Queen, page 18
Hutton understood that the only other people Mercury told immediately were Mary Austin and Jim Beach. But the visible signs of the illness soon led him into the duplicities of denial. His first long-term partner, David Minns, wrote in the oral history he co-edited, More Of The Real Life . . . Freddie Mercury, that when he was invited to a Caballé recording session, “I arrived only to see my former friend displaying the discoloured areas on his face which were the outward manifestations of one of the AIDS-related illnesses. He exclaimed: ‘It’s alright, dear! There’s no need to look at me like that. I’ve just been drinking too much vodka and doing too much. . . . The doctors say I have a liver complaint.’ Oh God, I thought.”
His German friend Barbara Valentin told Laura Jackson that, before the Ku Club show with Caballé, she applied layers of makeup to hide these small, purple Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions. More painfully, though, he’d developed an open wound on his right leg and a large scabbed lesion on the ball of the foot, neither of which would ever heal.
Japan, 1987.
Queen’s year off closed with Deacon having apparently repaired himself to some degree and started writing Queen songs, May still caught in his internal maelstrom, and Taylor engaged with his new band project, The Cross, which led to his personal life turning temporarily upside down.
Roger Taylor’s The Cross, b/w “Rough Justice,” Germany, 1988.
On a video set for a single, “Cowboys And Indians” (U.K. No. 74 for one week that October), he met and fell for a model called Debbie Leng—renowned for sucking sexily on a Cadbury’s Flake chocolate bar in a TV ad. Subsequently, on January 25, 1988, he married his longtime girlfriend Dominique Beyrand at Chelsea Registry Office.
A month later he left her to live with Leng. Taylor never spoke about these events, but it has been suggested this added up to “a civilized arrangement” for the benefit of the children.
When Queen returned to the studio in London, then Montreux, that January, May felt barely capable of contributing. “The Miracle, I don’t know how I got through it,” he told this writer in 1991. “I took a back seat on the writing, but I’m surprised how much guitar there is on it. I can remember whole days sitting there blank, I couldn’t get up off the chair, I was in such a depression. But there were a few days when I was fighting it and I got up and played—which was the only good thing that happened to me then.
“My dad died at the same time [June 2, 1988], and my marriage broke up [that summer], so for a while I didn’t exist as a person. I’d look at myself in the mirror and think, ‘Oh, he looks all right, he’s a rock star.’ But inside there was almost nothing there. . . . I was . . . I can’t describe how bad I was, it just all went. No amount of fame or money can insulate you from that sort of pain. . . . The group tends to be the most stable family that we’ve got. Oftentimes it saved me, I think. Life would be so awful that going into the studio was the only thing I could stand to do.”
In fact, Mercury deliberately enabled the four bandmembers to get closer to one another when he suddenly proposed that the rule on songwriting credits he’d instigated while they were recording their first album (whoever writes the lyrics takes the publishing royalties) should be abandoned at last and all songs credited to “Queen” with the income shared equally. While he never spoke publicly about the issue, it seems reasonable to surmise that his attitude had softened because of his illness. Regardless, agreement was swift and unanimous. In 1991, Taylor told Bob Coburn of the U.S.-based Rockline radio show, “It was just the best decision that we ever made. It removes all the ego things that get in the way of making decisions on merit.”
May felt the same, though he also saw it as a small act of contrition from him and Mercury to the others. “I think Freddie and I squashed Roger and John in the beginning,” he told me in 1991. “We were the major songwriters, and we didn’t give them enough say. Now it’s totally equal. I wish we’d done it earlier. It does mean a sacrifice, letting your baby go. But you get a better product because your name is on every track so you get more arguments . . . when someone brings in a song it gets torn apart and very critically looked at. It’s survival of the fittest because it needs everyone to do their bit to finish a track, and if you’re a bit iffy you won’t go near it. If a song somehow never gets a guitar part put on, it’s sort of a hint. . . . It also helps when you decide on singles, you’re not partisan anymore; you’re not saying, ‘I want my song to be the single.’”
But still they stopped and started constantly as individual interests intervened. Deacon continued his family-travel therapy whenever he got the chance. Taylor’s The Cross, a band of unknowns (bar Spike Edney on keyboards), toured the U.K. in February and Germany in April, promoting their debut album Shove It, which peaked at No. 58 in the U.K. May threw himself into a plethora of pan-generational studio sessions with artists including Living in a Box, Black Sabbath, Holly Johnson, Fuzzbox, Steve Hackett, and Lonnie Donegan (as well as Anita Dobson, whose album Talking Of Love, released in November, didn’t chart). Mercury grandly concluded his Caballé activities—and his public performance career, it transpired—with an October show in Barcelona attended by King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia to celebrate the passing of the Olympic flame from Seoul. He also sang, without comment, at a gala performance of the musical Time to raise funds for the Terence Higgins Trust HIV/AIDS campaign (Time was co-written by Mercury’s friend Dave Clark, formerly of the famous Five). In January 1989, Mercury released his last solo single, “How Can I Go On?” (“Is anybody there to comfort me?/Lord . . . take care of me”).
Nonetheless, Queen’s The Miracle emerged on May 22, 1989—preceded by the single “I Want It All,” a May-inspired anti-hymn to greed and general voracity—and rose to U.K. No. 1, U.S. No. 24. The album deployed surging Queen harmonies and May guitar swerves with power and discretion, while showing a familiar agility in genre-hopping from party rock to the sweet peace-and-love anthemics of the title track; highlights included the buzzing bass and synthesizer grooves of “The Invisible Man,” the Latin inclinations of “Rain Must Fall” and “My Baby Does Me,” and the chest-beating “Was It All Worth It.” They even let off steam by blasting the tabloids with “Scandal” (“They’re gonna turn our lives into a freak show”).
According to Hutton’s memoir, just as The Miracle hit the shops, Mercury asked the band to start work on another album: “Queen were dazed by Freddie’s eagerness to return to the stresses of the studio. . . . But they all said ‘Yes’ in unison.” (Official website queenonline.com places the transition from The Miracle to Innuendo sessions even earlier, in January 1989—that is, with no interlude at all.)
Then, in Montreux, while they ate dinner at Le Bavaria restaurant, he told them why he didn’t want to stop recording. Of course, they already knew it in their hearts. Hutton wrote, “Someone at the table was suffering from a cold and the conversation got round to the curse of illness. Freddie still looked fairly well, but he rolled up his right trouser leg and raised his leg to the table to let the others see the painful, open wound weeping on the side of the calf. ‘You think you’ve got problems!’ he told them. ‘Well, look what I have to put up with.’ Everyone was very shocked, but also very sympathetic.” (Laura Jackson’s band biography indicates this meeting took place in January 1991, but Hutton was an eyewitness.)
Talking to DJ Kevin Greening for a BBC Radio 1 documentary in 1995, May seemed to refer to the same occasion when he recalled Mercury saying, “You probably realize what my problem is, you know, my illness. Well that’s it, and I don’t want anything to be any different whatsoever. I don’t want it to be known, I don’t want to talk about it, I just want to get on and work until I can’t work any more.” Taylor added it was clear “Freddie felt that was the best way to keep his spirits up and he wanted to leave as much [music] as possible . . . we backed him up right to the hilt. Innuendo was made very much on borrowed time.” In the same program, Mary Austin said that, in Mercury’s last months, making music “fed the light inside. . . . Life wasn’t just taking him to the grave.”
Having been told the truth, the band had to shift from repeating Mercury’s earlier evasions to telling deliberate untruths. “We were lying to everyone, even our own families,” said May to David Thomas of Mojo in 1999. “Freddie used to say, ‘I don’t want people buying our records out of fucking sympathy.’”
Taylor described the process of making Innuendo to Rockline radio listeners in February 1991—without explaining that it was all geared to Mercury’s health: “We’d go into the studio, work for about three weeks, and take two weeks off. [It] was really a happy album to make. . . . It sort of wrote itself. The material has depth and maturity to it.”
Freestone’s memoir confirmed Taylor’s counterintuitive “happy album” comment: “Freddie really loved [it]. . . . Each time he brought a cassette of the day’s work home he was incredibly excited . . . he would wake everyone up and make us listen. He was giving it his all. . . . If we were still worried that all this hard work was shortening his life, he made it very clear that he didn’t care.” (In other respects, though, Mercury took measures to extend his life, such as his sudden decision in October 1989 to end his forty-a-day smoking habit and insist on a smoke-free studio.)
Co-producer Dave Richards described one of the bursts of spontaneity generated by these emotional crosscurrents when, in 1995, he talked about the creation of the title track for a BBC Radio 1 documentary. It began with Mercury sitting beside him in the Montreux control room and the rest of the band playing in the concert hall next door, linked via audio and TV: “It was an improvisation-type song, set up like a live performance, and they got into a nice rhythm and groove, and some chords, and then Freddie said, ‘Oh, I like that,’ and rushed downstairs to the concert hall and started singing along with it. . . . It just happened. It was wonderful.”
Locked into Mercury’s cycle of work, exhaustion, and recovery, for more than a year the band barely looked up, apart from Taylor’s use of Queen downtime to record a second album with The Cross and May’s small-time venture into writing music for fringe theatre company Red & Gold’s production of Macbeth (performed in November 1990). Meanwhile, intermittently back at Garden Lodge, Mercury gradually told a few family members and close friends what ailed him; in 2000, in the first interview his sister Kashmira Cooke and her husband, Roger, had ever given, Roger told the Mail On Sunday that when they visited on August 18, 1990, “Freddie said suddenly, ‘What you have to understand, my dear Kash, is that what I have is terminal. I’m going to die.’ After that, we talked no more about it.”
“12” Version” b/w “Single Version” and “Hijack My Heart,” 1989.
But business had to be taken care of. Long since informed by Mercury that he had AIDS, Beach negotiated Queen’s purchase of their entire back catalog in America from Capitol, who had disappointed the band. He then used that property as a substantial lure for a new U.S. record deal; no matter what the future might hold, a potentially lucrative past could be traded on. Soon he’d secured a deal and, it’s said, a £10 million advance from brand-new Hollywood Records, a Disney subsidiary.
“12” Version” b/w “7” Version” and “My Life Has Been Saved,” 1989.
Promo only, Japan, 1989.
Limited edition hologram pack, b/w “Stone Cold Crazy,” U.K., 1989.
Official fan club publication, Christmas 1989.
When the Brits (the U.K. equivalent of the Grammies) offered Queen an “outstanding contribution” career award in February 1990, they felt they had to acknowledge it graciously by collecting in person. Gamely, Mercury went along, even though he knew his gaunt appearance would attract another flurry of comment and TV exposure.
Taylor released his second album with The Cross, Mad, Bad And Dangerous To Know, on German label Electrola in March. Valiantly, they toured Germany in May. Then he returned to the stop-start progress on Innuendo in London and Montreux, a place whose Swiss order and calm Mercury used to detest but now valued profoundly.
With Taylor hard hit by his father Michael’s death in late July and Deacon quiet as ever, May found himself able to step up to the challenge of keeping Innuendo on track. His relationship with Anita Dobson by then established—though always volatile—he had emerged from depressive near-inertia on The Miracle sessions. “You do get through in the end,” he told me the following year. “I know who I am now. I’m productive again. In fact, the other three have all had a lot of stuff to deal with in the past year, and I was the one saying, ‘OK, I’ll hold the fort while you deal with it.’ It was a big surprise to me that I could do that.”
Not much changed in the studio. Musical intensity overruled any tendency to pussyfoot around Mercury’s illness—just as the singer had wanted. “We had a big fight over ‘Headlong,’” said May, who originated the song. “Fred, in particular, if there’s too much guitar in the mix he gets very impatient. We compromised in the end, but it’s difficult.”
As they finished the album by November 1990, it emerged that white rapper Vanilla Ice had, without permission or payment, based his U.S. and U.K. smash hit “Ice Ice Baby” on samples from Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.” At first May considered the track “crap.” After money had changed hands, he wryly described it as “quite a good bit of work in a way.”
In January 1991, harking back to the boldness of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Queen released the 6:30 multipart, choired-up, guitar-orchestrated, flamenco-interluded extravaganza “Innuendo” in the U.K. It hit No. 1 immediately. In America, Hollywood went with the more orthodox rocker “Headlong,” and nothing happened.
Despite the creeping pace of its creation, Innuendo, out in February, struck no one as a valedictory. Bursting with energy and variety—even in the sleeve illustrations adapted from drawings by nineteenth-century French artist, Grandville, a Taylor discovery—it earned the comparisons with A Night At The Opera, which May and Taylor soon echoed in interviews (alongside necessary musings about whether Mercury might be persuaded to tour again). In particular, Mercury sang magnificently; who else could deliver with equal efficacy suave Noël Coward–ish wit (“I’m Going Slightly Mad”), Bon Scott’s coarse roar (“The Hitman”), and a male Judy Garland’s tightrope-teeter between showbiz melodramatics and real-life emotional depth (“The Show Must Go On”)?
More and more, as his own illness and the AIDS epidemic bore down on him, Mercury’s work and life and impending death became one. During fall 1990, his friend and cook at Garden Lodge, long-ago former lover Joe Fanelli, told Mercury he had AIDS (a few months later, Mercury bought Fanelli a house to offer him a measure of security). After that, Hutton finally took the test and learned he was HIV-positive. He didn’t tell Mercury for another twelve months.
Mercury did what he could. With Innuendo finished, he led the band back to Montreux in January 1991 “to record some B-sides.” He liked some of them so much he said Queen should hold them back “for the next album.” At his side throughout, Peter Freestone later wrote, “Freddie must have realised by now that time was really short. . . . He was going from track to track which was basically what he did until the end of his life. While he had a voice, he would continue recording.”
“Explosive Version” b/w “Under Pressure” and “Bijou,” 1991
The Miracle
by Daniel Nester
THE LPs
ORIGINALLY ENTITLED THE INVISIBLE MEN but changed to The Miracle three weeks before its release in June 1989, Queen’s thirteenth studio album features a first for the band: collective songwriting credit. The band had done it before—“Under Pressure” is credited to “Queen and David Bowie”—but this time it was a “pre-agreed thing” before going into the studio, Roger Taylor explained in a BBC Radio 1 interview shortly before the album’s release.
“It’s a major decision, in fact,” Brian explained. “Doesn’t sound like a big thing, but it makes a big difference in the studio. You have a tendency to get very possessive about your own songs if your name’s in it somehow. We decided to chuck everything into the pool and say everything’s written by Queen.”
The end result largely sounds like an album written by committee, with some notable exceptions. It might be asking too much of any band that has taken a two-year hiatus, during which its members took part in a dizzying array of solo activities, to find any common musical ground—one had recorded an album with opera diva Montserrat Caballé (Freddie); another produced an album by EastEnders star and future second wife Anita Dobson and jammed with Black Sabbath, Bad News, and Def Leppard (Brian); a third started his own rock band called The Cross with himself as lead singer (Roger); and the fourth directed two comedy videos by Morris Minor & the Majors when not off skiing with his family (John). Perhaps the most charitable way to look at The Miracle is that it is indeed miraculous the album was made at all, let alone remains slightly relevant and listenable twenty years later.
With its cheesy electronic drums and a choir of Freddies, “Party” opens the album as if we’ve pressed play on Mr. Bad Guy II—not a good sign. In Queen: Complete Works, Georg Purvis describes “Party” as “perhaps one of the worst tracks ever record by Queen.” This overstates the matter a bit: if hopes weren’t so focused on Queen regaining rock god status, “Party” and the track that abruptly follows it, “Khashoggi’s Ship,” might be viewed as updates of the usual Queen album filler like “Bring Back That Leroy Brown” from Sheer Heart Attack. Both “Party” and “Khashoggi’s Ship” have merit if for nothing else than Brian May’s blazing Red Special work—power chords and trill fills, harmonic effects he’d picked up in the post-Magic tour gap years—which cut through an otherwise Europop production.
