Is This The Real Life? (21 page)

Aside from a couple of dates in July and a show supporting Vinegar Joe at Newcastle’s Mayfair in August, Queen had hardly played live since March. ‘We’d already driven ourselves mad playing pubs and little clubs up and down the country in Smile,’ griped May. ‘And we didn’t want to go through that again because we thought it would get too depressing.’ But it wasn’t over yet. On 13 September they played London’s Golders Green Hippodrome for a BBC In Concert show, road-testing most of
Queen II
on the night. A month later, they made their European debut as part of a promo trip, playing in Bonn and at Le Blow Up club in Luxembourg City.

On 4 September, Queen’s debut was released in the US. Jac Holzman’s enthusiasm was certainly mirrored in
Rolling Stone
’s gushing review, which frothed over Mercury’s ‘cocky, regal arrogance’ and likened ‘Deacon John’ to ‘a colossal sonic volcano whose eruption maketh the earth tremble’, finally concluding ‘Queen is a monster’. It would be a year before Queen played in the US, but it was a positive start.

As a warm-up to their forthcoming tour supporting Mott The Hoople, Queen booked two dates at Imperial College and invited photographer Mick Rock to shoot the show on 2 November. Rock, introduced to Queen at Trident on Ken Scott’s suggestion, was a Cambridge University graduate who had been close friends with Pink Floyd’s lost-boy singer Syd Barrett. He had gone on to photograph David Bowie and Lou Reed and had shot the covers for Reed’s
Transformer
and, most recently, Bowie’s
Pin-Ups
album. ‘Ken Scott said, “Queen love your work, especially the things you’ve done with David and Lou,”’ recalled Rock. ‘They really want you to shoot them.’

At their first meeting, Rock was quickly swayed by Mercury and Taylor’s charm offensive, but also by the band’s absolute self-confidence. He noted, not for the last time, that they wanted answers for everything, and that Jack Nelson was invariably the one being questioned: ‘They wanted the world and they wanted it no later than teatime on Friday.’ Rock listened to an acetate of
Queen II
and agreed to shoot the album cover later. But first, at Trident’s bequest, he shot some promotional photos for the forthcoming tour. Rock’s first shoot had Queen huddled around Mercury, who was clutching a giant sceptre. But the royal look was too obvious for some (‘Brian didn’t like them and they didn’t get published at the time’). Rock’s next proposal was to get the band to strip to the waist. The topless look was shamelessly kitsch, but Mercury adored it. ‘They wanted something sensational, an image that people would talk about,’ said Rock. The naked Queen pictures would quickly find their way into
Mirabelle
and
NME
, fuelling more antagonism from the paper. But the plan worked. As Rock recalled, ‘They got themselves some ink’. Better still, their sold-out show at Imperial garnered one of the best reviews of their career from
Disc
’s Rosemary Horide: ‘They were forced onstage for three encores until they finally had to stop – from sheer exhaustion.’

In the meantime, EMI had broken with tradition and paid for Queen to be the support act on Mott The Hoople’s upcoming UK tour. Jack Nelson was friends with Mott’s manager, a fellow American Bob Hirschmann, and recalled the company stumping up £3,000. EMI’s Bob Mercer claims it was between £9,000 and
£10,000: ‘Queen was the first time EMI had paid for a support tour, although it became common practice after that. Mott The Hoople were as hot as bear shit, and that was the audience we wanted to expose Queen to.’

In preparation for the tour, Queen booked rehearsal time at Fulham’s Manticore Studios, a converted cinema that had just been bought by super-group trio Emerson, Lake & Palmer. It was November and a jet heater had been switched on inside the studio, with parachute silks hung over the stall seats to keep the warmth in. Peter ‘Ratty’ Hince, who would become head of Queen’s road crew, was working as roadie for Mott The Hoople at the time. Hince and his employers were already at Manticore when Queen arrived.

‘It was freezing, so Mott were in there in jeans, scarves and fur coats,’ recalls Hince. ‘Then Queen showed up, all in their dresses, just to rehearse. We were like, “Who is this bloke called Fred prancing around with one glove and a sawn-off mic stand. Fred’s no name for a pop star.”’ Hince was similarly intrigued by Brian May and his choice of plectrum, a sixpence coin, which May preferred to a conventional pick, possibly because of its serrated edges. ‘He had a homemade guitar and an AC30 on a chair and he played with a sixpence … I thought, “Well, he’s probably got no money …”’ Bob Mercer tried to gatecrash the rehearsals but was refused entry. ‘I didn’t want to interfere or tell them what songs they should play, I was genuinely curious. But I was forbidden.’ Instead Mercer would have to wait until the opening night of the tour at Leeds Town Hall.

Mott The Hoople had been together since 1969 and had been on the verge of splitting before being persuaded not to by superfan David Bowie. His song ‘All the Young Dudes’ gave Mott a surprise hit in 1972. A year later, with new guitarist Ariel Bender and his dyed silver hair, Mott chimed with the current craze for glam-rock. More than that, they nurtured a connection with their audience and presented themselves as regular human beings not unapproachable superstars. As Brian May put it, ‘Mott were something to learn from,’ and their 1973 hit ‘All the Way from Memphis’ included a line that could have been written for Freddie Mercury: ‘You look like a star, but you’re still on the dole.’

Queen’s set included most of the yet-to-be released
Queen II
, ‘Keep
Yourself Alive’, ‘Hangman’ and a medley of rock ’n’ roll numbers, including their uber-camp version of ‘Big Spender’. The audience’s response to Queen on the tour is the subject of wildly varying opinion. Joop Visser remembered that by the end of the tour Queen were stealing the show from Mott The Hoople. Bob Mercer recalls seeing one gig where ‘Freddie came on and did “Big Spender” and the audience went nuts.’ Backstage afterwards, Mercer remembers a spat with someone close to Mott The Hoople over how well Queen had gone down. ‘He put me up against a wall and said, “They are off the tour. My band will never survive this.” And I said, “Sorry, sunshine, that’s your problem. I paid for them to be here.”’

However, Mott The Hoople’s pianist Morgan Fisher thinks differently: ‘The audience’s response to Queen changed from night to night. It was fifty per cent good and fifty per cent apathy.’ Fisher watched Queen from the wings. He had no doubt they would go on to make it, but he nonetheless had his reservations: ‘Queen were different from other groups. Thinking about it, the way they looked was very Biba. But they also wanted to work the crowd and that was their priority above everything else. The whole band were a lot more frantic back then. It was their franticness that put me off. Mott were already successful so we didn’t have to try and impress all the time. But Queen were desperate to make it, and I sometimes felt that they were trying too hard.’

The two bands travelled on a coach together, where Fisher, who relished all the perks of being in a band (‘I drank a lot in those days’), entertained his captive audience. ‘I’d bought a copy of
The
Goon Show
scripts, and I enjoyed them so much I decided I couldn’t keep it to myself. So I’d stand at the front of the coach and read out a whole episode.’ His soliloquies had a specific purpose: ‘Queen were obsessed with their work and needed bringing out of themselves.’ Eight years later, Fisher would join Queen as a touring keyboard player. ‘I think my behaviour on the coach was a large factor in getting that job. Later, Freddie let himself be humorous, which was a wonderful thing to see.’

Before the gig at Liverpool Stadium, Mike Bersin visited Mercury backstage and found the singer fretting over what to say to the audience. Liverpool would become a Queen stronghold, but this
was a Mott audience and one naturally suspicious of a band from London dolled up in black-and-white satin outfits. Freddie grabbed a copy of the
Liverpool Echo
, which recorded a Liverpool FC victory and a winning goal from Kevin Keegan. Flouncing out onstage minutes later, Mercury greeted the crowd with ‘Nice one, Kevin.’ ‘The place erupted,’ says Bersin.

Not every night went so well. A week later at Birmingham Town Hall, Mercury made his grand entrance, only to be greeted by a loud heckle: ‘Fucking get off, ya cunt!’ Birmingham was a notoriously tough crowd. Weeks before, the audience at the same venue had savaged Roxy Music’s support act, budding singer-songwriter Leo Sayer, when he showed up onstage dressed as Pierrot the Clown. One eyewitness recalled seeing a male fan urinating over the balcony in Sayer’s direction. Slowly, Queen managed to win over the mob, including some of the Mott diehards huddled in front of the stage. Then a misjudged high kick led to Freddie falling flat on his arse. Visibly winded, the singer pretended it was part of the act and carried on singing while lying on his back. As one eyewitness recalls, ‘From that moment on Freddie was a marked man for the haters in the audience.’ The final insult was a hot dog hurled from the crowd which caught the singer full in the face, splattering him with sausage and ketchup.

It was some consolation then that Queen and Mott got on well. Despite his initial reservations, Peter Hince was impressed: ‘Queen really had a lot of self-belief and confidence, and, for an opening act, really pushed to get what they wanted. They were flash and posey and we certainly wouldn’t call them a rock ’n’ roll band, but what they were doing was interesting.’ Returning to the car park after one night’s gig, the band noticed a message scrawled by a fan in the dirt on the side of the coach: ‘Mott is dead, long live Queen.’

On 14 December, the tour rolled into London with two shows at the Hammersmith Odeon. A second late-evening performance had been added due to public demand. At midnight, in a desperate attempt to halt the party, the Odeon’s management lowered the safety curtain on to the stage while Mott were still thrashing away. Queen’s performance that night is remembered as one of their best on the tour. They played to their biggest audience yet of some 7,000
people across the two performances, including May’s parents, Ruth and Harold, who bemusedly signed autographs for fans.

‘The opportunity of playing with Mott was great,’ said Mercury. ‘But I knew the moment we finished that tour [that], as far as Britain was concerned, we’d be headlining.’ However, as Brian May explained, ‘We went around the country getting some great reactions and thinking, “Yeah, we’re finally getting somewhere,” and all the while watching the single and album appear nowhere in the charts.’ The band fumed, while their PR wrung his hands. As one of Tony Brainsby’s associates explained, ‘Queen may have been a support group but they already had the mentality of stars.’

The band saw out the year with another BBC Radio session for John Peel’s
Sounds of the Seventies
. Alongside songs from the first album they threw in ‘Ogre Battle’, a whirling-dervish heavy metal track from the forthcoming
Queen II
. But the album’s release was still three long months away. Four days before New Year’s Eve, Queen sought solace with old friends and familiar faces at Liverpool’s Top Rank club. They played alongside 10cc and support band Great Day, a new group featuring Mike Bersin and Ken Testi.

If Queen were already stars in their own heads, then it was appropriate that someone outside the group should acknowledge the fact. Mick Rock had been pondering ideas for the cover of
Queen
II
and had acquired a set of photographs that included a shot of the actress Marlene Dietrich taken on the set of her 1932 film
Shanghai
Express
. In it, Dietrich had her eyes cast upwards, her face set in a regal expression, with the spidery fingers of each hand clasping her shoulders. If Queen had not yet become bona fide stars, then replicating this picture would suggest otherwise. Mick cornered the band backstage on the Mott The Hoople tour, brandishing the photograph: ‘Look at this! I know this has got to be it.’ While the rest of Queen looked on aghast, Mercury was delighted. His instruction was simple: ‘I shall be Marlene.’

‘G
o back to Pommyland, ya poofters!’ As crowd reactions go, this one could have been better. Queen had faced brutal audiences before, but not 30,000 miles from home. On 28 January 1974 the band had flown to Australia to make their debut at the Sunbury Rock Festival, a three-day musical fiesta held on a 630-acre farm in Melbourne. Somehow, Queen had been booked to play an early-Saturday evening slot to an audience who had not the slightest clue who they were. ‘It was all just a series of misunderstandings,’ understated Brian May, years later.

Sunbury had launched a year before and been compèred by comedian Paul Hogan, later to find fame as the comedy-movie action man Crocodile Dundee. In 1974, the bill was full of local heroes such as Buster Brown, Daddy Cool and Madder Lake; groups unknown outside their native Australia but each with a formidable reputation and staunch following. Showing their usual
attention to detail, Queen had brought their own lighting rig and insisted that their own people operate it, immediately ruffling the feathers of the local crew. To get the best out of the rig, the band pushed to go on later when there’d be less daylight, disgruntling other bands on the bill.

In the end it was competition for the coveted sunset spot between Queen and Aussie pub-rockers Madder Lake that led to a fracas. Both bands’ crews started trying to set up their gear at the same time. ‘The Australian stage crew didn’t like this and started fighting with our stage crew,’ said May. Before long the festival MC had weighed into the argument: ‘D’ya want these pommie bastards or do you want an Aussie rock band? … We’ve got a load of limey bastards here and they’re probably going to be useless.’ While Queen were met with hostility, at least one eyewitness disputes the story that they were booed offstage and claims they even managed to play an encore. Before leaving the stage, Mercury grandly announced, ‘When Queen come back to Australia we will be the biggest band in the world.’

Back in England, they could console themselves with some good news in the music press. For all the critical disdain, Queen were nominated second Most Promising New Act by readers of
New
Musical Express
(behind the Dutch rock band Golden Earring, who’d scored a big hit the year before with ‘Radar Love’) and third Best New Band in
Sounds
, losing out to weighty Scots rockers Nazareth and Blue, a Scottish pop group signed to Elton John’s Rocket Records imprint.

On 19 February, David Bowie’s loss was Queen’s gain. When the promo for Bowie’s new single ‘Rebel Rebel’ wasn’t ready for
Top of
the Pops
, the show’s producer called Ronnie Fowler. Fowler’s dogged promotion of Queen had continued unabated. According to Queen legend, he notched up expenses to the tune of £20,000; wining, dining and generally schmoozing various music biz players in the name of the band. Fowler pitched Queen for the vacant slot, even though their next single, ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’, had yet to be pressed.

In the lyrics of ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’, Mercury cast himself as some kind of naked avenging deity against a squall of guitar and
piano. Unexpectedly, the song’s finale was a chorus of the 1907 music-hall standard, ‘I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside’, featuring a boozy, ad hoc choir that included Ken Testi. It was the first sign of what would become a familiar theme on Queen albums. ‘Growing up, Freddie and I listened to the radio,’ May later told
Mojo
magazine. ‘One thing that both Freddie and I listened to was
Uncle
Mac’s Children’s Favourites
on Saturday morning. This show would have ‘Nellie the Elephant’, ‘The Laughing Policeman’ and Mantovani. It was this strange mix of novelty songs and dramatic, adult music that would appeal to kids. So we had all this stuff churning around in our brains.’

According to Eric Hall, the future football agent, then a radio plugger for EMI, ‘Freddie said, “I’m not doing
Top of the Pops
. It’s rubbish.”’ But the rest of the band convinced him otherwise. As dictated by the Musicians’ Union,
Top of the Pops
rules meant that all bands had to re-record the track they would then mime to. Queen cut a version of ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ at The Who’s Rampart Studios in Battersea. Knowing the group’s meticulousness and how much they were already fretting, Hall claimed he slipped the original version of the song to the MU rep for broadcast: ‘And he didn’t have a clue.’

Wreckage’s former drummer Richard Thompson was with Queen in the studio and witnessed the sleight of hand: ‘Freddie was just fiddling and fiddling, waiting for this bloke to go. He said to me, “We’re not really going to record. But we’ll put so much effort in, he’ll think we’ve spent hours on it.”’

Two days later, Queen’s television debut was broadcast on
Top of
the Pops
. Passers-by on a Kensington street that night may have wondered why a gaggle of long-haired men were crowding around an electrical goods shop long after it had closed. It was Queen and their entourage waiting to watch themselves on one of the TV sets in the shop window. ‘They’d been filmed just playing in front of a blue screen,’ remembers Richard Thompson. ‘But when we watched it on TV the BBC had stuck in a crowd of people dancing in front of them.’

Trident rushed out ten white-label pressings of ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’, which were quickly distributed to the BBC. Ronnie Fowler’s
expensive hustling had paid off. Yet after the first broadcast, Mercury spotted that the single had used a rejected mix. Jack Nelson was ordered to retrieve all copies from the radio stations and replace them with the correct one. As Richard Thompson puts it: “Freddie had this vision. It
had
to be right.” His diligence paid off, and ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’ entered the chart at number 45. Ronnie Fowler’s mission was complete. When he moved on to a new position at Elektra Records, his Queen expense account officially passed into company mythology, where it was described as a ‘Steven Spielberg-style science-fiction epic’.

Yet Fowler wasn’t the only one within the Queen organisation eager to spend EMI’s money. With more shows booked, Mercury was determined to make a visual impact on his audience. EMI’s A&R director Bob Mercer was used to buying his charges dinner (‘They needed a good meal as they were always broke’), but he felt uneasy when Freddie called and asked to see him on his own. “It got me a bit upsy,’ he admits. ‘Except when he turned up, he wasn’t on his own. He was with Zandra Rhodes, the frock-maker.’

Zandra Rhodes was a then 34-year-old fashion designer with a yen for adventurous textile designs. Her acclaimed Fulham Road boutique had opened in 1969, and was just a couple of miles from Kensington Market. Until now, costumier Wendy Edmunds and Freddie himself had been responsible for the group’s stage clothes. After spotting some of her creations for Marc Bolan, Queen enlisted Zandra Rhodes to design costumes for their next tour.

‘It was lovely to meet Zandra, but this was not a normal conversation for me,’ explains Mercer. ‘Eventually Freddie asked Zandra to go, so he and I could talk on our own. I was like, “Look, it cost us a few grand to get you on the Mott tour – how much is this going to cost us?” Fred said, “Five grand.” I said, “Fucking hell!” But he was so persuasive. In the end, I agreed, partly just to get him out of the office, but I asked him to find some way of invoicing me so that we could call it something else rather than “New Frocks”.’

Rhodes recalled Mercury and May arriving at her Paddington workshop in between rehearsals for the tour at Ealing Film Studios. Mercury was especially particular. ‘It was quite wonderful after just dressing ladies to be asked to do something for men,’ she said.
‘Freddie would hold things in front of him, and just waft around the room. He was great fun to work with.’ In the end, the pair settled on androgynous-looking tunics (‘very Greek,’ recalls photographer Mick Rock), with voluminous silk bat-wing sleeves. Within days of taking delivery, Mercury was modelling his in another Mick Rock photoshoot.

‘Freddie had a lot to do with dressing Brian,’ says Chris Smith. Arriving at Kensington Market, just before the tour began, Smith found Freddie standing behind the stall in his new stage outfit, arms outstretched in a Jesus Christ pose while a woman knelt below, fussing over the pleated wings. ‘When she stood up, it turned out to be Zandra Rhodes,’ he says. “At which point Freddie dramatically announced, “And Brian’s got one, too.”’ For Chris and Tim Staffell, it was another reminder of the world they had left behind: ‘I said to Tim, “Aren’t you glad you don’t have to dress up in all that gear?”’ The new tour would also mark the end of Freddie’s reign at Kensington Market. He was now simply too busy being a pop star.

Even though there was a tour booked, there was still no new album. In January, in response to industrial action by the National Union of Mineworkers, the British government had imposed a ‘three-day week’, limiting the use of electricity. This led to the first delay in pressing
Queen II
; the second came when the group spotted a spelling error on the finished sleeve. (‘Deacon John’ became, blessedly, ‘John Deacon’ and would remain that way for the duration of Queen’s career.) The Queen bassist would also mark the release of the album and upcoming tour by abandoning his MSc course. ‘There’s quite a lot of work going for studio electronics engineers,’ Deacon told one interviewer later that year. ‘But I’m sticking with Queen for as long as we last.’

Queen II
was finally released on 8 March, a week after the tour began at the Blackpool Winter Gardens. Finally, the fruits of what Roy Thomas Baker called Queen’s ‘relentlessness’ was made public. The songs ‘White Queen (As It Began)’ and ‘Ogre Battle’ had already been performed live, but had since been reworked at Trident. A step forward from Queen’s debut, there was greater cohesion this time, as ideas and aural tics from one song spilled
over into the next. In a precocious move, the finished album was split into Side White and Side Black. May’s wistful ‘Some Day One Day’ encapsulated the former; Mercury’s gothic ‘March of the Black Queen’ its flipside. Taylor also followed his songwriting debut, ‘Modern Times Rock ’n’ Roll’ on the first album, with ‘Loser in the End’ – perhaps one of the album’s weaker songs – in which the seismic drumming was a homage to Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham. ‘When England had The Who and Zeppelin, we had the two finest rock ’n’ roll bands in the world,’ he proclaimed.

Queen II
signed off with the full-length version of ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’. But it was Mercury’s mind-boggling ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-stroke’ that seemed to dominate Side Black; his fascination with the Richard Dadd painting of the same name finally realised as a similarly ambitious piece of music. The gatefold sleeve credited co-producer Baker for playing ‘virtuoso castanets’ and insisted that ‘nobody played synthesiser … again’. Mick Rock’s regal group portrait on the front couldn’t have suited the music better.

Essentially, Queen’s second album rang with echoes of The Who’s
Tommy
, Led Zeppelin’s fourth album and, further back, Hendrix, The Pretty Things, Yes, and Jethro Tull; anything and everything that had soundtracked stoned evenings at Ferry Road three years earlier. Yet it was these echoes that many critics focused on. In the US, where Queen’s debut was now selling steadily,
Rolling
Stone
magazine was mildly complimentary but also denounced parts of the record for having ‘none of the wit and sophistication of Genesis’ and for having ‘appropriated the most irritating elements of Yes’ style’. On home turf,
Record Mirror
described it ‘as the dregs of glam-rock … If this is our brightest hope for the future, then we are committing rock ’n’ roll suicide.’ Naturally, the criticism stung. ‘We took so much trouble over that album, possibly too much,’ said Roger Taylor at the time. ‘Immediately it got really bad reviews so I took it home to listen to again and thought, “Christ are they right?” But we’ll stick by it.’

For the music press, the greatest obstacle to embracing Queen was the notion that, as
Record Mirror
claimed, the group ‘have a giant-sized image with the music running a close second’. In reality, Mercury’s obsessive nature had helped drive
Queen II
. ‘Freddie didn’t
seem remotely bothered by the fact that there were only four of us to sing these parts,’ said Taylor. ‘We really were trying to break the boundaries of what people thought they could do in a recording studio.’ But with their fancy Rhodes-designed costumes and their insistence on approving all publicity shots, Queen sometimes played straight into their critics’ hands. After spying an unapproved band photo in one publication, Freddie buttonholed the writer: ‘Look how fat my arms look!’ he protested. ‘My arms aren’t like that at all!’ Later, on tour, a Queen soundcheck was delayed after Mercury lost his favourite silver serpent bangle. The soundcheck only continued after the bracelet had been found.

At least on tour, the band’s efforts weren’t going unrewarded. Yet on the second night, at Friars in Aylesbury, there was a portent of trouble ahead. During the show, Brian May’s playing became hampered by a pain in his arm. The band had been given injections before flying to Australia to play the Sunbury Rock Festival in January. May’s right arm had swelled up. The needle used to inject him had not been sterile, and it was discovered that he had contracted gangrene. While it was treatable, the infection would impact on the guitarist’s health as the tour progressed.