Is This The Real Life? (31 page)

In October, Queen were presented with a Britannia Award for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody', which tied with Procol Harum's ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale' as Best British Single of the Last Twenty-Five Years. In the same month, they released the first two songs on
News of the
World
as the two sides of their new single: ‘We Are the Champions' and ‘We Will Rock You'. Rock 'n' roll bands declaring their invincibility was nothing new. But rarely had any group sounded so utterly assured of that invincibility.

‘“We Are the Champions” is the most egotistical song I've ever written,' Freddie admitted. He had, he said, been inspired by the crowd singalongs at football matches, and wanted to write something for, as he called them, ‘the masses' at Queen concerts. ‘I suppose it could be construed as my version of [Frank Sinatra's] “My Way”,' he added. ‘We have made it, and it certainly wasn't easy.'

‘I was quite shocked when I heard the lyrics,' Brian May told
Mojo
. ‘I remember saying, “You can't do this, Fred. You'll get killed.” Freddie said, “Yes, we can.”' He was correct. Mercury's
conviction drives ‘We Are the Champions' from its dainty opening verse to its ridiculously overblown conclusion. Not once does he sound like a man suffering one iota of self-doubt. Queen filmed a promo for the single at the New London Theatre in front of an audience of nearly a thousand invited fans, with Freddie conducting the masses in his Nijinsky stage suit. After just one take, the crowd reacted as if they'd heard the song as many times as ‘Keep Yourself Alive' or ‘Seven Seas of Rhye'.

The bold declaration of ‘no time for losers' seemed a defiant snub to Queen's critics (‘In their moneyed superiority, they are indeed champions,' wrote
Rolling Stone
's Bart Testa, as if throwing up his hands in surrender). Taylor and May would always insist that Mercury's tongue was in his cheek when he wrote the song, and that, as the drummer said, the ‘we' was ‘a collective “we”. We are all champions.'

If audiences felt patronised, it didn't show. ‘We Are the Champions' gave Queen a number 2 hit in the UK, a number 1 in France (for a record-breaking twelve weeks) and a number 4 in the US. A song that at first, as Brian May said, ‘had us on the floor laughing' would go on to become ‘an international anthem for sports, politics … everything.'

The single's flipside had been written by Brian May, but was every bit as self-assured. ‘I woke up after a momentous gig at Stafford Bingley Hall when the audience had kept singing after we'd gone offstage,' recalled May, ‘and I had the idea for “We Will Rock You” in my head. Freddie and I both thought it would be an interesting experiment to write a song with audience participation specifically in mind.' Until the arrival of the stuttering guitar solo, the track relied only on Mercury's vocal and the collective hands and feet of his bandmates and anyone else that happened to be in Wessex Studios that day. ‘There are no drums on the track,' revealed May. ‘It's just clapping and stamping on boards, overdubbed many times over with many primitive delay machines.'

‘“We Will Rock You” truly showed the creative side of Mike Stone,' remembers Andy Turner. Over the course of some fifteen takes, Stone recorded everyone he could find at Wessex performing the two foot stomps and a handclap that comprised the song's
rhythm. ‘Early one evening, they came and rounded up me, Howard, and Betty the tea lady, who lived in the council house next door to the studio, and got us all up on these drum risers,' laughs Turner. ‘We all stood there and did the “boom-boom cha” take after take after take.'

At EMI's autumn sales conference that year, Brian Southall made use of both songs. ‘Our conference was themed around “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You”, so we handed out football scarves to everyone,' he explains. In keeping with the spirit of the occasion, Southall had also hired sports pundit Dickie Davies, presenter of
The Big Match
, to record links for the conference. ‘Then we played both tracks. Everyone was on their feet, totally fired up.'

After spending over six months in the US singles charts, ‘We Are the Champions' would be adopted by the New York Yankees baseball team as their anthem. Thousands of miles away from London in North Carolina, ex-Panchgani pupil Subash Shah would hear Queen's rallying cry of ‘We Will Rock You' every time he watched his baseball team over the next few years. Shah was a jazz fan with no great interest in pop music, and, until after Mercury's death, had no idea that he was listening to his childhood friend ‘Buckwee' Bulsara.

Defiant as always, Queen refused EMI's request to put a picture of the band on the sleeve of
News of the World
. Instead, they hired American artist Frank Kelly Freas to pastiche his artwork for a 1953 edition of
Astounding Science Fiction
magazine. Freas re-created his original doleful-looking robot, now attempting to cradle the members of Queen in his mechanical claw. As a gimmick, EMI created promotional robot clocks. ‘They were big grandfather clocks,' says Brian Southall. ‘Very expensive. But that's what we did in those days. There was no expense spared. The policy was, “How much money can we spend to make the band and us feel good?”'

By 1977, Southall and EMI's Bob Mercer had become acutely aware that Queen were an entirely different beast from the groups they'd encountered earlier in the decade. ‘Queen came to marketing meetings for one thing,' laughs Mercer. ‘They hunted as a pack.' For Brian Southall, a squabble over an album sleeve was
merely a sign of the times. ‘There was a point in the 1970s where record companies lost control of their artists. You could blame it on
Dark Side of the Moon
if you like. So it was a perfect time for Queen to take advantage of that, albeit in the nicest possible way. Like Pink Floyd, Queen delivered the album, delivered the album cover, and your job was to do the work of the worker ants and sell it. They were perfect animals for the seventies.'

One lunchtime, Southall and his marketing assistant took Mercury to lunch in a French restaurant close to EMI's offices in Manchester Square. ‘It was a great restaurant, wonderful food, but I think Freddie asked for a piece of lettuce,' chuckles Southall. ‘After lunch, it was a lovely day, Freddie decided that he was going to walk back to the office. It was about fifty yards around two sides of Manchester Square. But his limo had to drive, cruising at the same speed, with the door open in case Freddie got tired. He was a star, but a bigger star than anyone I ever met.'

In November, despite EMI's robot grandfather clocks and the omnipresent ‘We Are the Champions',
News of the World
only reached number 4 in the UK, Queen's lowest chart placing since
Queen II
. In a comic reversal of fortunes, it was their Wessex studio mates, The Sex Pistols, who took the top spot with their debut album. By then, Queen were on tour in the United States. The blow was softened when
News of the World
gave them their first American number 1. ‘Any band from that era that says they weren't competitive are liars,' said Roger Taylor. ‘We were always like, “Shit, I wish we could be where Led Zeppelin are.” Or we'd be looking at groups like Yes and wanting to do better.'

When Queen had sold out New York's Madison Square Garden in March, they'd set themselves a goal to better Yes's record of selling out three nights at the same venue. In December 1977, they managed two nights. ‘We were always trying to take the next step,' said May. ‘A million records this year, two million next year; one night at Madison Square Garden this time, two next time …'

For Brian, the concerts were a personal victory. May's father, Harold, had struggled with his son's choice of career, and Queen's hit singles and albums had done little to change his point of view. One of his projects at the Ministry of Aviation had been designing
the blind landing equipment for Concorde. While John Reid arranged for a group of the band's friends and employees to fly to New York for the shows on Freddie Laker's Skytrain, May went one better. ‘I flew my dad over on Concorde to see us play. He'd worked on Concorde for all that time but had never actually flown on it. He saw us play at Madison Square Garden, and after the show he came up to me and said, “Yes, all right. I get it now.” That was a wonderful moment.'

Onstage, Queen still subscribed to their usual policy, expressed by Freddie as ‘the bigger, the better – in everything'. May and Mercury opened the show alone with ‘We Will Rock You'. The tribal rhythm boomed hypnotically across the vast arenas, before the rest of band weighed in for a sped-up, almost punk-rock version of the same song. By then, Queen's 60-feet ‘crown' had achieved lift-off and hovered over the stage, beaming out shafts of light through a fug of dry ice. Four months later, cinema-goers would see a similar effect in Steven Spielberg's
Close Encounters of the
Third Kind
.

At Madison Square Garden, Freddie Mercury paraded in a crowd-pleasing New York Yankees baseball jacket. In Portland, the audience took over the vocals on ‘Love of my Life'. Before a gig in San Diego, a worse-for-wear John Deacon stuck his hand through a plate glass window, but had it patched up sufficiently to play the show. On most nights, Queen's cover of ‘Jailhouse Rock' was now dedicated to Elvis Presley, who had died suddenly in August.

After watching the first night in New York,
Rolling Stone
's Chet Flippo wrote that ‘Queen songs cannot decide whether to be The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles or tortured chanting Gregorians. Based on audience appeal, they get the job done. I'm just not sure what that job is.' In America, Queen were still perceived as a heavy rock band with an unusually theatrical lead singer. Some of their musical quirks, the throwbacks to
Uncle Mac's Children's Favourites
or The Temperance Seven, didn't translate as well as they did in the studio. The good folks of Norfolk, Virginia, preferred to be blasted senseless by ‘We Will Rock You', ‘Brighton Rock' or ‘Now I'm Here'. After the opening night, Queen's newest curio ‘Sleeping on the Sidewalk' was shelved for the remainder of the tour.

Offstage, ex-Hectics singer Bruce Murray caught up with Mercury at the Aladdin: ‘My mother was living in Las Vegas, and I saw that Queen were playing.' Backstage, though, Murray could see that how different his old friend's life now was. ‘I didn't want to become a hanger-on,' he says. ‘Freddie was into the whole gay thing now, and to be honest, there was, I think, a feeling backstage of “us and them”.' The two parted on good terms, but it would be the last time Murray saw or spoke to Fred Bulsara.

Onstage, Mercury sold the show as hard as always. Described in the US press as both ‘obnoxious and joyously camp', the singer modelled a fashionably shorter haircut, while his new wardrobe included a leather biker's jacket. Freddie would sign off shows with ‘Thank you, it's been a pleasure doing business with you', a quip that annoyed some critics who thought it too cynical. Ian Hunter caught the show at Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens, and burst out laughing after one incident. ‘Brian May's amp had exploded,' recalled Hunter. The guitarist dashed over to tell Mercury, who was at the piano, unaware that his microphone was switched on and that the audience could hear every word. As Hunter recalled, ‘Fred waved Brian away, saying, “Oh, just jump around a bit and the silly bastards won't know the difference!”'

On 22 December Queen played the LA Forum. It was their final night in Los Angeles, the last of three shows that had seen them play to total of 64,000 people. The band encored with a hastily rehearsed ‘White Christmas', joined onstage by their bodyguard dressed as Santa Claus, manager John Reid disguised as an elf and assorted roadies as reindeers. They flew home a day later. However much ‘slutting' there was still to be done in America, Mercury had other things on his mind: ‘My mother would kill me if I wasn't home for Christmas. I haven't missed one yet.'