Is This The Real Life? (40 page)

The first evidence of
Hot Space
’s brave new direction came in April with the release of a single, ‘Body Language’. The song reprised the finger-clicks and handclaps of ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, but its synthesised funk rhythm and processed drums put it even further left of field than ‘Another One Bites the Dust’. Furthermore, if Brian May was playing on it, then he was virtually inaudible. The accompanying video was dominated by Mercury and
a pack of shimmying dancers, while May looked as if he couldn’t quite bear to make eye contact with the camera. The single’s picture sleeve depicted a close-up of two naked bodies, which caused a fuss in the US, but not enough to stop the single reaching number 11. In the UK, ‘Body Language’ stalled outside the Top 20.

‘I can remember having a go at Freddie because some of the stuff he was writing was very definitely on the gay side,’ said May, when asked about ‘Body Language’. ‘I remember saying, “It would be nice if this stuff could be universally applicable, because we have friends out there of every persuasion.” It’s nice to involve people. What it’s not nice to do is rope people out. And I felt kind of roped out by something that was very overtly a gay anthem. I thought it was very hard to take that in the other way.’

Just a few days before
Hot Space
’s scheduled release, Queen received an urgent message from David Bowie. As well as ‘Under Pressure’, Bowie had sung backing vocals on ‘Cool Cat’. When Queen informed him that the song was on
Hot Space
, he insisted they take it off the record, claiming he wasn’t satisfied with his performance. ‘Unfortunately, he didn’t tell us until about a day before the album was supposed to be released,’ said May, ‘I toured with Bowie after he’d recorded with Queen,’ recalls Queen’s then official photographer Denis O’Regan, ‘and he didn’t have great memories of the experience. It was too much of a clash of the titans.’ A version of the song, without Bowie’s vocals, was promptly substituted. But the delay meant that the album wouldn’t be out in time for the first half of Queen’s European tour.

The band would be joined for the tour by an old friend, ex-Mott The Hoople keyboard player Morgan Fisher. ‘I was living in Belgium,’ says Fisher. ‘I was having nothing to do with making music but then I felt the need to get back into it and make some money.’ Fisher sent letters enquiring about work to friends and contacts, including Brian May. ‘Lo and behold, Brian sent me a telegram saying, “Do you want to tour with us?” I’d sent letters to a few Brians, so I was thinking, “Which Brian is that?”’

A couple of days later a box of Queen cassettes arrived and Fisher started practising. Before long, he was in Los Angeles for an audition. ‘But there were only two of us: me and Roger Powell
from Todd Rundgren’s band, Utopia. Roger was a synthesiser wizard and way ahead of me, but he hadn’t been in Mott The Hoople, and that’s what got me the job.’

With
Hot Space
still to be released, Queen faced the task of playing material with which the audience was unfamiliar. The funk track, ‘Staying Power’, was an especially hard sell. The album version included a horn arrangement recorded in New York by Aretha Franklin’s producer Arif Mardin. Onstage, May would inject more of the ‘anger and violence’ he believed missing from the studio version. But Queen’s more conservative audiences were less impressed. When the song’s announcement was greeted with jeers at Frankfurt’s Westfallenhalle, Mercury rounded on the hecklers: ‘If you don’t want to listen to it, fucking go home!’ Offstage, Freddie was living as large as ever, flying his barber, Denny Godber, from London’s hip Sweeney’s salon, into Wurzberg just so he could have a haircut, and inviting him to hang out with them for as long as he wanted.

Queen’s support act were Malcolm McLaren’s latest protégés, punk-pop band Bow Wow Wow. After hecklers threw bottles at the stage, the group took matters into their own hands and threw them back. They were swiftly replaced by a safer proposition, Christian rockers After the Fire. Brian May was appalled. ‘A certain section of our audience found Bow Wow Wow very modern,’ he told
Record Mirror
. Mindful of the reaction some of Queen’s new material was attracting, he added, ‘Our audience is perhaps a little narrow-minded in that way.’

There were problems, too, for Morgan Fisher. ‘I played the music professionally,’ he says, ‘but something wasn’t working right.’ Both Queen and Fisher had expected to find each other unchanged since 1974’s Mott The Hoople tour. ‘The trouble was I wasn’t the same Morgan Fisher they’d known back then, getting pissed and reading out Goon Show scripts. I had been out of the scene for a while, I was much quieter, I was involved in Indian spirituality and I was meditating every day. Queen weren’t the same, either. Freddie was as outrageous as ever, but the others all had kids. At the hotels, there were mums and dads and babies. It had all become very cool and calculated and professional.’ Nevertheless, one night, as Fisher came off stage, he glanced down and saw that the crew
had chalked a large arrow pointing left next to his stool. Alongside it was the word ‘EAST’.

Playing in such large venues, it would take too long to walk from the stage to the main dressing room during the taped section of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and Brian’s solo spot. Queen’s crew had constructed a makeshift mini-dressing room close to the stage, nicknamed ‘The Tent’ or ‘The Doll’s House’, and made out of black fabric draped over scaffolding poles. May’s lengthy guitar solo was a fixture of all Queen shows. ‘Brian would fight the good fight to get his solo into the set and I always think he got the sense he’d had a victory,’ says Brian Southall. While May soloed, the others would congregate in their makeshift hidey-hole.

Fisher, who was now leading an abstemious lifestyle recalls. ‘The trouble is Brian’s solo could go on for fifteen, twenty minutes. I remember one night, Freddie was sat there and he couldn’t stand it any longer. His eyes were rolling upwards, his teeth were sticking out and his hands suddenly flailed forward and he shouted, “For God’s sake, let’s go shopping! Get me outta here!”’

Behind the scenes, business manager Jim Beach had renegotiated Queen’s contract. The band were now signed to EMI on a new six-album deal.
Hot Space
would finally be released on 21 May, just before their UK shows. It was Queen’s most experimental album yet. Deacon and Mercury’s soul and funk dominated most of the first half, with May all but relegated to the sidelines. Tellingly, all four band members and Mack would be credited with playing synthesiser. Mercury had celebrated his sexual appetite in the past on songs such as ‘Get Down, Make Love’ and ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. ‘Body Language’ and ‘Staying Power’ would do the same on
Hot Space
. ‘It’s all narcissism of a decidedly tongue-in-bumcheek style,’ wrote Sandy Robertson of
Sounds
.

Mercury showed more restraint on ‘Life is Real (Song for Lennon)’, and Taylor offered a haunting feelgood pop song, ‘Calling All Girls’, that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on
Fun
in Space
. But, for the first time, there would be no Taylor or May lead vocals. Mercury sang lead on everything. May nudged the album closer to hard rock with ‘Dancer’ and ‘Put Out the Fire’, before turning the clock back to
A Day at the Races
era with the
album’s most traditional-sounding track, ‘Las Palabros de Amor’. With an English sub-title of ‘The Words of Love’, this would be Queen’s next single. It was a scarf-waving anthem, but the fireside guitars and Spanish title evoked a slight air of the Costa del Sol and, oddly, Abba’s hit ‘Fernando’. Surprisingly, Queen performed it on
Top of the Pops
, their first real-life appearance in five years on what Roger Taylor called ‘that shit programme’.

In the press,
Hot Space
would be both praised and denounced.
Rolling Stone
pointed out that ‘Queen have always been ruled by sound instead of soul’, while the
Washington Post
saluted the album’s ‘mesmerising
rechauffé
disco’. For many fans, though, the change of direction was too much. ‘
Hot Space
wasn’t easy,’ said May. ‘But I’ll stand by it. It got us out of a rut and into a new place.’ Roger Taylor’s judgement remains coloured by the album’s cover as well as the music inside. Taylor and Mercury wanted
Hot Space
to mimic a design they had seen on an old Motown record sleeve, but something went awry. ‘It’s our worst cover by miles,’ he said. ‘Absolute shit.’ Despite such reservations,
Hot Space
would make it to number 4 in the UK. Six months after its release, Queen fan Michael Jackson reappeared with
Thriller
, an album that, like
Hot
Space
, merged funk, pop and rock. Jackson told May he loved
Hot
Space
. As Mack points out, ‘
Hot Space
is very underrated, and about nine months ahead of its time.’

Back on home turf, the tour ran into problems when Queen were refused shows at Arsenal FC’s home ground in North London and Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium. Amusingly, the reason given was that Pope John Paul II was on his own UK tour and had hired all available portable toilets. Meanwhile, a proposed show at London’s Royal Albert Hall, the scene of one of Smile’s earliest gigs, was knocked back when the venue’s managers saw the scale of Queen’s lighting rig and feared it would damage the historic building.

In the end Queen would manage just four shows, including Leeds FC’s Elland Road stadium and the recently built Milton Keynes Bowl. Tyne Tees TV filmed the Milton Keynes gig, which would eventually find its way out as an official DVD. Seen now, it’s a striking reminder of how contrary and unique Queen looked and sounded in
1982. At the back, Roger Taylor, with his spiky mop and red bandana, looking like one of The Police; at the front Brian May, still the seventies guitar hero, as if preserved in aspic since the days of ‘Killer Queen’; John Deacon resplendent in gaudy turquoise jeans and T-shirt, like an engineer on dress-down Friday; and Freddie Mercury presiding over the show like a camp circus ringmaster. The music, too, is all over the place, pin-wheeling from pomp rock (‘Save Me’) to gospel (‘Somebody to Love’) to heavy metal (‘Sheer Heart Attack’) to the weird white funk of ‘Under Pressure’. Odder still, it works.

The only time Mercury dropped his guard was to introduce songs from
Hot Space
: ‘Most of you know we’ve got some new sounds out last week … and for what it’s worth we’re gonna do some songs in the black funk category, whatever you call it … People get so excited about these things it’s only a bloody record.’ Onstage, though, May gave ‘Staying Power’ and ‘Back Chat’ another lease of life. ‘“Staying Power”, in particular, became a fantastic live track,’ he said.

At Milton Keynes, though, one of Queen’s support acts would experience the disapproval of their less tolerant fans. While Joan Jett and The Blackhearts and Heart played user-friendly hard rock, the Liverpudlian psychedelic pop band Teardrop Explodes were a far more outré proposition. ‘The audience were incensed that we were playing,’ said vocalist Julian Cope. ‘We were bottled mercilessly from beginning to end by heavy metal bum boys who shouted at me, “Fuck off, you queer!” Wow, they dig Monsieur Freddie and call me queer?’

Teardrop Explodes wouldn’t be the only ones to experience violence. Mercury and boyfriend Bill Reid had a screaming row before the gig, culminating in Reid sinking his teeth into Mercury’s left hand. The wound was hastily patched up for the show. The singer’s tortuous relationship with Reid was a source of both concern and amusement. Morgan Fisher still recalls hearing the same argument at every post-gig dinner. ‘Every night, sat in the restaurant, Fred’s boyfriend would tell him, “Freddie you have got to stop smoking”, and every night Fred would snap, “Oh, shut up!” and light another cigarette. And so it went on.’ Bafflingly, Mercury had begun smoking in 1980. ‘I don’t know why he started so late in
life,’ says Peter Hince. ‘Maybe it was a stress thing, another prop to use. But Freddie never smoked like Keith Richards, like a rock star. It was more like a schoolgirl.’ Mercury himself would tell anyone that asked that he smoked to give himself ‘the husky singing voice’ he so admired in other singers.

Queen’s US tour was due to start in July, but the Milton Keynes show would be Morgan Fisher’s last with the band. Maybe it was the daily meditation sessions, maybe it was the teetotal lifestyle. ‘I was all set to go to America,’ he recalls. ‘So I went on holiday and I was lying on a beach when a telegram arrived from the Queen office: “Terribly sorry, Morgan, but we don’t need a keyboard player for the US tour.” I was furious. I had all the songs we were playing live on these cassettes. So I went back, piled them on the floor and jumped up and down on them, until there was miles of tape everywhere. Then I made sure I got my money.’

In truth, Queen always had every intention of touring America with a keyboard player, and had already lined up Fisher’s replacement. A Canadian session musician by the name of Fred Mandel had been hired for what was being billed as the
Rock’n’America
tour. ‘Queen were too embarrassed to say, “Sorry, Morgan, something is not right, we would rather get someone else,”’ laughs Fisher. ‘I never asked them why: I was too bloody repressed.’

Fred Mandel had been working with Alice Cooper and had co-written their 1980 album,
Flush the Fashion
, which had been produced by Roy Thomas Baker. ‘I was asked to go to this office on Sunset Boulevard to meet Gerry Stickells,’ says Mandel. ‘We sat down, talked for about two minutes, and then Gerry said, “Oh, you’ll do.” I said, “What? Don’t you want to hear me to play?” He said, “No, that’s OK, I just want to make sure you’re OK to hang out with.” I went to Montreal on the Sunday, had two days’ rehearsal. On Wednesday, I met Freddie Mercury for the first time in the dressing room of the Montreal Forum and walked out to play in front of 7,000 people.

‘I had a week to learn how to play a new synthesiser,’ he adds. ‘I was also playing bass as John was doing rhythm on a couple of tracks. Things like “Back Chat” and “Body Language” were pretty challenging. It wasn’t like learning a couple of pop tunes. Nowadays I’d baulk at taking something like that on. But back then
I was ignorantly blissful.’