by Mark Blake
In August, Freddie finally confirmed his sister Kashmira’s worst suspicions. “I did suspect he had AIDS,’ she later told the Daily Mirror. ‘But I didn’t want to ask a dying man that question so I waited to see if he wanted to tell me.’ It was when Kashmira glimpsed the wound on her brother’s foot that she realised. ‘He chose that moment to say, “Look, my dear, you must know that I am dying.”’ Just as with his closest friends and his bandmates, Mercury insisted that his sister never mentioned it again. His parents, meanwhile, were never told outright. ‘He used to love and respect us so much that he didn’t want to hurt us,’ explained Jer Bulsara in 2000. ‘We knew all along and we didn’t want to displease him.’
By now, the singer routinely ran a gauntlet of press photographers just to get from Garden Lodge to Metropolis. Living through the celebrity culture of the twenty-first century, it’s easy to forget how unusual it still was then for the press to pursue a pop star to such a degree. Queen’s raised profile after Live Aid and the hysteria and misinformation surrounding AIDS proved to be a dangerous combination. However much Mercury insisted on secrecy, it was now impossible for him to conceal the obvious change in his appearance. When a Sunday Mirror photographer captured him looking frail, Brian May informed the press that ‘Freddie’s OK … He definitely hasn’t got AIDS, but I think his wild rock ’n’ roll lifestyle has caught up with him …’ But May’s statement failed to throw anyone off the scent. Just days later, the News of the World pictured an emaciated Mercury leaving a London restaurant with his GP, Gordon Atkinson. Before long, Paul Prenter, long banished from the Queen camp, was quoted speculating about his former employer’s health in the American press: ‘I am desperately afraid that it might be AIDS.’
One afternoon, engineer John Brough found himself summoned to Garden Lodge. ‘Every year, the band would record a message for the fan club,’ he says. ‘Freddie wanted me to record his message. Peter Freestone asked me to come to the house for noon. When I arrived, he apologised and said that Freddie had a meeting that had over-run.’ It was one-thirty before Mercury finally arrived, and it was obvious that all was not well. ‘He looked very tired and very ill,’ says Brough. ‘But in himself he was just the same, with the same very dry sense of humour. We went to one of the spare bedrooms. He had the stage mic, the wand, and we recorded a vocal. It was a hot day so the window was open, and every time he went to sing workmen outside started drilling. Freddie was like, “Oh fuck!” Very funny. We did this thing with a synth and a vocal, and then he said he had to have a rest and he’d leave me to do the mix. Afterwards, Peter told me to invoice them, and I said, “Look, forget about it.” I was asked to go back a few days later, and when I did, Peter handed me a bag. Inside there was this cardigan from Harrods. It was a thank you from Fred. That was the last time I ever saw him.’
Their singer’s health was still an issue as Queen prepared to promote Innuendo. In January 1991, they released the epic title track as a single. ‘It’s a risk because a lot of people say, “It’s too long, it’s too involved, and we don’t want to play it on the radio,”’ said Brian May. ‘But we had the same feelings about “Bohemian Rhapsody”.’ ‘Innuendo’ was a far cry from pop hits such as ‘A Kind of Magic’. The introduction sounded like a heavy metal funeral march, the flamenco guitar mid-section like something dropped in from another record. It may have been a challenge to radio programmers, but for Queen fans of a vintage stripe, ‘Innuendo’ had gratifying echoes of A Night at the Opera.
Against expectation, ‘Innuendo’ gave Queen their first UK number 1 since ‘Under Pressure’. The accompanying video used animation and old footage and had the group members re-drawn in the style of artists such as Picasso, Da Vinci and Pollock. In a coincidence reminiscent of Tim Staffell being hired to work on the cover of his ex-bandmate Roger Taylor’s first solo album, one of the animators commissioned for ‘Innuendo’ was Jerry Hibbert, a classmate of Staffell’s and Fred Bulsara’s at Ealing art college. When Hibbert asked if the video was being animated because his old mate was too sick to appear, he was informed that Freddie was not ill. Nobody in the Queen camp was budging from the party line.
Innuendo, the album, followed in February. Like the single, the artwork also felt like a throwback to Queen’s past. Roger Taylor had unearthed a book of illustrations by the nineteenth-century artist Jean Grandville, and suggested using one of the pieces. Grandville’s A Juggler of Universes would be hand-coloured by Richard Gray and adapted for the Innuendo sleeve. While the title track mollified Queen’s heavy metal audience, the rest of the album was as diverse as ever. The difference was that Innuendo seemed to hang together better than any Queen album since News of the World. Brian May, in particular, was a dominant force. ‘By Innuendo, the others were having emotional problems, and I was a bit more together,’ he explained. ‘I was able to pitch into the writing a lot more.’ As well as his own ‘Headlong’ and ‘I Can’t Live With You’, May was a notable presence on the feisty heavy metal track ‘The Hitman’, ‘All God’s People’ and ‘Bijou’, a showcase for his guitar and Mercury’s voice inspired by Jeff Beck.
While every song was credited collectively to Queen, it was often easy to spot the original composers. Mercury’s ‘Delilah’ was pure filler, but so too was Taylor’s ‘Ride the Wild Wind’, which sounded like a companion to A Kind of Magic’s ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’. Mercury, meanwhile, was responsible for Innuendo’s best forgotten song, a solemn ballad titled ‘Don’t Try So Hard’. Missing from Innuendo was any of the funk influence that John Deacon had previously bought to Queen. The bassist had recently purchased a holiday apartment in the French ski resort of Biarritz, and the appeal of the slopes outweighed that of Metropolis studio, resulting in Deacon being absent from some sessions.
Innuendo also came with three more obvious singles; songs that would, though no one could have known it at the time, plot the last days of Mercury’s life. ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’ was an offbeat pop song, built around some arch wordplay. ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’ had a wistful lyric from Roger Taylor, which sounded, unavoidably, like Queen reflecting on their time together. Brian May’s ‘The Show Must Go On’ was another melodramatic piece in the style of ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’. ‘I sat down with Freddie and we decided what the theme should be and wrote the first verse,’ May told Guitar World magazine. ‘It’s a long story, that song, but I always felt it would be important because we were dealing with things that were hard to talk about at the time, but in the world of music you could do it.’ Painfully aware that his friend was dying, May wanted to change what he believed would be the song’s working title, but Mercury, business-like as ever, insisted that he didn’t. ‘The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to any kind of weakness or frailty,’ said Taylor. ‘He didn’t want pity.’
In the press, Innuendo drew the same measured praise and criticism as The Miracle. ‘It recognises few frontiers of style, let alone taste,’ wrote The Times, before giving a thumbs-up to ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’, and its ‘shamelessly soppy paean to the passing of youth’. Q magazine flew a cautious flag for Innuendo, while nailing a side of Queen that others often missed: ‘Clearly they take their work seriously, but taking themselves seriously is another matter entirely.’
The album matched the single with another number 1 chart placing in Britain. In the US, though, it stalled at number 30. While American sales had been lagging behind for most of the last ten years, the band’s circumstances had now changed. Jim Beach had spent much of 1990 negotiating Queen out of their US deal with Capitol. In November, the band had signed a new American deal with Hollywood Records, a label affiliated to Walt Disney. Hollywood’s label president Peter Paterno had bought Queen out of their Capitol contract for a rumoured $10 million.
The sweetener for the label was that Queen owned their back catalogue. In 1990, with money to be made from consumers wanting to replace their vinyl records with state-of-the-art CDs, Hollywood planned to digitally remaster a
nd re-release Queen’s previous albums. Still, several music business insiders couldn’t fathom why Hollywood had paid so much for a band that hadn’t had actually had a Top 20 US album since 1982, raising the question of whether Hollywood Records knew something about Queen’s future that others didn’t.
The new label’s launch party for Innuendo took place in February on the Queen Mary cruise ship, at California’s Long Beach. Guests were plied with free drink and treated to an extravagant firework display, but only two of the band bothered to attend. Even Queen’s old friends were confused. ‘Mack and I were invited to the party on the Queen Mary,’ remembers Fred Mandel. ‘We went down there and only Roger and Brian showed up. We thought that was strange as the band usually came together. Mack and I had started to speculate. Freddie looked thinner in the videos and things weren’t adding up. I tried to call Freddie, heard nothing, and so I called John but he was close-lipped about it.’
Deacon and Mercury’s absences were excused with vague talk of ‘family commitments’. Once again, it had fallen to the original Smile/Queen duo to press the media flesh and bullshit their way out of trouble. Billboard magazine’s Dave DiMartino was among those who interviewed May and Taylor during their Los Angeles trip. ‘They were dutifully undertaking that most undignified of tasks,’ said DiMartino, ‘talking about commerce rather than art.’ Throughout the trip, the pair praised their new label (‘Hollywood has everything to prove,’ said Taylor, ‘and that’s what we felt we needed’), and the new album (Taylor: ‘In some ways it does remind me of A Night at the Opera’) and addressed the controversy sparked by rapper Vanilla Ice’s recent hit, ‘Ice Ice Baby’, which had sampled the bassline from ‘Under Pressure’ (May: ‘He should have asked for permission but he didn’t’).
Asked about why Queen hadn’t played live for five years, they were forced to trot out the usual excuses. ‘Freddie finds it hard physically and mentally to be on tour,’ volunteered May. ‘He hates the idea of being an older rocker onstage,’ added the drummer. In an interview for Canadian TV, May looked positively rueful when asked whether Queen would ever play live again. ‘It would be my fondest dream to go out on tour,’ he sighed, looking like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
In March, Queen released ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’ as a single in the UK. For the video, a fancy-dressed Queen shared the set with an extra in a gorilla suit and a waddle of penguins. In his shaggy wig, white gloves and deliberately ill-fitting suit, Mercury resembled a Chaplin-esque silent movie star, but also, sadly, a consumptive nineteenth-century poet. The layers of white panstick on his face only accentuated how gaunt he now was; beneath his costume he wore an extra layer of clothing to pad out his skeletal fame. ‘He looked pretty ill at that point,’ conceded Taylor.
Queen’s press office fed the tabloids a quirky news story about one of the penguins urinating on the video set’s sofa while Freddie was sitting on it. ‘A little bit of Queen madness is wanted right now,’ claimed an upbeat Mercury. ‘So don’t bother to question our sanity.’ But regrettably, the singer’s appearance became a greater talking point than the song, which stayed outside the Top 20.
Just as he’d done after The Miracle, Mercury had followed Innuendo with an instruction to his bandmates that he wanted to keep working. Montreux was a private jet ride away and offered an escape from the constant press intrusion in London. At Mountain Studios, he worked as and when he felt physically able. ‘Freddie just said, “I want to go on working, business as usual, until I fucking drop,”’ recalled Brian May. ‘“That’s what I want. And I’d like you to support me, and I don’t want any discussion about this.”’ The initial plan was to record some B-sides. Before long, though, the band realised there was enough material for another studio album. Business-like as ever, Mercury was determined that Queen should get as much music out of him while they still could.
Working two or three days a week, the band recorded a batch of new tracks, including ‘You Don’t Fool Me’, ‘A Winter’s Tale’ (the last song Mercury ever wrote) and ‘Mother Love’. The 22 May recording session for ‘Mother Love’ is widely believed to be Freddie’s last recorded vocal. In the studio, he pushed himself harder to sing the song’s difficult middle-eight, insisting that it demanded a higher vocal. ‘Freddie got to some point, and said, “No, no, no … this isn’t good enough! I have to go higher here. I have to get more power in,”’ recalled May. After downing a couple of vodkas, said May, ‘he stands up and goes for it.’ Mercury achieved the performance he wanted. ‘Even when he couldn’t even stand without propping himself up, he was just giving us his all.’
‘He wanted to make music till the last second,’ said David Richards. “It was a difficult situation for all of us, but especially for Freddie, but he really wanted this project to be finished, even though he knew that the album would be released after his death.’
A fortnight before, Queen had released the blustery ‘Headlong’ as their new single. It made it to number 14 in the UK charts. But the whole band, even the puckish Taylor, looked noticably older in the song’s video. Mercury was wasting away beneath his baggy sweatshirt, but threw his usual shapes, grinning toothily into the camera, as if trying to convince the world that it was still business as usual.
On 31 May, just over a week after the last Mountain session, Mercury made what would turn out to be his final appearance in front of the camera. Hollywood Records had earmarked ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’ for a US single release. With Brian May in Los Angeles still promoting Innuendo, Taylor, Deacon and Mercury repaired to London’s Limehouse Studios to make a video for the song (May would be edited in later). The unhealed lesion on the ball of Mercury’s foot now made walking so painful for him that he was forced to remain static for the majority of the shoot. Though shot in black and white, it was all but impossible to mask Freddie’s physical decline. In the video’s final frame, he whispered the song’s melodramatic line ‘I still love you’ into the camera, like one of his favourite showboating Hollywood heroines. Few that saw the video could be in any doubt that they were watching a very sick man.
In August, Paul Prenter died of an AIDS-related illness. His demise was a bleak reminder of how little time Freddie now had left. Jim Hutton took a second HIV test, but the results were the same. This time, he chose to tell Mercury. The singer marked his forty-fifth birthday with a quiet dinner party at Garden Lodge. His social circle had grown smaller, as the singer closed ranks. Old party companions Barbara Valentin and Peter Straker had been excluded, as if they were too much of a reminder of the lifestyle he could no longer enjoy. Others, too, would find their requests to visit turned down (‘I’m not looking too good today, dear’). Instead, Mercury relied on a handful of trusted friends and employees: the clique at Garden Lodge, Mike Moran, Dave Clark, his chauffeur Terry Giddings and the ever-present Mary Austin. Shortly after his birthday, he drew up a will, appointing Queen’s business manager, Jim Beach, as one of his executors.
In October, EMI swung into action, releasing Queen’s Greatest Hits II, and two video compilations, Greatest Flix II and Box of Flix. In the light of such a rigorous release campaign, there was something apt about the title of Queen’s new single, ‘The Show Must Go On’. Mercury was too ill to make a video, forcing the band to rely on a montage of older clips. But the song’s sentiment spoke volumes in the light of their current situation. It was typical Freddie Mercury: the most melodramatic of swansongs.
In early November, the singer took the most important decision of his life, and announced that he no longer wished to take his AIDS medication. He had effectively chosen to die. Interviewed in 2000, Mary Austin believed that ‘he’d given himself a limit. I think, personally, that when he couldn’t record any more or have the energy to do so, it would be the end.’ The press were now keeping a permanent vigil outside the house. As Peter Freestone complained, ‘Freddie became a prisoner within the walls of Garden Lodge.’ When Montserrat Caballé asked to visit, Mercury refused, claiming he
didn’t want her to be harassed.
His parents, his sister and her family, and most of his bandmates visited Mercury during what would turn out to be the last week of his life. According to Jim Hutton, Taylor and May both made separate calls to the house. Pulling up outside the house, on one occasion, the Queen drummer was blinded by the photographers’ flashguns and crashed into the back of a stationary police car. For the ever-anxious May, there was another issue on his mind. The guitarist had finally finished his solo album, and was planning to release a single from it in a week’s time. Knowing that Freddie could die at any moment, May was worried that the release would look as if it was cashing in. May asked Jim Beach to broach the subject. The singer’s reply proved that his gallows humour was as sharp as ever: ‘Freddie said: “If I pop off while it’s happening, it’ll give you an extra bit of publicity.”’
On Thursday, 21 November, Mercury asked Peter Freestone to call Jim Beach. The following morning, Beach arrived at Garden Lodge for a meeting with Freddie that lasted over five hours. According to Freestone, ‘Freddie and he [Beach] had decided that it was time to release a statement with regards to Freddie’s AIDS status.’ The news came as a shock to those at Garden Lodge as they had, at Mercury’s behest, consistently lied to their friends and families about Freddie’s health. Writing in his own memoir, Jim Hutton suggested that Mercury had been pushed into making the statement, but agreed to it when he realised that it would scupper any planned newspaper scoop after his death. ‘He didn’t want to be usurped, having not announced it,’ explained Roger Taylor. ‘It was absolutely right to do it at the time that it was done.’