Queen, page 16
Queen must have wondered whether their South African venture caused their omission that December from Bob Geldof’s Band Aid, whose U.K. single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” raised millions to relieve famine in Ethiopia. The star-studded cast included Bono, Sting, and George Michael, but Queen made light of it. Mercury told Robin Smith of Record Mirror, “I would have loved to have been on the record, but I only heard about it when I was in Germany. I don’t know if they would have had me anyway, because I’m a bit old. I’m just an old slag who gets up every morning, scratches his head and wonders what he wants to fuck.”
“Thank God It’s Christmas” promo cue sheet, 1984. Courtesy Christian Lamping
Handbill, The Works tour, Budokan and Yoyogi Taiikukan, Tokyo, May 8–9 and 11, 1985.
Freddie sports falsies, Barra da Tijuca (Rock in Rio), Rio de Janeiro, January 11, 1985. Dave Hogan/Getty Images
b/w “Rotwang’s Party (Robot Dance),” Japan, 1984.
Japan, 1985.
Promo copy, U.S., 1985. Courtesy Christian Lamping
Japan, 1985.
Promo copy, U.S., 1985. Courtesy Christian Lamping
Promo copy, U.S., 1985. Courtesy Christian Lamping
b/w “She Blows Hot And Cold,” 1985.
David Bowie chats with Roger and Brian while Bob Geldof has a word with Prince Charles. Live Aid, Wembley Stadium, London, July 13, 1985. Dave Hogan/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
A United Nations blacklisting for boycott-busting did little to hamper the band’s international activities. In January 1985 in Rio, Queen played the world’s biggest-ever rock festival. The site, Barra da Tijuca, held 250,000 a night for ten concerts with Queen, George Benson, Rod Stewart, AC/DC, and Yes headlining two each.
To their astonishment, Queen sparked a fresh political flare-up on its first night, January 12. The set went swimmingly until the encores. While, in Europe, convivial hilarity had been the only reaction to Mercury wearing a wig and falsies for “I Want To Break Free,” Rio, on the other hand, turned nasty and threw stones. Realizing it was something to do with the costume, Mercury ran to the side of the stage, whipped it off, and dashed back for the next chorus. But afterward, according to Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson, as quoted in Laura Jackson’s Queen: The Definitive Biography, “[Freddie] broke down in tears, he just had no idea why the audience reacted like they did.”
Live Aid, Wembley Stadium, London, July 13, 1985. Popperfoto/Getty Images
Mercury was still expressing bafflement the following day when he talked to Record Mirror (interviewer unknown): “I don’t know why they got so excited about me dressing up as a woman. There are lots of transvestites here.” Somebody eventually explained to Queen that in South America the hook-line title had established “I Want To Break Free” as an anti-dictatorship anthem—delivering it in drag looked like mockery of passionately held aspirations. Remaining apolitical was proving quite a challenge.
With a couple of months off, Deacon bought a Porsche, crashed it, and lost his driving license, while Taylor, after a few relatively obscure excursions into producing other artists, scored a couple of hits with popular British actor Jimmy Nail’s cover of Rose Royce’s “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” (U.K. No. 3 that April) and ex-Undertones singer Feargal Sharkey’s “Loving You” (No. 23, June).
Meanwhile, Mercury was going through some painful reflections about stardom and his personal life. “It was awe-inspiring and mind-boggling to be up there [in Rio] with all those people in the palm of your hand,” he told an uncredited interviewer. “But the other side of the coin is that I must have been the loneliest person there. . . . I don’t want people to think, ‘Poor old Freddie,’ because I can deal with it. But I’m so powerful on stage that I seem to have created a monster. . . . No one loves the real me inside. They’re all in love with my stardom.” He went on to talk about his relationship with his ex-girlfriend Mary Austin—“I don’t feel jealous of her lovers. . . . We look after each other and that’s a wonderful form of love”—and how he’d already left “the vast bulk” of his estate to her (with lesser bequests to his cats and his parents).
Despite his dismissal of Paul Gambaccini’s AIDS alarm bell, it seemed that, as he approached forty, Mercury was considering some lifestyle adjustments. Perhaps not surprising, then, that when he got talking to Jim Hutton, then a barber at the Savoy Hotel, he began his most durable, as well as his final, gay relationship (even though he offended Hutton with his rather coarse chat-up opener, “How big’s your dick?”). They got together at London club Heaven on March 23, 1985—Hutton’s memoir, Mercury And Me, is certain about the date.
While Queen toured New Zealand and Australia during April, skirting a few anti-apartheid demonstrations en route, Mercury’s solo material finally emerged. A one-off single called “Love Kills,” recorded with Moroder for the Metropolis soundtrack, had reached the U.K. Top 10 the previous September, but in April the single “I Was Born To Love You” preceded his Mr. Bad Guy album. A combination of dance and romantic ballads—in a voice he’d deliberately made huskier by working through forty cigarettes a day, he said—it hit No. 6 in the U.K. Its failure to chart in America seemed predictable, given that Mercury called it “an extension of Hot Space.”
But a sense of same-old same-old still hung about Queen. They needed new impetus. They had no idea it would come from Bob Geldof. He first called them in Australia. He asked for Spike Edney, who had done a stint with Geldof’s Boomtown Rats, and requested he sound out the band about playing this huge concert for Ethiopia he was trying to organize. Queen said it sounded “pie in the sky.” Geldof kept on chasing. He finally nailed them when one of his legendarily rude rants, addressed to Queen’s manager Jim Beach, closed with, “Tell the old faggot it’s gonna be the biggest thing that ever happened!”
Mercury liked his style and so did May, who recalled in 1991, “Geldof said there isn’t a penny of this going anywhere else but to the people who need it and we were convinced. Exceptional guy. Doesn’t take no for an answer from anyone. Passion such as that has to be rewarded.”
Being Queen, they wanted to ensure they didn’t go unrewarded either. In his Mercury biography The Show Must Go On, Rick Sky recalled Taylor saying the night before the gig, “It’s a wonderful cause . . . but make no mistake—we’re doing it for our own glory as well.”
Although unpaid, like every other act, and with only a twenty-minute spot to fill, Queen hired the Shaw Theatre, London, for the typical three days of rehearsals they would have undertaken before a full tour. “We put together a show that made sense,” said May. “Geldof said to us, ‘It’s a jukebox, play the hits.’ So that’s what we did, potted versions of the hits. It was a challenge because that was the first time we’d done a gig without our own lights and sound gear. We were naked. [We had] none of the props we thought we needed. It was a test.”
On July 13, 1985, some minutes after 6 p.m. U.K. time, and at the very moment when U.S. TV switched to the international feed, Queen strode out in front of the seventy-five thousand at Wembley Stadium. A gently smiling Mercury, workmanlike in singlet, jeans, and boxing boots, plonked himself on the piano stool and caressed the opening notes of “Bohemian Rhapsody” to begin twenty minutes fifty-six seconds of what many still believe to have been the most powerful, concise, not to mention globe-bestriding rock set ever played: “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Radio Ga Ga,” “Hammer To Fall,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” “We Will Rock You,” and “We Are The Champions.” Mercury even had time for forty-five seconds of “ayoayo” call and response with the crowd.
Back home in Feltham, Middlesex, Bomi Bulsara turned from the TV to his wife, Jer, and said, “Our boy’s done it” (Tim Teeman interview with Mrs. Bulsara, The Times, 2006). Backstage, Elton John ran to Queen’s dressing room and yelled that the band had stolen the show. Geldof’s been saying it to anyone who asked ever since. Nobody disagreed.
Why? Taylor raised a sneaky technical point, talking to Mojo’s David Thomas in 1999: “We sent our brilliant engineer to check the system so he set all the limiters for us. We were louder than anyone else at Live Aid.” But May, in 1991, gave all credit to their frontman: “Freddie is the kind of person who rises to the occasion. The rest of us played OK, but Freddie took it to another level. It wasn’t just Queen fans. He connected with everyone.”
Even stolid Deacon fell into raptures, talking to the Daily Star: “Live Aid turned our world upside down. Before, we’d promised ourselves a good long rest—no touring, no work, no band. Queen was rejuvenated by that wonderful day. We’d all been getting a bit tired. Jaded. Now we’re bursting with enthusiasm and ideas.” (Incidentally, when the band formally met Prince Charles and Princess Diana at Live Aid, Deacon had fielded a substitute, his roadie Spider, because he was “too nervous.”)
At first, as their catalog sales soared in the aftermath of the global telecast, this fresh vigor lacked a collective purpose. Mercury immersed himself in Munich again, May tinkered with his solo album, while Taylor tried more production work and, with Deacon, played on a couple of Elton John tracks.
Then Australian movie director Russell Mulcahy pulled them together, asking whether they would record some music for the soundtrack for his Highlander movie about an immortal hero played by Christophe Lambert. The invitation spurred them into a series of Highlander-themed songs, four of which made it to Queen’s next album: “Gimme The Prize,” “Don’t Lose Your Head,” “Princes Of The Universe,” and “Who Wants To Live Forever” (which May came up with while driving home from watching some rushes in January 1986). With this basis for a new Queen album—which they worked on in London and Munich from September 1985 to April 1986—Taylor again came up with a song they all immediately wanted to release as a single: “One Vision” hit No. 7 in the U.K. and 61 in America.
But even Live Aid couldn’t make everyone love them. “One Vision” triggered some resentment that its fist-pumping pleas for “one god” and “one worldwide vision” somehow exploited the message of Live Aid. Nothing much to do with it, said Taylor; he’d drawn inspiration from way back, namely Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., hence the line “I had a dream.”
The niggles continued, though. As part of their appeal to be removed from the UN blacklist, they had to make a public promise not to play in apartheid South Africa again. And with Mercury moving back from Munich to live full-time at Garden Lodge, the tabloids began to publish the first rumors that he had tested positive for HIV. He hadn’t, but as Deacon sighed to The Hit’s Martin Townsend, “If you say no, then it becomes ‘So and so denies, etc.’—I mean, they can twist it any way they want. . . .” Still, at the premiere of his friend Dave Clark’s musical Time, Mercury was uninhibited enough in the public gaze to take over an usherette’s ice cream tray at the intermission and walk around throwing her wares to, or at, anyone who called out.
John Deacon with Robert Awhai and Lenny Zakatek, for the motion picture The Immortals: “The Joy-Stick Mix” b/w “No Turning Back” and “No Turning Back (The Chocks Away Mix),” 1986.
Queen felt rather good. The band’s long spell of internal struggle and strife seemed to have faded away. In March, the title track “A Kind Of Magic” hit U.K. No. 3 and topped the chart in thirty-five countries (not America, of course, where it faded at No. 42). The album, released in June, displayed the band’s familiar hard-rock-to-disco scope but added the grand yet touching orchestrations of “Who Wants To Live Forever” and the fetching Supremes pastiche, “Pain Is So Close To Pleasure” (co-written by Mercury and Deacon).
The summer looked promising: a sold-out European tour coming up, A Kind Of Magic hitting No. 1 at home, and Wembley Stadium sold out on their own—twice over.
The Works
by Stephen Dalton
THE LPs
Queen’s eleventh studio album remains an unsurpassed peak among the band’s 1980s releases, creatively if not commercially. Made in the aftermath of their ill-fated disco-funk experiment Hot Space and a change of record label, The Works heralded a partial return to the heavy-rock sound of classic Queen. But it also offered a rich and eclectic musical mix, prominently showcasing the synthesizers and drum machines that came to define the band’s later, more pop-friendly sound.
It may have failed to reverse Queen’s declining U.S. profile, but The Works became a chart-topping success across Europe and beyond. Remarkably, all nine album tracks were released as singles or B-sides. Polished and emphatically modern in its sound and packaging, this was the record with which these revitalized 1970s veterans went head to head with the new generation of post-punk superstars, including U2, The Police, and Duran Duran.
A key theme of The Works is the battle between man and machine, soul and science. This subtext is mirrored musically in the mix of traditional guitar numbers with synthesizer-led songs, and also made lyrically explicit in the album’s centerpiece track, “Machines (Back To Humans).” Deploying the jargon of home computing, fresh at the time but somewhat quaint today, the song’s narrator rails against an increasingly mechanized world: “When the machines take over/It ain’t no place for rock ’n’ roll.”
But the finest expression of this man-machine theme on The Works is unquestionably “Radio Ga Ga,” drummer Roger Taylor’s misty-eyed eulogy for the bygone wireless age. Rumbling along on a solid chassis of preprogrammed beats and throbbing synthesizers, this heavily electronic track is the closest that Queen ever came to the gleaming retro-futurism of Kraftwerk. But there is nothing robotic about Freddie Mercury’s soaring, heart-bursting vocal or Brian May’s wistful, vapor-trail guitar licks.
Taylor wrote “Radio Ga Ga” as a critical commentary on the growing dominance of MTV and video-led pop culture—a rich irony, given that Queen were early pioneers of the rock promo. And even more ironic considering the band’s lavish clip for this single, which incorporated segments of Fritz’s Lang’s 1927 science-fiction classic Metropolis, helped turn the song into a worldwide smash.
Bass guitarist John Deacon’s sole songwriting contribution to the album, “I Want To Break Free,” became another international hit. Built around an infectiously simple, stuttering rhythmic refrain, Deacon’s escapist fantasy is graced with an octave-vaulting performance from Mercury and a striking synthesizer solo, which May later adapted for guitar to play live.
The memorable video for “I Want To Break Free,” featuring all four bandmembers in drag, was intended as a parody of the famously drab British TV soap opera Coronation Street, but the sight of Freddie Mercury as a butch desperate housewife, years before his sexuality became full public knowledge, did not play well with MTV or Queen’s more conservative fans. Indeed, this mildly risqué clip was later blamed for the album’s lukewarm U.S. reception.
All the same, fans of Queen’s muscular, adrenaline-pumped guitar sound were not short-changed by The Works. May’s stomping “Tear It Up” is a ballsy blues-rock crowd-pleaser—routine ingredients, but it still gets the pulse racing. His only other solo composition on the album, “Hammer To Fall,” is a full-fledged powerhouse anthem packed with sky-punching, sing-along lyrics. Fantastic stuff.
Equally impressive, Mercury’s “It’s A Hard Life” is a roaringly romantic power ballad reflecting on the strains and pains of long-term relationships. Ablaze with fiery guitar riffs and operatic orchestration, both of these mighty mini-epics can stand alongside “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “We Are The Champions” in the pantheon of all-time Queen classics.
All squeezed into a lean thirty-seven minutes, even the lesser tracks on The Works never feel surplus to requirements. Mercury’s “Man On The Prowl” marks another of the singer’s piano-driven pastiches of vintage 1950s rock ’n’ roll, while “Keep Passing The Open Windows” is a wry number originally written for an aborted soundtrack to the movie version of John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire. Both are pleasant enough.
The soul-searching ballad “Is This The World We Created?” the only joint credit for Mercury and May, acts as a kind of bittersweet coda to this compact, hit-packed album. After The Works, Queen’s final act became a sad catalog of creeping sickness and slow decline. But in 1984, with a newly modernized pop-rock sound and the triumph of Live Aid looming, they seemed almost invincible.
Korea, 1984.
b/w “Tear It Up,” U.S., 1984 (withdrawn sleeve). Courtesy Ferdinando Frega, Queenmuseum.com
A Kind Of Magic
by Sylvie Simmons
THE LPs
Sixty-three weeks on the U.K. chart and a string of hit singles—not bad at all for an album that started out as a hodgepodge of songs written for two different movie soundtracks and a couple of one-off tracks. Or, for that matter, for an album by a band that, according to the press, was breaking up—allegations that Freddie Mercury countered during Queen’s July 1986 Wembley Stadium concert, a month after the album’s release, by pointing at his butt.
Whatever might have been going on behind the scenes, it certainly seemed like the fairy dust that had hung over Queen’s triumphant Live Aid appearance was still doing its job. Then again, it didn’t hurt that Queen came up with so many memorable new songs for the album, including “One Vision,” “Who Wants To Live Forever,” and “Friends Will Be Friends.”
