Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (5 page)

All day long, Freddie remained relaxed.

“He sat holding court, in that perfectly camp but quite humble way of his,” agrees Bernard. “He knew the power he had over people, but it didn’t go to his head. If he’d been sitting outside a beach hut in Southend-on-Sea, he’d have taken people’s breath away. He was a true star, with that indefinable quality. John Deacon I wasn’t aware of, where was he? And I didn’t see Brian May or Roger Taylor speak to each other all day. They were like a divorced couple at the same party.”

Quo’s Francis Rossi disagrees.

“I don’t subscribe to the theory that Queen were on the point of breaking up then. They seemed like they were getting on all right to me, and we knew the boys in the band pretty well. All bands have differences. They were certainly united in their commitment to the Live Aid cause.”

The backstage area was nonetheless rife with rumors about Queen being on the verge of breaking up.

“It showed,” insists Bernard Doherty.

“Not when they went on, though. If there were differences, they were intelligent enough to put them aside to get on with the job in hand. And they went out there and won. Queen had the wow factor. What else do we remember about Live Aid? The sound going down on the Who. Bono getting in the zone, losing the plot and confounding the others by breaking the rules of performance that day—none of the rest of U2 would talk to him after that.”

Despite Live Aid turning out to be the performance that established U2 as a stadium group with a superstar future, it almost went horribly wrong. Not only did they play a self-indulgent fourteen-minute version of their “heroin song” “Bad,” from the 1984 album
The Unforgettable Fire
, but Bono punctuated it riskily with blasts of Lou Reed’s “Satellite of Love” and “Walk on the Wild Side,” as well as by bits from the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” and “Sympathy for the Devil.” This left
room for only one other song, causing their finale “Pride (In the Name of Love),” an eventual global mega-hit, to be ditched. Then Bono spotted a young girl whom he apparently thought was being crushed in the crowd when the audience, reacting to the singer’s charisma, surged forwards. At the time, it was reported that he had signaled desperately to stadium stewards to pull her free, but that the stewards had failed to understand . . . so Bono leapt from the stage to reach her himself, then hugged her, comforted her, and wound up dancing with her. Subsequent interviews with fans—he kissed and danced with more than one on the day—have revealed that this was more likely a stunt on Bono’s part, to demonstrate how brilliantly he could connect with an audience. Whatever it was, it became an indelible image of Live Aid, resulting in all of U2’s albums reentering the UK charts.

“On the day, though, they really thought they’d blown it,” said Doherty. “Simon Le Bon did blow it, with the bum note of all time. Then there were the critics drooling over Bowie. Phil Collins, playing both Wembley and JFK courtesy of Concorde—though I think a lot of people wished he hadn’t bothered, not least the hastily re-formed Led Zeppelin, who he drummed for at JFK. As for Queen, they did exactly what Bob had asked them to do. I watched from the wings and I was blown away. I was behind Freddie, looking over his shoulder onto the piano, just a couple of feet away from him. I stood watching the audience with some trepidation. You never know: even the greatest acts in the world bomb, and you don’t know why.”

We needn’t have worried. Queen drew from every influence, every which way. They gave it all they had. So many other supreme performers flooded back into my mind at that point: Alex Harvey, the great glam rocker of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Ian Dury and the Blockheads. Mick Jagger. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders. What Freddie displayed better than on perhaps any other occasion was instinctive star quality, as well as a phenomenal grasp of what makes a must-watch show. He conjured up all the genius of vaudeville. It was as if he had studied and absorbed the best-kept secrets of every definitive artist who
had gone before him and sorcered a little of all those greats into his own act. It was quite a formula. The ultimate peacock, Freddie seduced us all.

Not, admits Doherty, that he knew Queen were making history that day.

“Not on the day, no. I had headphones on, and a walkie-talkie—no mobile phones back then. I was worrying about Dave Hogan and Richard Young in the pit. I had Bob and Harvey to fret about. It was all going on, I had a lot on my mind. I knew the band were going down well, sure. The crowd was going nuts. Everyone backstage stopped talking to watch them. That was bizarre. Never normally happens . . . Who came on before or after Queen? Hardly anyone remembers. What do I remember? That Freddie Mercury was the greatest performer on the day. Perhaps the greatest performer ever.”

David Wigg, the veteran journalist then writing for the
Daily Express
, had long been a close personal friend of Freddie’s.

“I was the only journalist allowed to join Freddie in his dressing room as he prepared for Queen’s performance at the biggest show in the world,” he says. “He was very relaxed, and looking forward to getting out there to do his bit.”

“We are playing songs that people identify with, to make it a happy occasion,” Freddie had explained.

Freddie and David discussed the reasons behind Live Aid, and talked about Freddie’s own experiences in childhood.

“He said that he first became aware that he was luckier than a lot of children when he attended an English boarding school in India, and discovered through a boy’s eyes the plight of the country’s poor.”

“But,” Freddie had insisted, “I’m certainly not doing this out of guilt. I don’t feel guilty just because I’m rich. Even if I didn’t do it, the problem would still be there. It’s something that will sadly always be there. The idea of all this is to make the whole world aware of the fact that this is going on. By making this concert we are doing something positive to make people look, listen, and hopefully donate. Neither should we
be looking at it in terms of us and them. When people are starving, it should be looked upon as one united problem.”

Freddie openly admitted to “Wiggie” that when he saw TV film of Africa’s starving millions, he had to switch off his set.

“It disturbs me so much, I just can’t watch it. Sometimes I do feel helpless, and this is one of those times I can do my bit. Bob has done a wonderful thing, because he actually sparked it off. I’m sure we all had it in us to do that, but it took someone like him to become the driving force, and actually get us all to come together.”

For one concertgoer, that day was the more overwhelming for the fact that this was his first rock experience. Jim Hutton, the humble hairdresser who became Freddie’s partner shortly before Live Aid, went on to share the rest of Freddie’s life. Little could he have known that day that, just six years later, he would be helping to prepare his lover for burial. Conveyed to the concert in grandeur as Freddie’s other half in the star’s own limousine, it was the first time Jim had ever attended a gig of any kind, let alone watched Queen play live.

“Talk about chucking me in at the deep end,” laughed Jim. “I was a bit blown away by all the glamorous superstars, to be honest. Every member of the band had his own trailer. All the wives were there, as well as Roger’s and Brian’s children. Freddie knew everyone. He took me to meet David Bowie, who I’d actually met before, when I cut his hair. He even introduced me to Elton John as ‘my new man.’ Freddie didn’t need time to get ready, he was just going on stage in what he was wearing when we left home—a white vest with a pair of faded jeans. He also had on a pair of his favorite trainers, a belt, and a studded amulet. When it was their turn to go on, he knocked back another large vodka tonic and said, ‘Let’s do it.’

“I walked with him to the stage, and kissed him good luck. Not that he needed it. To hear them playing those songs live—a bit of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ with Freddie on the piano, ‘Radio Ga Ga’ with the crowd clapping wildly in unison, ‘Hammer to Fall,’ then Freddie on his guitar for ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love,’ and ‘We Will Rock You,’ and ‘We
Are the Champions,’ thundering away . . . to a simple guy like me, this was all just mind-boggling. Then later on, once it had got dark, Freddie and Brian back on stage together, just the two of them, performing that wonderful ballad ‘Is This the World We Created . . .?’ They had recorded it quite a while before Live Aid, hadn’t they, but it was as if they had written it especially for the occasion. The words were so right, and the way Freddie sang them was just magical. It moved me to tears, as Freddie often did.”

At last, Jim, who died from cancer in January 2010, nineteen years after Freddie’s death, had seen his rock-star lover at work.

“He gave it everything up there. He amazed me. Then, when he was off, he seemed glad it was done. ‘Thank God that’s over,’ he laughed. Another large vodka, and he was calm. We did stay until the end to catch up with everyone, but Freddie didn’t want to bother with the after-show party at Legends nightclub. Instead, we went home to Garden Lodge like an old married couple, to watch the rest of the American leg on television.”

Conspicuous by their absence that day were Freddie’s own parents. Although often in attendance at Queen’s UK concerts, they chose instead to witness this spectacle at home.

“It was such a huge event, it would have been too complicated,” recalled Freddie’s mum Jer, suggesting that she and Freddie’s father, Bomi, would have been overwhelmed by both the crowds and the logistics of getting to and from the stadium. “So I watched it on television. I was so proud. My husband turned to me and said, ‘Our boy’s done it.’ ”

From the viewpoint of professionals charged with transmitting and recording the event, Freddie’s contribution had been little short of sensational. Mike Appleton, former executive producer of
The Old Grey Whistle Test
—the influential BBC television rock series—remembers Mercury’s performance as “fascinating.”

“For a start, he was not even supposed to go on. Doctors had already said that he was too ill to perform. His throat was terrible, from a cold or something. He wasn’t well enough, but he absolutely insisted.
It happened that he and Bono of U2 wound up as the most successful performers of the day.

“It was so interesting to see Freddie through the monitors—I was shut away in a sweltering OB truck all day long. We were literally building a program live on air as we went. Come five o’clock and we were flipping live to JFK—alternating twenty minutes here, twenty minutes there, let’s put an interview in here, a live bit from earlier there, some highlights of the first hour in this slot . . . it’s actually very exciting television, and the only way I like to work. Freddie simply came on, took immediate possession of the stage, coolly and calmly, and then proceeded to take possession of the audience.

“Queen had at that point been off the boil for a while, having made no significant impact with an album for some time. The Live Aid experience wound up putting them back on the map, and had the same effect on the music business as a whole. Overall, sales went up. Live Aid proved to be a tonic for the entire industry. As Freddie was the out-and-out star of the day, he was undoubtedly the main ingredient of that tonic. He was more dominant that day than I’d ever seen him before. The day may have belonged to Bob emotionally. It definitely belonged to Freddie musically.”

Mike later received the BAFTA [British Academy of Film and Television Arts] Award for Live Aid as Producer of the Best Outside Broadcast.

Dave Hogan, who captured the show in stills, shares Appleton’s opinion.

“Only six of us were chosen as Live Aid’s official photographers,” reveals the fabled
Sun
lensman known as “Hogie” (who is no stranger to a splash headline himself—“Maimed by Madonna” was his Warholian moment).

“We were shooting for the Live Aid souvenir book, so we weren’t stopped from going anywhere,” he recalls.

“It was obvious to everyone on the day that Freddie was the main man—but not until he actually got on stage. Freddie wasn’t a limelight-grabber when he wasn’t on. His behavior was gentlemanly and low-key,
compared to most. No one realized how powerful he was until he went out there. At that point, we knew, this is it. I remember him launching into ‘Radio Ga Ga.’ It wasn’t even dark, he was whipping up all this magic in daylight. That ocean of fans clapping and stamping together just sent shivers down your spine. For us, it was heaven. This is the moment you want. He stole it. The day was full of fantastic moments—Bono leaping into the crowd, McCartney’s first live performance since John Lennon was assassinated. But what I saw Freddie do that day took my breath away. He engaged with every single person present. Total unison. Nobody has done that, before or since. I think he was the only one who
could
do it.”

Thus, the cream of rock sang and danced to feed the world. It has been repeated ad nauseam that Queen’s performance was the most thrilling, the most moving, the most memorable, the most enduring—surpassing as it did the efforts of their greatest rivals.

“By far the most extraordinary,” agrees radio presenter Paul Gambaccini. “You could sense a frisson backstage as heads rose towards the monitors like dogs hearing a whistle. They were stealing the show, and they would regain a stature they would never lose again.”

The other members of Queen were the first to praise their front man.

“The rest of us played OK, but Freddie was out there and took it to another level,” said Brian, with typical modesty. “It wasn’t just Queen fans. He connected with everyone.”

As he later elaborated to me in an emotional interview at Queen’s Pembridge Road offices, “Live Aid
was
Freddie. He was unique. You could almost see our music flowing through him. You couldn’t ignore him. He was original. Special. It wasn’t just our fans we were playing to, it was
everyone’s
fans. Freddie really gave his all.”

Of all Queen’s 704 live performances fronted by Freddie, it remains their most iconic, their finest hour. Live Aid gave the band the perfect opportunity to demonstrate that, stripped of props and trappings, of their own lighting rig and sound equipment, of fog and smoke and
other special effects, without even the natural magic of dusk and with fewer than twenty minutes in which to prove themselves, they were unchallenged sovereigns who still had what it took to rock the world. They would now embrace the unequivocal fact that Queen were greater than the sum of their parts. They had no way of knowing that their finest hour was already behind them. United in exultation, recommitted to the cause, all thoughts of solo careers shelved—for the moment, at least—they were soon to discover that their glittering, second-chance future with Freddie would be tragically short-lived.