Is This The Real Life? (23 page)

‘Brian had the Zandra Rhodes costume on at the Uris,’ remembers Anthony. ‘The idea was that when he hit the big Pete Townshend windmill chord, the lighting engineer knew to put a
spot on him which would catch the pleats of the tunic. It was a beautiful effect. One of Mott’s crew knew this and started trashing the board, hitting all the faders to throw him off his mark.’ The producer’s fiery streak surfaced again. ‘So I got hold of the guy, stuck this huge torch in his face and told him to leave the board alone.’ Later, Mercury was delighted to read a review of one of the New York shows, in which the female critic had noted that ‘she could tell what religion I was … and that I wasn’t wearing any knickers.’ ‘They notice everything down to the pimple on your arse, dear,’ he told writer Caroline Coon.

The bands travelled to Boston for the next night of the tour. But waking up in his hotel on the morning of the gig, May was barely able to move. After dragging himself into the bathroom, the guitarist saw his reflection in the mirror and realised why: his skin was yellow with jaundice. The infected arm, poor diet, late nights and the stress of touring had left his immune system depleted. May had contracted hepatitis. Queen flew back to England, where the guitarist was ordered to take six weeks’ bed-rest. Meanwhile, the rest of the band, their crew, and everyone that had come into close contact with May was inoculated against the virus. Mercury returned to the UK with a health problem of his own: not a ‘pimple on his arse’ but a plague of boils.

‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ was released as a single in the US at the end of May, but with the band unable to promote it, failed to chart. PR Tony Brainsby issued a press release, expressing Queen’s ‘bitter disappointment’ at the cancellation of the rest of the American tour, but that the group would be back in the studio by early July.

With May recuperating in hospital, Mercury, Deacon and Taylor began working up ideas for the next album. Having lasted three years in Queen, Deacon was finally shaking off the feeling that he was still, in his words, ‘an outsider’. He would later tell interviewers that it was only now, with the recording of Queen’s third album, that he felt convinced the band might have a serious future.

Work on the new album would take place between Trident, Wessex, Air and Sarm Studios in London, and Rockfield in Monmouth, with Roy Thomas Baker and Mike Stone again manning the board. Back on his feet, May joined the band at Rockfield,
but kept leaving the studio to throw up. At Trident in August, he collapsed and was taken to King’s College Hospital, where he was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer, which had, it transpired, first developed in his teens. After an operation, May was ordered to remain in bed. Paranoid ‘the band would replace me’, he began writing songs while recuperating.

In his absence, Deacon proved himself an able rhythm guitarist, while Freddie paid frequent morale-boosting visits to Brian’s hospital bed. But with their guitarist again out of commission, a planned run of the postponed US dates was cancelled. ‘Brian has got to look after himself,’ Mercury fussed to
NME
. ‘We all want to make sure something like that never happens again.’

When May returned to the studio he was confronted with a ‘mountain of playing to catch up on’. There were guitar parts, vocal harmonies, and countless overdubs. ‘It was very weird,’ he said. ‘Because for the first time I was able to see the group from the outside, and I was very excited.’ Despite their guitarist’s absence and the fragmented nature of the sessions, Queen had a clear vision for their next album. ‘
Queen II
was very layered and had been difficult for people to understand,’ said May. ‘So much so, that when we were making the follow-up, we’d thought we’d better take it a bit easy and spell out what we were doing, so that it would be a bit more accessible.’ Roy Thomas Baker’s understanding of the project was clearer still: ‘OK, let’s have really big hit singles.’

On one of his first studio visits after leaving hospital, May was confronted by the ‘big hit single’ in question: ‘Killer Queen’. The song was Mercury’s baby and, with its dainty piano, mimicked the compositional traits of pre-war songwriters Noël Coward and Cole Porter. ‘It’s one of those bowler hat, black suspenders numbers,’ claimed Mercury, suggesting the additional influence of his beloved
Cabaret
. Somehow in the midst of all this came chiming heavy metal powerchords and lyrics name-checking Moët & Chandon and Marie Antoinette.

‘I wrote “Killer Queen” in one Saturday night,’ explained Mercury. ‘It’s a song about a high-class call girl. Classy people can be whores as well.’ The song may have been written quickly, but the recording took longer. On first hearing the track, May was
unimpressed by what he described as the ‘abrasive backing vocals’; all of which had to be redone. Taylor remembers ‘take after take after take. The pitch had to be exactly right.’ One night after a band dinner, Baker demanded that Mercury return to the studio to work on the song. ‘But Freddie refused,’ explained the producer. ‘He said, “I’m not leaving this chair, dear!” So the road crew lifted him up and carried him to the piano. That’s how we got “Killer Queen”.’

Alongside Baker and Stone came two new recruits to the Queen studio team: Wessex Studio’s tape operator Geoff Workman, a wry Liverpudlian who would go on to engineer Queen’s
Jazz
album, and Sarm East Studio’s young assistant engineer, Gary Langan. Brian May would only contribute four compositions to the finished album, but these included ‘Brighton Rock’ and ‘Now I’m Here’; songs that would become high watermarks in the Queen catalogue. Both tracks were completed at Sarm, and gave Gary Langan his first taste of working with Queen. Roy Thomas Baker was now an expert at marshalling the band, as Langan witnessed first hand. ‘Roy is the most extrovert person I have ever come across in my life,’ he says. ‘And to see him and Freddie Mercury together … He could also put the band down in a way that fired them up. He’d say, “Darlings, that was truly awful. How could you present such a dreadful performance?”

‘It was very hard work,’ he continues. ‘You’d do fourteen-or fifteen-hour days. You’d start at twelve or one o’clock and go straight through until three in the morning, and it was total concentration for the whole time. They sweated blood.’ Langan remembers that the call-and-response vocals on ‘Now I’m Here’ required five quarter-inch tape machines running at different speeds, which left the ‘whole room humming’. The final mix of ‘Brighton Rock’ was heard by Langan, Baker, Stone, Mercury, May and Taylor crammed into the control booth and was, says the engineer, ‘one of those “Ye gods!” moments.’

In September, May, still looking frail, made his first public appearance with Queen since New York. To commemorate sales of 100,000 copies for
Queen II
, the band were presented with silver discs at a function at London’s Café Royal. With his usual keen eye for a
photo op, Tony Brainsby booked Jeanette Charles, a Queen Elizabeth II impersonator, to present the band with their discs. A month later, ‘Killer Queen’ was released as a single in the UK. It was a double A-side, paired with another new song, ‘Flick of the Wrist’, but only one would find its way onto the radio. Later, Brian May shared his initial misgivings about ‘Killer Queen’ as a single, fretting that some fans would think it too lightweight. But, as he also admitted, ‘It was the turning point. It was a big hit and we desperately needed it.’ ‘Killer Queen’ reached number 2 in the charts, only held off by pop pin-up David Essex’s ‘I’m Gonna Make You a Star’. May’s misgivings didn’t last long: ‘Fuck it! A hit is a hit is a hit.’

Adrian Morrish, Freddie’s old friend from Isleworth Polytechnic, caught Queen performing ‘Killer Queen’ on
Top of the Pops
that summer. And there was Fred Bulsara in a fake fur blouson ‘being’ Freddie Mercury. ‘It was the first time I’d ever seen the persona,’ says Morrish. ‘I knew he’d joined a band. The shock was that he’d become successful.’ On the same night, Bruce Murray, once Freddie’s bandmate in The Hectics, was working in a mini-cab office in South London, watching television while waiting for another fare. ‘There was something about the singer in Queen,’ he recalls. ‘He had all this long hair now, but there was something about him I recognised … I suddenly realised, “My God, that’s Fred Bulsara.” I phoned Derrick Branche, and said, “Are you watching TV? Go and turn the TV on now!”’

Queen’s third album,
Sheer Heart Attack
, was released on 1 November, just as the band embarked on their second UK tour of the year. Mick Rock had again taken the cover photograph, but the presentation was startlingly different from that of
Queen II
. ‘We want to look like we’ve been marooned on a desert island,’ Freddie told him. Rock obliged, by shooting the band from above while they lay in a circle, their faces and bare chests smeared with Vaseline and sprayed with water. When Roger complained about the appearance of his hair, extensions were added in the final picture. While Freddie’s ubiquitous black nail varnish was still visible, the band were dressed down, and less overtly glam than before. ‘We’re showing people we’re not merely a load of old poofs,’ insisted Mercury. ‘We are capable of other things.’

The music inside reflected the cover. This was Queen at their most concise yet. May’s party pieces ‘Brighton Rock’ and ‘Now I’m Here’ opened and closed the first side of music and were the lengthiest songs on offer. ‘Brighton Rock’ had been in existence in some shape or form since
Queen II
, though the multi-tracked guitar solo idea dated back further to the Smile track ‘Blag’. As a counterpoint to the guitars was Mercury’s startling falsetto vocal. ‘Now I’m Here’ was Queen’s adventures in America set to music, name-checking Mott The Hoople and Brian’s lost love Peaches with Freddie’s exhortation ‘Go, little Queenie’ lifted straight from Chuck Berry. May’s other two compositions ‘Dear Friends’ and ‘She Makes Me (Stormtrooper in Stilettos)’ were less compelling, but offered a glimpse into their composer’s troubled frame of mind. May played piano on ‘Dear Friends’, while Mercury sung a slight lyric of love and redemption; Brian took his own lead vocal for ‘She Makes Me’, asking the world to ‘cure his ills’ over a rather leaden melody.

Even John Deacon had been coerced into writing. The bass player made his compositional debut with ‘Misfire’, a cheery soft-pop piece that scraped in at just one minute and fifty seconds. Not to be outdone, Taylor offered his best Queen song yet. ‘Tenement Funster’ was another in what would become the drummer’s bottomless canon of songs celebrating the joy of the rock ’n’ roll life: a hymn to loud music, ‘good guitars’ and ‘the girls on my block’. But it was Mercury that distinguished himself as a writer on
Sheer Heart Attack
. ‘Flick of the Wrist’ was venomous hard rock that could have graced the first Queen album. The group-credited ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ was a feverish heavy metal number that dated back to Freddie’s Wreckage days. In contrast, ‘In the Lap of the Chords’ was a pomp rock ballad (also reprised as the last song on the album) with a crowd-pleasing chorus that pre-empted ‘We Are the Champions’. Tellingly, it would serve a similar purpose in Queen’s live show until usurped by ‘We Are the Champions’ four years later.

Sheer Heart Attack
’s wild cards also came from Mercury. ‘Bring Back That Leroy Brown’ was a vaudeville pastiche, with May on ukelele-banjo, Deacon thumbing a double bass, and the singer
drawing again on his boyhood memory of the novelty records he had heard on
Uncle Mac’s Children’s Favourites
. ‘There was this feeling that we could try any kind of style,’ said May, ‘and shouldn’t be embarrassed by anything at all.’ ‘Lily Of The Valley’ was a delicate piano piece that hinted at the writer’s inner turmoil. Twenty-five years later Brian May offered his own impressions on what the song was about. ‘“Lily of the Valley” was utterly heartfelt,’ he said. ‘It’s about [Freddie] looking at his girlfriend and realising that his body needed to be somewhere else.’

In late 1974, the singer was still living with Mary Austin, but stalling any questions about his private life in the press with the usual quips and glib aside (‘I’m as gay as a daffodil, dear’). He claimed that he and his chauffeur were enjoying a flirtatious relationship, and that he played ‘on the bisexual thing … because it was fun’. After Mercury’s death, former EMI radio plugger Eric Hall would waggishly claim that ‘Killer Queen’ was inspired by Freddie’s unrequited love for him: ‘He said, “I wrote that song for you. I’m the queen and you’re the killer because I can’t have you!”’ According to Hall, this conversation took place in a Holiday Inn while Queen were due to appear on Radio Luxembourg. ‘Freddie comes to my room in the middle of the night, tells me he’s in love with me, and can he get into my bed with me,’ said Hall. While agreeing to sit and ‘hold his hand’, Hall insists he rebuffed Mercury’s advances and that Freddie accepted the rejection.

John Anthony had also found himself summoned to Freddie’s hotel room one night during Queen’s first UK tour that year. Anthony had travelled from London to Sunderland in the group’s tour bus. One night after a show, Queen were joined by various female admirers back at their hotel. John went to bed, only to be telephoned by a frantic-sounding Freddie, who asked him to come to his room immediately. ‘And there was Fred sat in bed in his pjyamas and night cap and these two girls standing around in his room,’ says Anthony. ‘Fred said, “Get rid of them Johnnypoos.” So I told them that Fred had a big day ahead of him tomorrow and was very tired and they’d best go.’ When they were alone again, Mercury told Anthony that he thought he was gay, and asked him if he would tell Mary Austin on his behalf. John refused.

On the third night, the tour reached the Liverpool Empire, where Queen were briefly reunited with the opening act from earlier in the year. Dave Lloyd was still waiting for the champagne he’d won in a bet with Roger Taylor, while bassist Keith Mulholland joined the Queen entourage in the hotel bar for an aftershow party.

‘Freddie made a very grand entrance,’ recalls Mulholland. ‘He’d obviously gone back to his room, showered and done his hair. Very regal. I was sat at a table with Brian who was having a Jack Daniels, and Jack Nelson was pouring the champagne. I said something like, “This band is going to go ballistic”, and Jack said, “Ballistic? We are going straight to the top.”’