Is This The Real Life? (36 page)

The single ‘Play the Game’ was less immediate and radio-friendly than ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, but reached a respectable number 14 in the UK. Of greater interest than the song was Mercury’s latest fashion statement. The singer had completed the Castro Clone look by growing a thick moustache. In protest, the band’s offices were inundated with packets of razors as fans voiced their protest. ‘It’s funny how he got more press out of growing a moustache than he would have done from walking naked down Oxford Street,’ remarked Roger Taylor.

Queen’s next American tour was due to open in Vancouver at the end of June. The Who were touring the US at the same time. Their support band was The Only Ones, a group featuring bass guitarist and former Kensington Market stallholder Alan Mair. Mair’s old employee Fred Bulsara was now Freddie Mercury, millionaire rock star, but Alan would catch a rare glimpse of the old Freddie during the tour.

‘I’d stayed in touch with Queen for the first couple of years, but then I joined The Only Ones and I remember seeing Freddie again and he’d got a bit too into himself, under the influence of whatever he was taking,’ recalls Mair. When The Who played the LA Forum, Mair spotted members of Queen arriving backstage. ‘My initial instinct was to go over and say hi, but then I remembered that the last time I’d seen Fred he’d been such an arsehole, so I looked away.’ Mair left the party to walk back to the band’s trailer. ‘Suddenly, I heard these heels clicking behind me, and it was Fred. He’d seen me turn away. He was extremely friendly, asked me why I’d walked away and said, “Was it because I was such a cunt last time I saw
you?” And I said, “Yes, Freddie, it is and you were” … He laughed. But after that I started to see him again.’

When Queen’s own tour began, Mercury’s facial hair would attract yet more attention. At some gigs, fans threw disposable razors on stage. As the tour wound on, Mercury began asking audiences what they thought of the new look, twitchily grinning at the chorus of cheers, boos and cat-calls. ‘D’you girls like this moustache? … D’you boys like this moustache? … A lot of people hate it. I don’t give a fuck!’ Meanwhile, those unsure about who was playing the drums in Queen need only look at Roger Taylor’s bass drum skin, which was helpfully decorated with a picture of his face (‘Just in case he ever got amnesia, he’d know who he was,’ said drum tech ‘Crystal’).

Six songs from
The Game
had been worked sporadically into a set that now opened with ‘Jailhouse Rock’. ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ was played, but, at first, only occasionally. It was difficult to replicate the dry studio drum sound onstage, and the song’s funkier approach rankled with some of Queen’s audience. ‘They thought it “not very rock ’n’ roll”,’ admitted Brian May. A year earlier, Detroit radio DJ Steve Dahl had launched the ‘Disco Sucks!’ campaign in protest at rock being squeezed out of radio playlists by dance music. It culminated in a ceremonial burning of Bee Gees, Chic and Village People records at a baseball stadium in Chicago. Nevertheless, it illuminated the dividing line between rock and dance traditions in America, with an uneasy sub-text of white versus black music. In a bizarre twist, New York dance station WBLS had picked up on ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, unaware of Queen’s history, and playlisted the record. ‘They thought we were a black act,’ said May. The response was so favourable that other stations followed their lead. When ‘Play the Game’ stiffed at a bully number 42 in America, the band had nothing to lose by such increased exposure.

According to ‘Crystal’ Taylor, it was the band’s crew that first suggested ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ as a single, after hearing it at Musicland: ‘But the band just glared at us and told us to mix some more cocktails.’ Roger Taylor remembers it differently. After one of Queen’s four shows at the LA Forum in July, the band’s
backstage visitors included Michael Jackson. ‘I remember Michael and some of his brothers in the dressing room going on and on about “Another One Bites the Dust”,’ Taylor insisted. ‘They kept saying we must release it as a single.’

Not for the first time, the record company bowed to outside pressure. A performance video for the song was shot during the soundcheck in Dallas. A week later, the single was released in the US. Eight weeks on, Queen had their second US number 1 hit. In the UK, ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ made it to number 7, losing out to The Police, Madness and Elvis Presley. But it would make the top spot elsewhere in Argentina, Spain, Mexico and Canada. As Brian May admitted, ‘Roger and I would probably never have gone in that musical direction had we not been coerced by John and Freddie.’ ‘I never thought it would be a hit,’ admitted Taylor. ‘How wrong was I?’

‘Another One Bites the Dust’ would achieve multi-platinum status, while giving Elektra its first three-million-selling single. But Chic’s Bernard Edwards had mixed feelings about the song. As John Deacon freely admitted, ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ had borrowed its bassline from Chic’s ‘Good Times’. ‘That’s OK,’ Edwards told
NME
. ‘What isn’t OK is that the press started saying that we had ripped
them
off. “Good Times” came out more than a year before, but it was inconceivable to these people that black musicians could possibly be innovative like that. It was just these dumb disco guys ripping off this rock ’n’ roll song.’

As well as his new son, Taylor had another welcome distraction outside of the band. During a three-week break from the tour, he flew to Mountain Studios to work on a solo album, later released as
Fun in Space
. Taylor had been piecing together ideas since the first sessions for
The Game
in 1979. Throughout the rest of the year, he would return to Mountain during downtime from Queen, and would put together ten tracks on which he sang and played all the instruments, with engineer David Richards adding additional synthesiser. The instrument that Queen had avoided for so long would take centre-stage on
Fun in Space
and on Queen’s next studio outing.

The US tour reconvened in Milwaukee in early September, with
Queen basking in the glory of a number 1 hit. Mercury, usually bare-chested or in a figure-hugging vest and PVC trousers, continued to goad the audience about his moustache before introducing ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’: ‘I hate skinny chicks … the bigger the tits the better!’

Offstage, of course, the
Spartacus Guide
, a worldwide directory of gay-friendly bars and clubs, would dictate his nightlife in each city. During a stop-over in New York, Mercury had a fling with a male nurse named Thor Arnold. The ‘good time, good time’ he had sung about in ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ continued at a pace. ‘We all knew what was going on and with whom,’ chuckled Roger Taylor. ‘We were all in each other’s lives.’ On 28 September, Taylor would realise his dream of Queen matching Yes’s record at Madison Square Garden. Queen filled the Garden for three consecutive nights, with Mercury spraying the front row of the audience with champagne and cheerfully calling them all ‘cunts’. The final night’s aftershow party saw male guests served by topless waitresses in black stockings and high heels, while female guests were tended to by male waiters clad only in gym shorts. As one eyewitness remarked: ‘Queen didn’t want to be accused of sexism.’

Implausibly, after coming straight off the back of a 46-date American tour, Queen would spend most of October and November in a recording studio. The year before, film director Mike Hodges had approached the band about composing a soundtrack for his forthcoming science-fiction movie,
Flash Gordon
. The band agreed, and Hodges pitched Queen to the film’s Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis. No great fan of rock music, the producer’s immediate response was, ‘But who are the queens?’

Flash Gordon was a comic-strip superhero created in 1934. Taylor and May were both fans of science fiction and comic books, with Taylor especially gung-ho about breaking Queen into a new medium. ‘We wanted to write the first rock ’n’ roll musical soundtrack,’ he said. ‘No one had ever used rock music in a film unless it was something like
The Girl Can’t Help It
, where it was a movie about music. Nowadays it’s the norm, but we thought we were breaking a bit of ground.’

Queen were shown twenty minutes worth of film footage. They
demoed some initial ideas in Munich while working on
The Game
. ‘Then Dino De Laurentiis heard the demo tracks and was like, “No, this is not my film!”’ recalled Brian May. ‘But Mike Hodges stuck with it and convinced him it would be great.’ De Laurentiis’ doubts stemmed from his desire to make a heavyweight sci-fi epic and Hodges’ intention to create something more kitsch. Queen’s demos were tailored with Mike Hodges’ vision in mind.

The soundtrack was patched together at various London studios in two months with Brian May and Mack producing. ‘It was very seat-of-the-pants,’ admitted May. Not least for composer Howard Blake, who was brought in to write a last-minute orchestral score, after Bowie’s string arranger Paul Buckmaster quit, in the belief that it would be used alongside Queen’s contributions. With the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra already booked into a studio, Blake was presented with a crippling deadline. He produced a ninety-minute score in 10 days, staying awake for the last four days straight. ‘I remember Freddie Mercury singing the idea of “Ride to Arboria” in his high falsetto,’ said Blake. ‘And I showed him how I could expand it into the orchestral section now on the film.’ After three days conducting the orchestra in the studio, Blake collapsed with chronic bronchitis brought on by exhaustion and stress.

In the end, Taylor’s enthusiasm for the polyphonic synth used on
The Game
would dictate many of the sounds on the album. When Howard Blake recovered, he discovered that much of his score had been replaced by Queen’s synthesised music. ‘A disappointment,’ he understated. But it would be May that would see the project to completion: ‘Everyone else got drawn into other things, and as I also had the longest attention span it was to left to me to hold the baby.’ ‘It was a technical nightmare,’ adds Mack. ‘There was just me and Brian and so many tape recorders and tapes and cassettes with bits and pieces of dialogue …’

‘We wanted the soundtrack album to make you feel like you’d watched the film,’ said May. ‘So we shipped in all the dialogue and effects and wove it into a tapestry.’ In 1994, the soundtrack to Tarantino’s
Pulp Fiction
would make spectacular use of the film’s dialogue, but Queen’s soundtrack to
Flash Gordon
premiered the same trick fifteen years earlier. When they finally synced the music with
the finished rushes, De Laurentiis was convinced. Mike Hodges had succeeded in bringing the camp comic strip to life. There were over-the-top sets and dialogue; there was Shakespearean actor Brian Blessed hamming it up in gold hot pants; there was Ingmar Bergman protégé Max von Sydow playing Emperor Ming, and there was the beautiful Ornella Muti as Princess Aura getting strapped to a table and whipped. With its tongue-in-cheek humour and frisson of S&M,
Flash Gordon
was made for Queen, and vice versa.

‘Flash’s Theme’ was a Top 10 hit in November. The chorus was nursery-rhyme simple, the prodding rhythm had just the right air of cinematic menace, putting some in mind of the approaching shark in
Jaws
five years earlier, and there was plenty of loud guitar. Meanwhile, dialogue whizzed in and out of the mix with Brian Blessed’s Prince Vultan delivering the immortal line, ‘Gordon’s Alive!’ ‘It was a very camp film,’ admitted Taylor. ‘But I thought our music suited the film in all its camp awfulness.’

When Queen flew to Zurich to begin rehearsals for the European tour, they brought with them their new toy: a synthesiser. It would fall to Brian May to play the synth on ‘The Hero’, ‘Flash’s Theme’ and ‘Battle Theme’, the three Flash Gordon tracks that had been worked into the setlist. Their opening act for the tour would be Straight Eight, a West London pub-rock band who’d been signed to Pete Townshend’s Eel Pie Records. The label had stumped up an eye-watering £30,000 to buy Straight Eight on to the tour. Not that anyone in Queen took much notice.

‘Brian was charming and friendly and offered us compliments and advice,’ recalls Straight Eight guitarist Rick Cassman now. ‘John Deacon was almost invisible, and I don’t think Freddie said a word to me or any of the band for the entire tour. Right from day one I noticed that Freddie was rather aloof. He always arrived by separate limousine with his own group of hangers-on. But every performance he gave was faultless. Roger Taylor was a little like Freddie in that he seemed to move in his own circles and arrived at gigs with his own entourage. I detected massive egos with both him and Freddie.’

The tour included six dates in Germany, one at Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle, the 9,000-seater arena built for the 1936
Olympics. ‘It was where they used to hold Nazi rallies,’ recalls Cassman. ‘That was surreal. Ahead of me I could see nothing but darkness until the entire audience raised their lighters and became a giant illuminated mass. Wonderful!’ Freddie’s party-piece for the encore of ‘We Will Rock You’ now involved arriving onstage on the shoulders of a roadie dressed as
Star Wars
villain Darth Vader.
Star Wars
creator George Lucas caught wind of the stunt, and threatened to sue, forcing Queen to scrap the act.

In December,
The Game
tour reached England. The Birmingham NEC was a newly opened 1,300-seat venue, making Straight Eight the first band ever to play there. But the support band were always going to be overwhelmed by the headliners. ‘Queen used that old trick of turning the PA volume up to double what it was when we performed,’ says Cassman. ‘So that immediately made them appear bigger and brasher than us. They were 100 per cent professional, and the main thing we learned from them was to use the whole stage and try to make ourselves appear bigger than we actually were.’

At Birmingham, Mercury took such brashness to new heights by re-appearing for the encore wearing the tiniest leather shorts he could fit himself into. Backstage, crew members took bets on whether or not he’d split them. ‘Onstage, Freddie was 100 per cent energy and charisma,’ says Cassman. But he couldn’t help but notice how different he was offstage. ‘He seemed distant, even to the other band members. I never remember Queen laughing or joking about during soundchecks.’