by Mark Blake
According to ‘Crystal’ Taylor, it was the band’s crew that first suggested ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ as a single, after hearing it at Musicland: ‘But the band just glared at us and told us to mix some more cocktails.’ Roger Taylor remembers it differently. After one of Queen’s four shows at the LA Forum in July, the band’s backstage visitors included Michael Jackson. ‘I remember Michael and some of his brothers in the dressing room going on and on about “Another One Bites the Dust”,’ Taylor insisted. ‘They kept saying we must release it as a single.’
Not for the first time, the record company bowed to outside pressure. A performance video for the song was shot during the soundcheck in Dallas. A week later, the single was released in the US. Eight weeks on, Queen had their second US number 1 hit. In the UK, ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ made it to number 7, losing out to The Police, Madness and Elvis Presley. But it would make the top spot elsewhere in Argentina, Spain, Mexico and Canada. As Brian May admitted, ‘Roger and I would probably never have gone in that musical direction had we not been coerced by John and Freddie.’ ‘I never thought it would be a hit,’ admitted Taylor. ‘How wrong was I?’
‘Another One Bites the Dust’ would achieve multi-platinum status, while giving Elektra its first three-million-selling single. But Chic’s Bernard Edwards had mixed feelings about the song. As John Deacon freely admitted, ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ had borrowed its bassline from Chic’s ‘Good Times’. ‘That’s OK,’ Edwards told NME. ‘What isn’t OK is that the press started saying that we had ripped them off. “Good Times” came out more than a year before, but it was inconceivable to these people that black musicians could possibly be innovative like that. It was just these dumb disco guys ripping off this rock ’n’ roll song.’
As well as his new son, Taylor had another welcome distraction outside of the band. During a three-week break from the tour, he flew to Mountain Studios to work on a solo album, later released as Fun in Space. Taylor had been piecing together ideas since the first sessions for The Game in 1979. Throughout the rest of the year, he would return to Mountain during downtime from Queen, and would put together ten tracks on which he sang and played all the instruments, with engineer David Richards adding additional synthesiser. The instrument that Queen had avoided for so long would take centre-stage on Fun in Space and on Queen’s next studio outing.
The US tour reconvened in Milwaukee in early September, with Queen basking in the glory of a number 1 hit. Mercury, usually bare-chested or in a figure-hugging vest and PVC trousers, continued to goad the audience about his moustache before introducing ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’: ‘I hate skinny chicks … the bigger the tits the better!’
Offstage, of course, the Spartacus Guide, a worldwide directory of gay-friendly bars and clubs, would dictate his nightlife in each city. During a stop-over in New York, Mercury had a fling with a male nurse named Thor Arnold. The ‘good time, good time’ he had sung about in ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ continued at a pace. ‘We all knew what was going on and with whom,’ chuckled Roger Taylor. ‘We were all in each other’s lives.’ On 28 September, Taylor would realise his dream of Queen matching Yes’s record at Madison Square Garden. Queen filled the Garden for three consecutive nights, with Mercury spraying the front row of the audience with champagne and cheerfully calling them all ‘cunts’. The final night’s aftershow party saw male guests served by topless waitresses in black stockings and high heels, while female guests were tended to by male waiters clad only in gym shorts. As one eyewitness remarked: ‘Queen didn’t want to be accused of sexism.’
Implausibly, after coming straight off the back of a 46-date American tour, Queen would spend most of October and November in a recording studio. The year before, film director Mike Hodges had approached the band about composing a soundtrack for his forthcoming science-fiction movie, Flash Gordon. The band agreed, and Hodges pitched Queen to the film’s Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis. No great fan of rock music, the producer’s immediate response was, ‘But who are the queens?’
Flash Gordon was a comic-strip superhero created in 1934. Taylor and May were both fans of science fiction and comic books, with Taylor especially gung-ho about breaking Queen into a new medium. ‘We wanted to write the first rock ’n’ roll musical soundtrack,’ he said. ‘No one had ever used rock music in a film unless it was something like The Girl Can’t Help It, where it was a movie about music. Nowadays it’s the norm, but we thought we were breaking a bit of ground.’
Queen were shown twenty minutes worth of film footage. They demoed some initial ideas in Munich while working on The Game. ‘Then Dino De Laurentiis heard the demo tracks and was like, “No, this is not my film!”’ recalled Brian May. ‘But Mike Hodges stuck with it and convinced him it would be great.’ De Laurentiis’ doubts stemmed from his desire to make a heavyweight sci-fi epic and Hodges’ intention to create something more kitsch. Queen’s demos were tailored with Mike Hodges’ vision in mind.
The soundtrack was patched together at various London studios in two months with Brian May and Mack producing. ‘It was very seat-of-the-pants,’ admitted May. Not least for composer Howard Blake, who was brought in to write a last-minute orchestral score, after Bowie’s string arranger Paul Buckmaster quit, in the belief that it would be used alongside Queen’s contributions. With the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra already booked into a studio, Blake was presented with a crippling deadline. He produced a ninety-minute score in 10 days, staying awake for the last four days straight. ‘I remember Freddie Mercury singing the idea of “Ride to Arboria” in his high falsetto,’ said Blake. ‘And I showed him how I could expand it into the orchestral section now on the film.’ After three days conducting the orchestra in the studio, Blake collapsed with chronic bronchitis brought on by exhaustion and stress.
In the end, Taylor’s enthusiasm for the polyphonic synth used on The Game would dictate many of the sounds on the album. When Howard Blake recovered, he discovered that much of his score had been replaced by Queen’s synthesised music. ‘A disappointment,’ he understated. But it would be May that would see the project to completion: ‘Everyone else got drawn into other things, and as I also had the longest attention span it was to left to me to hold the baby.’ ‘It was a technical nightmare,’ adds Mack. ‘There was just me and Brian and so many tape recorders and tapes and cassettes with bits and pieces of dialogue …’
‘We wanted the soundtrack album to make you feel like you’d watched the film,’ said May. ‘So we shipped in all the dialogue and effects and wove it into a tapestry.’ In 1994, the soundtrack to Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction would make spectacular use of the film’s dialogue, but Queen’s soundtrack to Flash Gordon premiered the same trick fifteen years earlier. When they finally synced the music with the finished rushes, De Laurentiis was convinced. Mike Hodges had succeeded in bringing the camp comic strip to life. There were over-the-top sets and dialogue; there was Shakespearean actor Brian Blessed hamming it up in gold hot pants; there was Ingmar Bergman protégé Max von Sydow playing Emperor Ming, and there was the beautiful Ornella Muti as Princess Aura getting strapped to a table and whipped. With its tongue-in-cheek humour and frisson of S&M, Flash Gordon was made for Queen, and vice versa.
‘Flash’s Theme’ was a Top 10 hit in November. The chorus was nursery-rhyme simple, the prodding rhythm had just the right air of cinematic menace, putting some in mind of the approaching shark in Jaws five years earlier, and there was plenty of loud guitar. Meanwhile, dialogue whizzed in and out of the mix with Brian Blessed’s Prince Vultan delivering the immortal line, ‘Gordon’s Alive!’ ‘It was a very camp film,’ admitted Taylor. ‘But I thought our music suited the film in all its camp awfulness.’
When Queen flew to Zurich to begin rehearsals for the European tour, they brought with them their new toy: a synthesiser. It would fall to Brian May to play the synth on ‘The Hero’, ‘Flash’s Theme’ and ‘Battle Theme’, the three Flash Gordon tracks that had been worked into the setlist. The
ir opening act for the tour would be Straight Eight, a West London pub-rock band who’d been signed to Pete Townshend’s Eel Pie Records. The label had stumped up an eye-watering £30,000 to buy Straight Eight on to the tour. Not that anyone in Queen took much notice.
‘Brian was charming and friendly and offered us compliments and advice,’ recalls Straight Eight guitarist Rick Cassman now. ‘John Deacon was almost invisible, and I don’t think Freddie said a word to me or any of the band for the entire tour. Right from day one I noticed that Freddie was rather aloof. He always arrived by separate limousine with his own group of hangers-on. But every performance he gave was faultless. Roger Taylor was a little like Freddie in that he seemed to move in his own circles and arrived at gigs with his own entourage. I detected massive egos with both him and Freddie.’
The tour included six dates in Germany, one at Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle, the 9,000-seater arena built for the 1936 Olympics. ‘It was where they used to hold Nazi rallies,’ recalls Cassman. ‘That was surreal. Ahead of me I could see nothing but darkness until the entire audience raised their lighters and became a giant illuminated mass. Wonderful!’ Freddie’s party-piece for the encore of ‘We Will Rock You’ now involved arriving onstage on the shoulders of a roadie dressed as Star Wars villain Darth Vader. Star Wars creator George Lucas caught wind of the stunt, and threatened to sue, forcing Queen to scrap the act.
In December, The Game tour reached England. The Birmingham NEC was a newly opened 1,300-seat venue, making Straight Eight the first band ever to play there. But the support band were always going to be overwhelmed by the headliners. ‘Queen used that old trick of turning the PA volume up to double what it was when we performed,’ says Cassman. ‘So that immediately made them appear bigger and brasher than us. They were 100 per cent professional, and the main thing we learned from them was to use the whole stage and try to make ourselves appear bigger than we actually were.’
At Birmingham, Mercury took such brashness to new heights by re-appearing for the encore wearing the tiniest leather shorts he could fit himself into. Backstage, crew members took bets on whether or not he’d split them. ‘Onstage, Freddie was 100 per cent energy and charisma,’ says Cassman. But he couldn’t help but notice how different he was offstage. ‘He seemed distant, even to the other band members. I never remember Queen laughing or joking about during soundchecks.’
On the night of 8 December, John Lennon was shot dead outside his apartment building in New York. The day after Queen played Wembley Arena and performed a quickly rehearsed version of Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. Mercury fluffed the lyrics and May forgot some of the chords. Away from the braggadocio of his live performance, Mercury was still playing down the importance of his songwriting in any interview, and Lennon, more often or not, was his yardstick. ‘I don’t believe that I have a talent to write deep messages,’ he said. ‘John Lennon can do that but I can’t.’
Queen’s Flash Gordon soundtrack was released on 8 December. In the UK, it would match the single’s Top 10 placing but stopped shy of the Top 20 in America. It had Queen’s name on its cover, but it wasn’t a Queen album in the conventional sense. Though, oddly, it attracted some of their best press yet (‘Wham! Zam! Thok! An album of truly epic proportions!’ raved Record Mirror). Flash Gordon only contained two full-length songs, ‘Flash’s Theme’ and ‘The Hero’, with the rest given over to short, incidental pieces; ideal for the film, but unlikely to hold the attention without the visual spectacle. Also, not everyone in the band seemed to share May and Taylor’s passion for Flash Gordon. When one of Queen’s crew stuck the album on during a late-night drinking session, a refreshed John Deacon slurred, ‘Who is this?’
Back in Germany for the tour’s final dates, Straight Eight were invited to Queen’s after-hours party at Berlin’s Black Cat club. For a pub-rock band from Shepherd’s Bush, it was something of an experience. ‘It was a strip club and very hardcore,’ recalls Rick Cassman. ‘The atmosphere was one of high decadence, with drink and drugs flowing.’ A Playboy centrefold model invited to the party proved a charming distraction. ‘I couldn’t resist asking her for a dance,’ admits Cassman. ‘Imagine the girl in the cartoon of Roger Rabbit dancing with a stick-thin, wasted punk rocker. After about three minutes, Roger Taylor came up and whisked her away.’ Up onstage, male and female strippers had sex, while down on the dancefloor, Straight Eight’s roadie (‘a big lad from Birmingham’) passed out after too much over-indulgence and had to be carried out of the venue.
Like jaded Roman emperors, Queen viewed it all with the dispassionate air that came from years of witnessing such excess. That night, while most of the band basked in the seedy delights of the Black Cat, Mercury was off elsewhere enjoying his own misadventures. They all had plenty to celebrate. By the end of 1980, Queen had sold in the region of 25 million singles and 45 million albums internationally. They had also been accorded an entry in The Guinness Book of Records as Britain’s highest-paid directors of a company (reported annual salary: £700,000 each). With The Game now five times platinum, Queen owned the world. But as Brian May wearily admitted: ‘The excess was starting to leak into the music.’
Queen’s 1981 began with the Japanese premiere of Flash Gordon and five nights at the Budokan in Tokyo, picking up a waif-and-stray English pop star along the way. Gary Numan had scored a run of hits since 1979 with his Bowie-influenced synthesised pop. Numan had flown to Tokyo on an invite from the rock band Japan. ‘I was supposed to be guesting onstage with them,’ he says. ‘But when I got there it was all a misunderstanding, and they didn’t want me with them at all.’ On a whim, Numan managed to get a ticket for Queen’s first show at Budokan. ‘Someone must have spotted me, because Queen’s security guy came over and invited me backstage.’
Queen asked Numan to join them for dinner at one of Tokyo’s swankiest restaurants. ‘But I was incredibly shy and a plain eater,’ he admits. Daunted by the Japanese food and having to use chopsticks instead of cutlery, he chose to go without. ‘So Freddie noticed and asked what I wanted to eat. I had to tell him: McDonald’s.’ Mercury called over his chauffeur, checked with the restaurant manager, and fifteen minutes later Numan was tucking into a cheeseburger and French fries, while Queen savoured the sushi and Mercury entertained the whole table with racy anecdotes. After hours, Freddie gave his credit card a workout at Tokyo’s prestigious Shibuya Seibu department store, which had been closed to the public to allow him to shop in peace. Before long, though, Queen would be spending an even larger amount of money to buy their way out of trouble.
In Werner Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, the lead character, a rubber baron and opera fanatic, journeys into the heart of the Peruvian jungle to find a remote crop of rubber plants from which he hopes to make his fortune and build his own opera house. Having travelled as far as he can by river, Fitzcarraldo enlists the natives to help him drag his ship through the jungle and across the Peruvian mountains. It is a punishingly slow, arduous and yet strangely compelling task. In 1981, Queen’s road crew would experience their own Fitzcarraldo moment, attempting to move over 100 tons of their paymasters’ equipment by air, sea and road, and even through the jungles of South America. Just months later, they would go back to the continent for a second run. This time they would be lucky to get back alive.
Queen’s first trip to South America in February 1981 finally came together after nine months of meticulous planning. ‘South America had been mooted a few times,’ recalls Peter Hince. ‘But there were always offers coming into the Queen office to play unusual places; Moscow was another one. The band were always keen, but this time they were up for it because they were so buoyed by the success of The Game. At that point Queen really were the biggest band in the world.’
By 1981, many of the bands that had inspired Queen had either split or were in the process of falling apart. With the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980, Led Zeppelin had closed down; The Who were limping on without Keith Moon, but would only last to make one more album before th
rowing in the towel (albeit temporarily), while Pink Floyd’s The Wall tour would be their last live shows for six years. The arrival of punk and new wave had led to huge critical opprobrium, but Queen had survived.
In 1980, guitarist Peter Frampton and the funk band Earth, Wind & Fire had played shows in Brazil and Argentina. However, both had performed on a small scale and at indoor venues. ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ had been an unexpected number 1 hit for Queen in Argentina and Guatemala, and they were now officially the biggest-selling band in South America. Queen’s plan was to transport their full show and perform at the nation’s outdoor sports stadiums. Road manager Gerry Stickells and Queen’s business manager Jim Beach made several exploratory trips to the continent, and a temporary production office was established in Rio de Janeiro.
It was unknown territory in more ways than one. As Hince recalls, ‘There were so many people involved, you didn’t really know who was in charge or what was happening.’ Jose Rota, based in Buenos Aries, was appointed as the tour’s main promoter, and given the task of liaising between the Queen office and local promoters elsewhere on the continent; a process fraught with difficulty, when it was quickly discovered that one promoter was unable to pay the band their guaranteed fee. Dates were scheduled, re-scheduled and cancelled.
Queen’s production manager, Chris Lamb, had flown ahead to Argentina, but ran into trouble at Customs. Lamb aroused suspicion by having a canister of flash powder; an essential pyrotechnic for the show. He was also carrying the crew and backstage passes, which featured a picture of two topless women and a banana. One story claims that Lamb was forced to doctor the offending passes with a marker pen before being allowed into the country. ‘I think it was the usual thing,’ offers Hince. ‘You paid someone and they let you in. Everything was done in US dollars, and the Queen office made sure there was plenty to go around.’