small, on him. But no one had.

‘Still, we all got dragged to the cop shop, and my main concern was that the delay might mean cancelling a show. The police
thought they had the scoop of the year and were furiously rifling through the bus, even sticking their noses in the ashtrays.
When they couldn’t come up with so much as a joint, their disappointment was almost laughable.’

On the whole they were treated well, particularly when the police began to realise that they’d been hoaxed by someone who
had told them that Queen were all high on drugs. Eventually they were released in the early hours of the morning, which left
Brown worrying whether they would reach Dundee in time for their date at the City Hall.

The furthest north Queen ever played in Britain was a gig on 14 December at the Capitol in Aberdeen. By this time it
looked as if ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, still at the top, would hold on long enough to be that year’s Christmas number one; a distinction
much fought over. Towards the end of the tour, the band had a few days off, and Pete Brown recalls going to Brighton with
them to see a gig: ‘We’d all gone to the Dome to see Hot Chocolate. They had a terrific number just out, called “You Sexy
Thing”, and it was a good night. Later, back at our hotel, suddenly the restaurant door flew open, and Errol Brown (Hot Chocolate’s
lead singer) burst in. He headed straight for Freddie, shouting, “You bastards! My main shot at a Christmas number one! You
bastards!” God, it was so funny!’

On Christmas Eve 1975, Queen returned to the Hammersmith Odeon for a performance that was to be televised live by
The Old Grey Whistle Test
and picked up for simultaneous broadcast on Radio One. Three weeks before,
A Night at the Opera
had been released in America, while in Britain it had already gone platinum. The day after Boxing Day, it, too, hit the top
slot in the UK album charts. This was Queen’s most successful year to date. For Mercury personally it had been a period of
great change, something that would, in crucial ways, cause trouble ahead. But right then, the future meant tomorrow, and wider
horizons were at last visible. Mercury had always known that he had been born to live life to the fullest; all he had so far
lacked was the opportunity. He had a feeling that was about to change.

By mid-January 1976 ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ had reigned over the UK singles chart for nine consecutive weeks. This matched a twenty-year-old
record set by the American singer Slim Whitman with ‘Rose Marie’ and secured Mercury and Queen innumerable accolades at the
annual music-press poll awards. With the confidence, too, that
A Night at the Opera
had already topped the half-million sales, rehearsals were in progress for the next stage.

In March they hoped to repeat their triumph in the Far East with their second tour of Japan. This was to be followed immediately
with what would be, in effect, their first tour of Australia – baling out after one gig at the Melbourne Festival two years
earlier hardly counted. And before all this, there was an extensive tour of North America and Canada. In contrast to the previous
whistle-stop itinerary, this time they played at fewer venues but often stayed four consecutive nights in the same city, which
cut down on the punishing travel schedule. As they flew out of Britain on 20 January, Mercury was pleased to be working with
Gerry Stickells. As ex-tour manager for Jimi Hendrix, no doubt he quizzed him for reminiscences of his late idol.

Queen opened to a rapturous reception at the Palace Theater, Waterbury, a week after their arrival. Their response
there augured well for the rest of the tour. Like true rock stars, everywhere they went now fans mobbed them, the more ingenious
among them tracking the band’s whereabouts, on the trail of anything from an autograph to a kiss. A growing army of groupies
had even begun bribing their way into hotel rooms, in the hope of making their celebrity conquest for the night.