Is This The Real Life? (38 page)

Prior to the opening night at Vélez Sársfield, promoter Jose Rota was taken aside by secret servicemen and asked what he would do if a terrorist put a gun to Freddie Mercury’s head during the show and ordered him to shout ‘Viva Peron!’ in honour of the former Argentinian leaders. ‘There were worried that with such a vast audience it might become political,’ quipped Mercury. ‘So they pleaded with me not to sing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”.’

In the end, Queen walked onto a stage flanked by armed soldiers. However, nothing could quite prepare them for the response from the audience. Every Queen album was now in the Argentine Top 10 and every song they played was treated like an encore, with the language difference no barrier to the 54,000-strong crowd echoing every word. Despite the stifling heat, Mercury performed part of the set in his leather bike jacket, over a vest branded with the logo of the London gay club Heaven. (His companion for the South American stint was a male model who also worked as a bouncer at Heaven.) The second night’s gig at Valez Sarfield would be broadcast live to a TV audience of over 30 million in Argentina and Brazil. Backstage, the band were introduced to Argentine football hero Diego Maradona, who would, five years later, handball the English football team out of a quarter-final world cup victory.

Photo opportunities with local sporting heroes were all part of the game; but so too was dinner with General Viola. Amnesty International had earlier estimated that anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people had been tortured or abducted at the behest of the Argentine military junta. But, in the end, all of Queen, bar Roger Taylor, dined with Viola at his home.

So successful were the shows at Vélez Sársfield that Queen would return a week later to play a third night. In the meantime, they holed up in Rio de Janeiro and waited for their next move. With gigs in Cordoba cancelled, they rolled out the artificial turf for shows at the municipal stadium in Mar del Plata and Rosario, playing to over 76,000 people. Still determined to play the 81,000-seater Maracana Stadium, negotiations only broke down when Queen’s offer of a fat donation to the governor of Rio’s wife’s favourite charity was refused. ‘That one was a case of “hurry up and
wait”,’ recalls Hince. ‘We are playing … we’re not … we are … we’re not.’

Two more shows had been confirmed at Sao Paolo’s Morumbi Stadium for 20 and 21 March. The band decamped from Rio, while the crew began the Fitzcarraldo-style task of transporting over 100 tons of equipment to Brazil by road and through the jungle. At the Brazilian border, Customs officials were determined to examine every piece (a process that would have meant cancelling both shows). Somehow a deal was struck, presumably involving US dollars, and the trucks were allowed through with just thirty-six hours to go before the first night. In São Paulo, John Deacon’s personal security guard introduced himself with the information that he had killed over two hundred people. Queen had been assigned bodyguards drawn from Brazil’s infamous ‘Death Squads’. ‘They were the heavy, heavy police who actually kill people at the drop of a hat,’ recalled Mercury. ‘Someone took a photo of John with “Doctor Death”,’ says Peter Hince. ‘There’s Deakey and there’s this guy with a gun stuffed down his trousers.’

Backstage before the first night at Morumbi, the redoubtable Gerry Stickells finally cracked. Infuriated by the lack of a working telephone, he tore one off the wall and threw it out the window. The police were called and Queen were forced to remain in their dressing room until minutes before showtime. In the end, they would perform to more than a quarter of a million people across two nights in Brazil. Alongside their own gear, Queen were loaned spotlights by the show’s organisers. On closer inspection, they saw that they were stenciled with the words Earth, Wind & Fire, and had been impounded during their tour a year before.

Fearful that Queen’s equipment would be confiscated, the crew took emergency measures. While the stadium staff were busy helping themselves to the band’s artificial turf, the crew broke down the stage and managed to transport all the gear to the airport. ‘Our freight agent in LA had chartered a jumbo jet from a company called Flying Tigers,’ recalls Peter Hince. ‘It had a top deck and the guts of the plane had been turned into a hold. Unfortunately, when we arrived with all the gear, we discovered that they didn’t have the right pallets to fit the equipment.’ Hince
spent eighteen hours at the airport, guarding the precious load, before it was flown back to the US, via Puerto Rico. Despite running costs of between £20,000 and £25,000 a day, Queen grossed $3.5 million for their South American venture, and scored a major PR victory. ‘S
OUTH
A
MERICA
B
ITES
T
HE
D
UST
!’ proclaimed the trade magazine
Music Week
. ‘Clinical and machine-like they may be,’ wrote
Melody Maker
. ‘But what matters more is that Queen did it.’ Seven months later, they would try and do it all again, but with rather different results.

With a planned
Greatest Hits
album deferred until the end of 1981, Roger Taylor’s solo debut,
Fun in Space
, surfaced in April, preceded by a single, ‘Future Management’. The album sleeve showed a goggle-eyed alien. Unknown to both parties, the model had been created by Taylor’s old Smile bandmate Tim Staffell. ‘I didn’t know what it was for, and I didn’t discover until years later,’ said Staffell. ‘That was peculiar.’

When ‘Future Management’ inched into the UK Top 20, Taylor appeared on
Top of the Pops
, miming uncomfortably with an electric guitar. ‘My God!’ he groaned in 2008. ‘I always hated
Top of the Pops
.’ The song had shades of The Police’s white reggae, and both the single and album demonstrated Taylor’s love of the musical here and now, but neither would really trouble the charts.
Fun in Space
was the first evidence that Queen as a whole was worth more than the sum of its parts.

In May, Chrissy May gave birth to a daughter, Louisa. Just weeks later, Brian joined the rest of the band and Mack at Mountain Studios. As with the first sessions for
The Game
, there was no pressure to complete another album. Mercury was busy collaborating with John Deacon on a pure soul track titled ‘Cool Cat’, which was even further removed from seventies-era Queen than ‘Another One Bites the Dust’. For Brian May, Queen’s rock conscience, the sessions would mark the start of an especially challenging period. ‘It wasn’t easy,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t easy at all.’

July brought the welcome distraction of another Montreux Jazz Festival and an encounter with David Bowie. Mountain’s engineer David Richards had worked on Bowie’s
Heroes
album, and Bowie had booked a session at Mountain to record the track ‘Cat People
(Putting Out Fire)’. It was almost inevitable that he would drop by a Queen session. ‘David came in one night and we were playing other people’s songs for fun, just jamming,’ recalled Roger Taylor. ‘In the end, David said, “This is stupid, why don’t we just write one?”’ According to Freddie Mercury, talking about the Queen/Bowie collaboration ‘Under Pressure’ in 1985, the resulting session lasted nearly twenty-four hours, fuelled by ‘a few bottles of wine and things’. Mack’s memory is clearer: ‘There was so much blow [cocaine].’

Interviewed in 1984, John Deacon largely credited ‘Under Pressure’ to Mercury and Bowie, while claiming that it was Bowie who composed the song’s now much-sampled bassline (Deacon: ‘It took me a certain amount of time to learn it’). Roger Taylor said that nothing was written in the studio and that the song was originally titled ‘People on Streets’. Another unreleased Queen track, ‘Feel Like’, from the same sessions, included a piano line that would end up on ‘Under Pressure’.

‘We felt our way through a backing track all together as an ensemble,’ recalled Brian May. ‘When the backing track was done, David said, “Okay, let’s each of us go in the vocal booth and sing how we think the melody should go – just off the top of our heads – and we’ll compile a vocal out of that.” And that’s what we did.’ Some of these improvisations, including Mercury’s memorable introductory scatting vocal, would endure on the finished track. Bowie also insisted that he and Mercury shouldn’t hear what the other had sung, swapping verses blind, which helped give the song its cut-and-paste feel.

‘It was very hard,’ May admitted in 2008, ‘because you already had four precocious boys and David, who was precocious enough for all of us. Passions ran very high. I found it very hard because I got so little of my own way. But David had a real vision and he took over the song lyrically.’

Bowie also decided that instead of ‘People on Streets’ it should be called ‘Under Pressure’. On hearing of the collaboration,
EMI/Elektra were delighted. Two weeks later, Bowie, Mercury and Mack were at New York’s Power Station studios trying to agree on a final mix. ‘Roger was also along to keep the peace,’ remembered May. ‘I had given up by that time.’

‘I started mixing with Bowie, and there’s him out
there
and me in
here
,’ laughs Mack. ‘It didn’t go too well. We spent all day and Bowie was like, “Do this, do that.” In the end, I called Freddie and said, “I need help here”, so Fred came in as a mediator.’

‘I wasn’t involved, but the desk broke down,’ revealed May. ‘The song was cobbled together and it was a monitor mix that went out as a single, which was fiercely battled over by David and Freddie.’ At some point, Bowie wanted to re-do the song; at another point he was reluctant for it be released as a single. In the end, ‘Under Pressure’ would be released October, giving Queen and Bowie a UK number 1. ‘“Under Pressure” is a significant song for us,’ said Brian May in 2008, ‘and that is because of David and its lyrical content. I would have found that hard to admit in the old days, but I can admit it now … But one day, I would love to sit down quietly on my own and re-mix it.’