Freddie Mercury: The Biography (23 page)

John Deacon became a buttoned-up, disapproving granny. Brian May emerged a vision in a long nylon nightie, with fluffy slippers
on his feet. While Roger Taylor transformed himself into an alarmingly convincing, sexy schoolgirl, complete with gymslip
and stockings. But still it was Mercury who was the most hilarious. Opting to send up the
Street’s
barmaid, Bet Lynch, he wore a candy-pink skinny-rib sweater, over an enormous false chest, and a saucy PVC, split-sided miniskirt.
Whenever he took great sweeping strides, there was a flash of white knickers. He had originally attended dress rehearsals
in ambitious six-inch stilettos, but couldn’t stand up in them and had to settle for lower heels. He once impudently announced
that if he weren’t a rock star he would have nothing to do, adding with a twinkle, ‘I can’t cook. I’m not very good at being
a housewife!’ In this video, he certainly knew how to use a vacuum cleaner.

But if the Battersea shoot was a lark, the third and final sequence, which featured Mercury without the rest of the band,
meant the most to him. Especially because he worked for a second time with his friend Wayne Eagling. ‘Freddie was inspired
a lot by ballet,’ says Eagling. ‘He had wanted for a long time to appear as a great dancer, and this was his chance, so we
made him Nijinsky. Trying to choreograph for someone who is not a ballet dancer is difficult, and it wasn’t easy for Fred.
Sometimes in frustration, I’d end up saying to him, “Well, just
do what you would normally do then.” But he was the ultimate professional and determined to get it right.’

Derek Deane picks up, ‘Wayne had recreated the ballet
L’après-midi d’un faune
for Freddie, which had been made famous by Nijinsky. It begins with Freddie looking as if he’s sitting on a rock, but it’s
really made up of a pile of bodies, which one by one come alive. Later there’s a shot of Freddie rolling on his stomach on
top of a line of rotating bodies along the floor. Now he
loved
that bit!’

Although filming the ballet scene took a whole day, it features less than a minute in the final cut. Mercury had shaved off
his moustache for the part and altogether enjoyed the experience. When it was over, he wanted to repay Eagling for his efforts,
but the dancer refused money: ‘I did it as a favour for a friend,’ he says, ‘and didn’t want to be paid, but Freddie kept
asking me if there was anything
he
could do for
me,
and I replied, “Well, I can’t sing, but I’d love to sing a song with you.”

‘So Freddie and I wrote and recorded a number together called ‘No, I Can’t Dance’. I was never so nervous in all my life.
If you feel inadequate I think you’re like that, and being beside Freddie in a recording studio I certainly felt inadequate.
But the funny thing was, I could sing with him next to me. We had a great time.’

The critics had fun, too, when the video for ‘I Want to Break Free’ was released on 2 April 1984. It was obviously meant as
a lark, but self-righteous accusations about outrageous transvestism and ludicrous claims that such blatant homosexual behaviour
could corrupt Britain’s youth were made. It didn’t stop the single from reaching number three in the UK, as well as becoming
a huge hit throughout Europe. Some South American countries even adopted it as a freedom anthem.

Although by this time Mercury considered Munich to be very much his home, he began commuting to London at weekends. He still
showed no signs of slowing down socially
and in some ways had even reverted to the reckless hunger he had often displayed during those extended American tours. Come
April he was to meet Jim Hutton again by chance, according to Hutton. Mercury was eating out at a smart restaurant in Earls
Court and spotted Hutton among the other diners. From that moment, it is said that Mercury tracked Hutton’s every move relentlessly.

Coincidentally, Jim Hutton’s two-year relationship with his live-in lover was ending. Hutton’s home was Surrey, but he liked
to drink in a gay pub in Vauxhall, south London. Mercury frequented Heaven, a nightclub under Charing Cross Station, but he
had apparently started to instruct his chauffeur to detour first to Vauxhall. Hutton believed that Mercury had made it his
business to discover where he socialised, and that he would send his personal assistant Joe Fanelli into the pub simply to
satisfy himself that Hutton was there and alone. After this Mercury would continue on to Heaven. If this were true, Mercury
himself was far from ready to admit it. In one of his coarser moods, he bragged about his life then, ‘I’m just an old slag
who gets up every morning, scratches his head and wonders who he wants to fuck.’

By summer 1984 Mercury was in training for the demands of a forthcoming European tour. The band flew into a storm of controversy
by announcing that they intended to play at the Sun City Super Bowl in South Africa. This immediately antagonised the Musicians’
Union, anti-apartheid groups and the press. Queen’s publicists tried to offset this by insisting that the band was not political,
and that the gigs would be before mixed audiences. But nothing made any difference, and Queen were not to emerge from this
furore totally unscathed.

It was ironic that the title of their new single was ‘It’s a Hard Life’. The video was a study in screen decadence and included,
among the extras, the voluptuous Barbara Valentin. But it took more than a four-inch cleavage to upstage Mercury in his
scarlet costume elaborately decorated with a profusion of Cyclops eyes.

The Works tour started in Belgium on 24 August and welcomed among its session men newcomer Spike Edney, who had lately worked
with the Boomtown Rats. Edney had been introduced to Queen by Roger Taylor’s personal assistant, Crystal Taylor. ‘They asked
me to an audition in Munich,’ Edney recalls, ‘and I went assuming there would be a queue, only to find I was the only one.
I knew all their stuff anyway, so that was me in. I was more or less with Queen from that tour right through to Knebworth
two years later.’

On 10 September, between the last of the four dates at London’s Wembley Arena and their German gig at Westallenhalle, Dortmund,
Queen’s new single ‘Hammer to Fall’ came out. That day also marked the release of Mercury’s first solo single in his own name.
Co-written with Giorgio Moroder, and one of the tracks from the
Metropolis
soundtrack, ‘Love Kills’ was a rock/disco number. Convention decrees that solo work often fares worse than a band’s material.
But Mercury’s single defied this tradition by reaching number ten in the UK charts. This was three places higher than ‘Hammer
to Fall’, a typical Queen rocker normally guaranteed to have vast fan appeal. ‘Love Kills’ also became a massive hit in London’s
gay clubs and elsewhere in Europe.

It was while singing ‘Hammer to Fall’ a fortnight later in Hanover that Mercury slipped awkwardly on a flight of stairs. He
carried on with the show, but when doctors examined him later it was clear that he had damaged some knee ligaments. He was
advised against performing – but with just a handful of dates remaining, the star ignored their warnings and finished the
tour. Five days later Queen landed in Bophuthatswana.

They were committed to a dozen dates at the Super Bowl, and tickets had sold out in a day. However, on the first night Mercury
was scarcely warmed up, when his voice, which lately
had been troublesome, threatened to seize up. Aware that he was in difficulty, the rest of the band tried to rally him, but
Mercury’s voice only got worse. ‘Fred walked off after three songs. He was in agony,’ Edney recalls.

Having lived on the road for several years, Mercury could never be accused of having neglected his comforts. He toured in
the height of luxury with his personal valet, a masseur and a chef. Apart from his use of cocaine as a stimulant, his travelling
medicine chest boasted an array of vitamins and tonics, specially selected to help him maintain the high energy levels he
required to keep going. But despite all this, and the pre-tour physical training, his weak spot was his voice – and the small,
persistent and painful nodules on his vocal cords that beat him every time. Frustrated, Mercury once rasped, ‘They disappear
but return like corns. It’s misusing the voice that does it.’

The specialist summoned to examine Mercury couldn’t have agreed more, and Queen had no option but to cancel the following
four nights. ‘It caused a big scandal because there was no time to reschedule dates, but it just couldn’t be helped,’ says
Edney. Angry ticket-holders were one thing, but there was worse to come, as many people felt that Queen had failed fully to
think through the political implications of playing in South Africa.

Mandla Langa, cultural attaché and ANC spokesperson, says: ‘People were infuriated. Queen came into South Africa at a time
when we didn’t need any external influence which could lend respectability to the Pretoria regime. Sun City was always regarded
as an insult to any right-thinking South African and to perform there, in the midst of poverty and rage, cannot be rationalised
as Queen doing their bit to break down barriers. The people who attended those concerts were overwhelmingly white, and institutions
such as the South African Broadcasting Corporation revelled at their new-found connection with the Western world and gave
Queen maximum airplay … People
here have long memories, and their music has never been embraced by black activists.’

For their pains Queen were placed on the United Nations blacklist of musicians who performed in South Africa – although their
name was later removed – and in Britain the Musicians’ Union came down hard on them for flouting their rules. Unmoved by an
impassioned speech from Brian May when he faced the Union’s General Committee in person, they fined Queen heavily. The band
paid up, but only on condition that the money was donated to charity.

Having left for Munich straight after the tour, Mercury was as keen as the other band members to put all this behind him.
For the first time Queen had decided to release a Christmas single, and work on it had begun at Sarm Studios in London. ‘Thank
God It’s Christmas’ was started during Mercury’s absence in Munich. Later May, Taylor and Deacon flew to Germany with the
tapes, where Mercury added vocals. It was released on 26 November but failed to reach the top twenty.

The battle for that year’s Christmas number one was won almost as soon as it began for 1984 was the year Band Aid emerged
with their charity single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’. In early November Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof had been deeply
moved by a special televised report by the award-winning BBC’s foreign affairs correspondent Michael Buerk on the Ethiopian
famine. Inspired by this he had hatched at short notice an ambitious plan to produce an all-star record, from which no one
involved would take any profit.

Two weeks and many phone calls later, thirty-six established rock artists gathered, in the same Notting Hill studio Queen
had lately used. They were there to lay down the song that had been hastily co-written by Geldof and ex-Ultravox singer Midge
Ure. The stars included Cliff Richard, Phil Collins, Sting, Boy George, George Michael, Status Quo, Duran Duran and Paul Young.
But Queen hadn’t been invited; a fact that
greatly upset Mercury, who later revealed, ‘I would have
loved
to have been on the Band Aid record,’ adding, ‘I don’t know if they would have had me on the record anyway. I’m a bit old.’

Age, though, had nothing to do with it. One reason, cited by the charity organisers, why Queen hadn’t been asked was because
the band had been on tour at the time and were unavailable. But this was not the case. What was true was that the clouds of
controversy over the South African shows still hung over their heads – and perhaps this played its part. Or possibly, knowing
that Mercury’s voice was more distinctive than the others, it was considered inappropriate to have any one individual’s stamp
on what was intended to be a joint effort.

If it were the latter reason, this didn’t cushion Mercury’s disappointment at not being part of what turned out to be the
biggest-selling single in Britain ever. Especially now that Queen had come under fresh fire from the critics for having released
a batch of singles that were all tracks from one album. Shouts of fan exploitation were heard and contributed to an unhappy
end to Queen’s first year back together again.

The humble way in which Mercury expressed his disappointment at being left out of the Band Aid recording signals a change
in his demeanour from the mid-eighties onwards. ‘I was caught up in being a star, and, I thought, this is the way a star behaves,’
said Mercury. ‘Now I don’t give a damn. I want to do things my way and have fun.’ And, certainly, close friends and acquaintances,
who knew him in his last six years, independently testify to a man in many respects more placid and mature. Queen’s first
public-relations consultant, Tony Brainsby, detected a marked change in Mercury, when they ran into each other around then.

‘Freddie had gone to see Peter Straker appearing in a play,’ Brainsby recalls. ‘He was wearing a beautiful suit and looked
very elegant that night. I wasn’t meeting Freddie the rock star, but the sophisticated gentleman. What struck me most was
how much he had mellowed. He wasn’t fighting for stardom and recognition, clawing his way back from Queen’s financial set-backs.
He had become a charming, congenial man who enjoyed going to the theatre. He was a different person altogether and relaxed,
perhaps not professionally but certainly personally.’

Professionally there was no time to relax, for on 12 January 1985 Queen were to headline at ‘Rock in Rio’, a rock festival
held near Rio de Janeiro that was billed to outshine even Woodstock. Staged at a custom-built arena in the mountains at Barra
da Tijuca and organised by Brazilian businessman Roberto Medina, the other guests on the star-studded bill included AC/DC,
Ozzy Osbourne, Yes and Iron Maiden. Maiden’s lead singer then, Bruce Dickinson, vividly remembers the event: