Is This The Real Life? (57 page)

Made in Heaven
didn’t disappoint the band or EMI. Another number 1 hit, it also yielded five Top 20 UK singles, although one, ‘Let Me Live’ (conjured out of a snippet of Mercury from 1983), was
banned from the BBC Radio 1 playlist on the grounds that Queen were too old for the station’s new young demographic. In America, though,
Made in Heaven
only just registered in the Top 60. Brian May’s parting shot from 1995 suggested that he planned to move on in his life and career, without Queen: ‘Having had twenty years of this very volatile democracy, I don’t feel I need it in my life any more.’ This would prove easier said than done.

Without Queen to distract them, the surviving members went back to real life. For John Deacon, it was an easy transition. His brood now included a sixth child, Cameron, born during the
Made
in Heaven
sessions. Asked what he did with himself these days, the lapsed bass player said, ‘I am mainly involved with looking after the children at home.’ Roger Taylor also had a new addition, a daughter named Tiger Lily, born in 1994, but, before long, he was writing songs for another solo album.

Brian May filled his time with guest spots, tracks for children’s movie soundtracks, charity gigs and records, Jimi Hendrix, Shadows and Mott The Hoople tribute albums … It was Mott The Hoople’s ex-keyboard player Morgan Fisher that approached May for the tribute disc. ‘R.E.M. and Aerosmith were supposedly up for it,’ he chuckles. ‘But I was living in Japan and I had no lawyer, no management … So it ended up becoming a Japanese Mott The Hoople tribute album with Japanese bands. By then, Brian had already done “All the Way from Memphis”. I had to write and say, “Look, I’m sorry, the project’s off, I have to do a Japanese one.” To his great credit, he came back and said, “Put my song on anyway. I can be your guest foreigner.”’

Fisher had toured Europe with Queen in the early 1980s, before being told his services were no longer required. May’s involvement with the tribute album was a rapprochement of sorts. Yet when Fisher crossed paths with Roger Taylor at rehearsals for a tribute concert to Mott’s late guitarist Mick Ronson, ‘there was not much spoken between us.’ Then again, as May once put it, ‘I’ve always been too much of a nice guy, I’m such a pleaser. Freddie was never
like that. A kid could be waiting outside for five hours, and Freddie would be like, “Oh, fuck off, darling, I need my rest.” I’m the nice guy who sits there signing everything that’s put in front of me.’

Though nobody knew it at the time, there was also a pattern emerging to some of May’s outside work. In October 1991, a month before Mercury’s death, Brian had played at the Guitar Legends concert in Seville. For the show’s finale, May had joined vocalist Paul Rodgers on a version of Free’s ‘All Right Now’. Two years on, May had played on Rodgers’ album,
Muddy Water Blues: A Tribute to
Muddy Waters
. In February 1994, May joined him during his gig at London’s Kentish Town Forum, and again that summer at Rodgers’ show in Montreux. But it would be some time before both parties chose to make the arrangement more permanent.

In January 1997, the Queen trio made their first public performance together since the Mercury tribute concert. Deacon, May and Taylor joined Elton John to close the opening-night performance of a new ballet,
Le Presbytère (A Ballet For Life)
, partly inspired by Mercury and his fight against AIDS. The quartet would perform ‘The Show Must Go On’ in Paris at the Théâtre National de Chaillot. Brian May would scoop another Ivor Novello award that year for ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’, while the more May-centric end of the Queen songbook was revisited for the
Queen Rocks
compilation album. ‘We wanted to remind people that we were always a rock band,’ he explained. ‘Personally, I’d rather people just bought
Queen II
.’ Nevertheless, Deacon, May and Taylor joined forces to record a new song for the compilation. The ballad, ‘No One But You (Only The Good Die Young)’ was the album’s one moment of restraint.

Back at his Allerton Hill home studio, May was completing a new solo album.
Another World
was released in June 1998. It had begun life as a covers record, but ended up containing a mix of original material (including songs originally written for TV and the Gwyneth Paltrow movie,
Sliding Doors
) alongside Mott The Hoople’s ‘All The Way From Memphis’ and Jimi Hendrix’s ‘One Rainy Wish’. There were special guests, including Jeff Beck, Ian Hunter and Taylor Hawkins, the Queen-worshipping drummer with US rock band Foo Fighters. Just two months before release,
May was holidaying in Africa when he learned that Cozy Powell had been killed in a car accident. It was a dreadful blow. ‘I get very depressed quite often,’ he admitted, ‘and Cozy could always lift you out of it.’ He remixed one song, ‘The Business’, as a tribute to Powell, waspishly telling
Q
magazine, ‘I’m sure that somebody somewhere will complain that I’m trading off his memory.’

With Powell’s replacement, Kiss drummer Eric Singer, The Brian May Band went out on the road for the rest of the year, playing the UK, Europe, Russia, Japan and Australia.
Another World
made it into the UK Top 30, selling to ardent Queen fans and guitar aficionados. ‘Truthfully, I’d love somebody to come up to me and say, “I love your new record … it’s new and it’s different,”’ said May, ‘rather than, “How do you do that guitar effect on
A Night at the Opera
?”’

Just two months after May’s
Another World
, Roger Taylor returned to the fray. Never shy about making his views known, Taylor had just donated £10,000 to the campaign by Manchester United Supporters Association to stop broadcasting giants BSkyB from taking over their football team. BSkyB was owned by media giant Rupert Murdoch, whom Taylor had savaged in his song ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’. Meanwhile, his new album,
Electric Fire,
found him sticking the boot into lazy journalists, greedy lawyers and wife-beaters. The music vaulted from hard rock to pop to ballads to a cover of John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’; some of it let down by what one music magazine described as ‘our host’s baffling lyrical conceits’.

Electric Fire
was promoted with a concert from the drummer’s home studio, re-named The Cyberbarn, and broadcast across the internet. It received a record number of 595,000 online views. In March, the following year, Taylor returned to play a brief UK tour, joined onstage in Wolverhampton by Brian May for ‘Under Pressure’. But the album still stalled outside the Top 50. As Taylor pointed out: ‘Mick Jagger is one of the biggest stars and he can’t sell a solo record.’

Another World
’s sleeve note had included a dedication to Brian May’s personal assistant Julie Glover for ‘management, therapy and day care’. Julie had been a mainstay of Queen Productions before working exclusively for the guitarist. It was she who broke
the news to May that Freddie Mercury had died. In August 1999, the
Sunday Mirror
ran a story claiming that Brian had been having an affair with Julie (‘his glamorous Girl Friday’) behind his partner Anita Dobson’s back. All parties remained silent over the story, but Glover quit her job soon after.

Before long, another newspaper wrote that May had booked himself into the Cottonwood Clinic in Tucson, Arizona, a retreat describing itself as ‘the premiere holistic behavioural health and addiction treatment centre’. The reason: his so-called ‘addiction to lover Anita Dobson’. Again, neither May nor Dobson would comment. But in recent interviews May had talked candidly about his emotional problems. ‘I was always screwed up about sex,’ he told
Mojo
’s David Thomas. ‘I got married at totally the wrong time. In the midst of all this, I’m trying to be a husband and a good father to my kids. So that really excluded me from being wildly promiscuous. But emotionally I became utterly out of control, needy for that one-to-one reinforcement, feelings of love and discovery, and that’s what I became addicted to.’

It was also odd, if illuminating, to read the guitarist pouring his heart out to a celebrity magazine. ‘I’ve had serious battles with depression,’ he told
OK
’s Martin Townsend. ‘It sounds stupid, because people think, “Poor little rich bastard.” But it doesn’t make any difference what your situation is.’ Asked about his on-off relationship with Anita Dobson, May volunteered the titbit: ‘I didn’t think I could ever be with someone that didn’t like Led Zeppelin! And the stuff she likes I got dragged into by my heels … the whole world of musical theatre made me physically ill … and still occasionally does.’ Like his earlier statement that ‘there cannot be a Queen without Freddie’, May’s comment about musical theatre would come back to haunt him. Interviewed some years later, May quietly acknowledged the Cottonwood Clinic for helping him out of the depression ‘so deep that I had to admit powerlessness, and ask for help’. In November 2000, after spending several months apart, May married Anita Dobson at a private ceremony in Richmond register office.

Away from his troubled private life, the guitarist seemed to spend his free time playing live with anyone that asked:
Motörhead, Foo Fighters, Spike Edney’s rock ensemble, the SAS Band … EMI managed to squeeze out another Top 5 album with
Queen’s Greatest Hits III
, while Roger Taylor enraged ‘some crusty old duffers’, when his image appeared behind Freddie Mercury’s on one of the Royal Mail’s Millennium stamps. As one prominent philatelist pointed out: ‘The Royal Mail has broken the strict rule that no living person other than a member of the Royal Family may appear on a postage stamp.’ Others complained that Mercury, ‘a hedonistic gay man’, was on a stamp in the first place.

In spring 2000, the Queen duo came back to work together, ruffling feathers by performing ‘We Will Rock You’ with the all-singing, all-dancing pop group 5ive at the BRIT Awards. Some fans griped about their heroes demeaning themselves by performing with a boy band. Yet the look on both musicians’ faces when the stage curtains parted, the dry ice plumed and they crashed into the song’s mid-section suggested May and Taylor missed the thrill of playing live.

A single version of ‘We Will Rock You’ by 5ive and Queen became a number 1 hit that summer, again raising the question of whether Queen would consider working with another singer. Less than a year later, 5ive had gone to boy-band heaven, and Queen turned their attention to Robbie Williams, the refugee singer from Take That, and then riding high with his own solo career.

Williams had been asked to record ‘We Are the Champions’ for the soundtrack to a romantic action movie,
A Knight’s Tale
. ‘Robbie said it would be nice to do it with Queen,’ explained May. ‘So, at two days’ notice, we went into the studio and did it – live! We did four takes. Rob sang live and he came up with the goods. It’s a controversial thing to do … because a lot of Queen fans were like, “Why are they consorting with that person from Take That?” Shock, horror!’

The collaboration was in keeping with the long Queen tradition of doing the unexpected, and upsetting people along the way, including, it seemed, John Deacon. In April 2001, Deacon informed the
Sun
: ‘I didn’t want to be involved with it, and I’m glad. I’ve heard what they did and it’s rubbish. It’s one of the greatest songs ever written, but I think they’ve ruined it. I don’t want to be nasty but
let’s just say Robbie Williams is no Freddie Mercury. Freddie can never be replaced – and certainly not by him.’ Tellingly, Deacon had also been absent a month earlier when Queen were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in New York.