Is This The Real Life? (42 page)

‘In the studio Freddie was full of ideas and lateral thinking,’ explained May. ‘But he didn’t have the greatest attention span. He would always peak at a certain time. If you had Fred for an hour when he was peaking, he was absolute gold dust. But then you’d hear, “Oh look, dear! I’ve done this. I have to go now”, and you knew you’d had your slice of Freddie.’

Mercury would take a sole writing credit on three songs. ‘Keep On Passing the Open Windows’ had been earmarked for
The Hotel
New Hampshire
. With its optimistic lyrics and driving rhythm it was the kind of self-empowerment anthem much heard in mid-eighties film soundtracks. ‘Man on the Prowl’ was forgettable rockabilly, saved by a glorious piano finale from Fred Mandel. For the first time, Queen had allowed another musician into the studio for a credited performance. ‘Freddie and I both played on “Man on the Prowl”,’ says Mandel now. ‘But Fred said to me, “Why don’t you take over later and play that rock ’n’ roll stuff. You do that
better than me. Besides, they will all think it’s me, darling!” I didn’t care. I was being paid.’

The singer would save his best work for ‘It’s a Hard Life’, another of those ceremonious half-ballads in the mould of ‘Play the Game’ or ‘Killer Queen’. The song’s opening line was based on a line from an aria in Ruggero Leoncavallo’s opera
Pagliacci
. ‘This is one of the most beautiful songs Freddie ever wrote,’ said Brian May in 2003. ‘It’s straight from the heart.’ May worked closely with Mercury, sitting with him ‘for hours and hours, trying to get the most out of it.’ It’s not difficult to fathom the song’s appeal for May. Mercury had stopped crowing about his sexual prowess (‘Staying Power’) and Bacchanalian lifestyle (‘Don’t Stop Me Now’) and was singing about his desire for romantic love. Mercury would never admit as much. ‘But I almost believe that every songwriter in the world has something to say when they write a song,’ said May. ‘All sorts of stuff creeps in there. Fred was no different.’

Fred Mandel would play on ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and ‘Hammer to Fall’, but his most enduring contribution to
The Works
would come elsewhere. John Deacon, Queen’s resident ‘ostrich’, had laid another golden egg. ‘I Want To Break Free’ (‘Was he trying to tell us something?’ joked Taylor) was the strongest evidence yet of what Fred Mandel calls ‘Queen’s secret weapon, John Deacon’. Like ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, it was the simplest of pop songs, stripped back to its bare bones.

Unusually, Deacon asked Fred Mandel to play the song’s solo on a synthesiser. ‘This was controversial, as no one did solos apart from Brian,’ recalls Mandel. ‘But the band were out to dinner, so I did it. I didn’t think anything of it, as I’d done the same on Alice Cooper records. It was no big deal, but I think people thought it was a big deal.’ Deacon wanted the synth solo to stay, and there it remained. Several years later, while touring with Elton John, Mandel was browsing in a music store when he spotted a new Roland synth. ‘It had a pre-set button that read “May Sound”. I realised that Roland had heard the solo to “I Want to Break Free” and thought it was Brian on guitar, not realising it was actually done on one of their own products, and copied it on to their new synth.’

Intra-band relations during the making of
The Works
would be as
fraught as they had been during
Hot Sp
ace. ‘But then we’d all come back to the idea that the band was greater than any of us,’ explained May. ‘It was more enduring than most of our marriages.’ ‘I Go Crazy’, one of May’s heavier tracks, was rejected by his bandmates. ‘The other three hated it so much they were ashamed to play on it,’ he admitted. The song would wind up on the B-side of ‘Radio Ga Ga’. But outvoted three to one, May had no choice but to accept that it wouldn’t make it on to
The Works
. ‘Deep down, they were all rational guys,’ adds Fred Mandel. ‘I think Queen were like the Four Musketeers: whatever was good for the group …’

With Mack co-producing, there was always a mediator on hand. ‘Mack was like Roy Thomas Baker, Part Two,’ says Mandel. ‘He was as important to the second half of Queen’s career as Roy had been in the first half. Mack and Roy came from a world where you had to get down on the studio floor and know how to fix the wires. Not every producer came up that way. They were ideas guys as well as technicians. It was a formidable force. Mack could achieve the things Queen asked of him.’

But, at times, even Mack needed a refuge. ‘There was a nudie bar over the road from the studio,’ he says now. ‘It became an office for me and John Deacon to go and get a little peace and quiet.’ For Mercury, in particular, Los Angeles was another playground in which he could indulge his every whim. ‘The gay scene in LA was incredible,’ chuckles Mack. During one of his many nights out in West Hollywood’s ‘Boystown’ district, Mercury met a biker known as ‘Vince the Barman’. Vince would join Mercury at his rented mansion on Stone Canyon Road, but refused to ditch his bar job and accompany the singer on Queen’s next tour. For the first time ever, Mercury had been turned down. From here on, within the singer’s close circle, Vince would always be regarded as ‘the one that got away’.

‘The house Fred was renting was Elizabeth Taylor’s old place,’ remembers Mack. ‘And one day, Freddie threw a table through its glass doors.’ For his thirty-seventh birthday, Mercury held a party at Stone Canyon Road, covering the mansion with lilies and inviting Rod Stewart and Elton John, among others. On Mercury’s past form, it was a comparatively sedate affair, but Queen’s overall
spending in LA was causing concern. ‘The accountant said that he’d never seen people burn through so much money,’ laughs Mack. ‘He started asking questions like, “Why do you have nineteen rental cars when there are only eight of you?’

In order to finish
The Works
, Queen and their entourage decamped to Munich and back to what May had called ‘the emotional distractions’. ‘We got to the studio one day and John had left a note on his bass,’ recalled May. It simply said: ‘Gone to Bali.’ Weary of the grind, the bass player had fled to a Pacific island for some respite. ‘There was no note on his bass,’ disputes Peter Hince. ‘Yes, he did go to Bali, for personal reasons that I don’t wish to go into. I put him on the plane and I got him back.’ ‘We were OK about it,’ added May, ‘as we were all going mad as well. John could be wonderfully unpredictable: very quiet and shy a lot of the time, but then suddenly he’d break out and you didn’t know what he was going to do next.’

Meanwhile, Mercury’s complex love life became even more complex. In January 1984, he began a relationship with the late Austrian actress and model Barbara Valentin. The blonde Valentin had been one of film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s leading ladies. Six years Mercury’s senior, Valentin had once been described as ‘the German Jayne Mansfield’. The pair met on the Munich club circuit. ‘Barbara and I have formed a bond that is stronger than anything I’ve had with a lover for the last six years,’ he said in 1985. ‘I can really talk to her and be myself in a way that’s very rare.’ The pair would later purchase an apartment together on HansSachs Strasse, in the middle of the Munich’s club zone. While his relationship with Valentin was sexual, Mercury was still embroiled in an on-off romance with Winnie Kirchberger. Determined not to be dominated by his millionaire rock star boyfriend, Kirchberger would often treat Mercury badly.

‘Winnie was primitive, the truck-driver type that Freddie preferred,’ said Valentin in 1996. ‘They’d have terrible fights and both would pick up unsuitable guys to make the other one jealous.’ But Valentin’s relationship with Mercury could be similarly crazed. Theirs was a close and treasured friendship, but as die-hards on the Munich club scene, they would egg each other on: more booze,
more drugs, more sex, with each other, with other people. On one occasion, Mercury blacked out at the apartment, supposedly after too much alcohol and cocaine. Undaunted by the episode, he carried on indulging. It would be some time before he discovered the truth about his long-term health.

On 23 January, Queen released a taster of
The Works
, the single ‘Radio Ga Ga’, the lyrics and sentiment prompted by Roger Taylor’s frustration with the music business. ‘It deals with how important radio used to be. Before television, it was the first place I heard rock ’n’ roll,’ he said. ‘Today it seems that video, the visual side of rock ’n’ roll, has become more important than the music.’

Nevertheless, Taylor’s misgivings hadn’t stopped Queen making a video for the single. Director David Mallet’s memorable promo for ‘Radio Ga Ga’ spliced footage from Fritz Lang’s film
Metropolis
with images of Queen gadding around in a futuristic flying car. Taylor piloted the space-age vehicle, but seemed, at times, as if he was struggling to keep a straight face. Behind him, May simply looked uncomfortable while a similarly uneasy-looking Deacon showed off the results of his newly acquired perm. Only Mercury looked at home, hamming it up like a grand dame, possibly buoyed by the vodka and tonic he’d stashed unseen inside the vehicle. The film’s most striking sequence, shot at Pinewood Studios, had Queen conducting a mass rally of 500 handclapping fan-club members. As
Mojo
’s David Thomas later pointed out: ‘It was eerily reminiscent of some Leni Riefenstahl film of a Nazi night-rally.”

The comic irony of a song bemoaning the importance of video over radio, while being promoted with a lavish video, would prove no deterrent to airplay or sales.
NME
were swift to condemn the video’s militaristic aspect, decrying ‘Radio Ga Ga’ as ‘arrogant nonsense’. Yet within a fortnight, the single was at number 2 in the UK. After years of watching his three bandmates write hit singles for Queen, Taylor had finally written one of his own.

The Works
was released on 1 February. Mercury had indulged his obsession with old-school Hollywood by getting photographer George Hurrell to shoot the artfully airbrushed cover. Hurrell was an industry veteran who had photographed Marlene Dietrich,
Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo. Before long,
The Works
had followed the lead set by ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and also reached number 2. A month later Queen made their first ‘live’ appearance since 1982, sharing a bill with Culture Club at Italy’s televised San Remo Festival, and miming animatedly to ‘Radio Ga Ga’. Backstage, tension simmered over into what Peter Hince describes as a ‘minor disagreement’ between May and Taylor. ‘Brian and Roger would row quite often,’ he says. ‘But it never got physical, unlike some bands. I can’t remember what the row in San Remo was about – probably who had the biggest hotel suite.’

‘Radio Ga Ga’ would give Queen a number 1 hit in Italy, Belgium, Germany, Ireland and Sweden. In America, where Queen’s fortunes had taken such a blow with
Hot Space
, there were also signs of recovery.
Rolling Stone
magazine declared
The Works
‘a royal feast of hard rock without that metallic aftertaste’, but sales were slow with the album eventually peaking at number 23. ‘Radio Ga Ga’ had fared better, inching up to number 16 in the US. But the bubble would soon burst.

‘We had spent a million dollars getting out of our deal with Warner-Elektra to get into Capitol in the US,’ explained Brian May. ‘Then Capitol got themselves into trouble with a dispute in the early eighties over the alleged corruption of independent record promoters in the US. Capitol got rid of all its connections to the independent radio promoters. The reprisals from the whole network were aimed directly at all the artists who had records out at that time. They got very upset and dropped “Radio Ga Ga”. That week it dropped like a stone.’ Five weeks after reaching number 16, the single was barely in the US Top 100.

There were other contributing problems inside the Queen camp. ‘The guy that looked after Fred was very good at looking after Fred’s interests but trampled all over everyone else,’ said May in 2008. ‘So any press people and promoters in the US were treated with disdain. They thought Fred was doing it. So Fred lost a lot of friends while we were touring, and we didn’t even realise it was happening. Meanwhile, the radio people were also being told, “Fred doesn’t want to talk to you.”’ While May would never name the guilty party in interviews, it was Mercury’s personal manager
Paul Prenter. The outcome of Prenter’s attitude was an added blow to Queen’s relationship with the US radio networks. ‘Prenter could be very effective and he did get some good scoops for the band,’ says Peter Hince. ‘But he could also be difficult and he was very fickle, and he had these delusions of grandeur.’

Yet there would be worse damage to come. In April, Queen released
The Works
’ second single, ‘I Want to Break Free’. With director David Mallet, Queen created a video so memorable it would even rival the promo for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. ‘Most videos we regarded as a complete chore,’ said Roger Taylor. ‘The only one we enjoyed and didn’t stop laughing at was “I Want to Break Free”.’ It was Roger’s then-partner Dominique who had mooted the idea of Queen ‘dragging up’ as women in a pastiche of the TV soap opera
Coronation Street
.

Queen’s dysfunctional female family unit would cast John Deacon as a matriarchal grandmother; Brian May in hair-rollers, dressing gown and fluffy slippers; Roger Taylor as a troublingly easy-on-the-eye blonde schoolgirl (Taylor: ‘I was quite shocked myself when I first saw it’), and Freddie Mercury as a frustrated housewife or a spoof of
Coronation Street
’s brassy barmaid Bet Lynch, in leather mini-skirt, figure-hugging pink top and false breasts. As an added prop, Freddie shunted a vacuum cleaner around a house while the others looked on. The punchline was that Mercury kept his trademark moustache for the drag act, but shaved it for a later sequence where he romped with members of the Royal Ballet in a routine that borrowed from
The Rite of Spring
.

‘I Want to Break Free’ went straight to number 3 in the UK, where audiences had been weaned on Carry On films and TV sitcoms in which English gents routinely dressed as women. ‘We wanted people to know that we didn’t take ourselves too seriously,’ explained Taylor. It was a U-turn after years of Queen presenting themselves as a band who took themselves very seriously, but it encapsulated the same contrariness and contradiction that also made the group tick. As one insider explained: ‘Queen would criticise themselves and each other all the time, but woe betide if anyone from outside did it.’