by Mark Blake
Mercury’s early vocal heroes and rivals would also be joined by younger musicians that had grown up on his music, including the hard rock bands Def Leppard, Metallica, Extreme and Guns N’ Roses. As the weeks passed, the line-up would grow to include George Michael, Seal, Lisa Stansfield, Annie Lennox, Liza Minnelli … The artistes were free to choose their own Queen songs, but as Taylor pointed out, ‘We thought it appropriate that nobody should do “Another One Bites the Dust” because … that was rather unfortunate phrasing there.’ In another parallel with Live Aid, the concert would be televised live around the world to seventy-six countries. With the remainder of Queen still grieving their loss, the gig offered something else: a distraction. ‘I threw all my energy and all my persuasive, telephonic powers into helping to organise the show,’ admitted May. ‘So that was good for about three months and it kept my mind off what on earth I was going to do.’
‘Freddie would have said, “Darling, Wembley Stadium? Are you sure it’s big enough?”’ joked Roger Taylor. On the day, the stadium was filled to its furthest tier with the old, the young, the Queen faithful, the curious observer, and those who, in the years since Live Aid, had flocked to the stadium for every major music act from Madonna to Queen to Springsteen.
Queen’s survivors strode out on stage to rapturous applause. ‘We are here today to celebrate the life and work and dreams of one Freddie Mercury,’ announced Brian May. With the hair, the sunglasses and the drummer’s dandyish frock coat, the old Smile duo looked every inch the rock stars-about-town. In contrast, John Deacon resembled a former rock star already embracing his retirement – his hair cut short, his clothes unassuming, his voice, when he finally spoke, quiet and understated.
The show’s opening act was Metallica, rattling through three hits from their recent Black Album. A number 1 seller on both sides of the Atlantic, it was a heavy metal record that had sold to those outside the core constituency. Metallica were an Anglophile rock band who knew their way around Queen albums such as Sheer Heart Attack. But they were also on their way to become one of the biggest rock bands in the world. It’s doubtful whether Mercury was ever a fan, but Metallica were a huge draw for TV.
The first Queen song of the day came from the second band on the bill, Extreme. Like Metallica, the Boston group had also crossed over to a pop audience. Their music owed a giant debt to Queen’s, reflected in a medley that included ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ and ‘Bicycle Race’. Lead singer Gary Charone bravely began the performance with a snippet from ‘Mustapha’, Mercury’s half-Arabic vocal extravaganza from the Jazz album.
Brian May would be the first of Queen to break cover, dashing onstage to join Def Leppard for a faithful version of ‘Now I’m Here’. Later, blurring the lines between parody and what U2’s Bono once called ‘the brainless swamp of big-label rock music’, spoof band Spinal Tap’s arrival brought some welcome humour to proceedings. The band said they had been asked to ‘cut their set short by twenty-five songs to one …’ Their quip that ‘Freddie would have wanted it this way’ was an uncomfortable reminder of some of the well-meant, if glib platitudes heard since the singer’s death.
During the interval, video footage of Mercury in action was screened on either side of the stage, prompting hysterical applause. But it was the show’s second half that contained its most memorable moments, as guest vocalists stepped up to join Queen. It was curious to see Robert Plant trying, and failing, to master ‘Innuendo’. The Led Zeppelin singer was gracious in defeat. ‘I went to Morocco one Easter and I had the lyrics taped to the dashboard of my car trying to memorise them,’ he said later. ‘Freddie had said they’d written it as a tribute to Zeppelin, but I couldn’t get my head around the words. I ended up with a huge lyric sheet taped to the stage … I think they cut my performance out of the video.’ They did. Then again, as Plant declared earlier, ‘Freddie sang all of these songs better than we’re going to sing them.’
Plant wasn’t alone. There was enough goodwill from an audience caught up in the excitement of the day to carry even the shakier performers through. But it was a sign of how idiosyncratic Mercury’s music was that several oldtimers came unstuck. Peter Hince had returned to the Queen camp to work at the tribute concert. ‘It emphasised how great Freddie was as a singer,’ he says now. ‘Roger Daltrey and Lisa Stansfield did a good job.’ Stansfield would memorably appear onstage in hair curlers, pushing a vacuum cleaner for ‘I Want to Break Free’. ‘But so many people were not worthy … Paul Young was appalling.’ Young at least had the chance to witness, first hand, thousands of pairs of hands clapping in unison to ‘Radio Ga Ga’. ‘Freddie was so demanding of himself,’ adds John Brough. ‘He’d come in sing and do backing vocals, and it could take three hours, but that was the norm. It was only when other people were doing the tribute concert that I saw how difficult it really was.’
With emotions running high, it was inevitable that someone would take everything, including themselves, too seriously. David Bowie did not disappoint. Bowie was joined by Annie Lennox for ‘Under Pressure’, and Mott The Hoople’s Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson for ‘All the Young Dudes’, before finishing with his own hit, ‘Heroes?’ It was a sterling performance. Before leaving the stage, the singer began a rambling soliloquy about ‘our great friend Freddie Mercury … and your friends, our friends … members of your families … that have been toppled by this relentless disease.’
Amid all the musical hubris, it was a reminder of the life-and-death issue that had prompted the concert. But then, as Bowie later explained, ‘I felt as if I was being transported by the situation.’ After his speech, he dropped to one knee and begun reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Bowie later proudly claimed that members of Spinal Tap watching had been rendered ‘speechless with disbelief’. The subsequent footage certainly captured the look of disbelief on Roger Taylor’s face. Gracious as ever, Brian May would only comment: ‘I remember thinking it would have been nice if he’d warned me about that.’
Just as Queen had stolen Live Aid, the tribute show would have its own outright winner. Mercury had taken time to praise George Michael during his last ever radio interview. Since the end of his pop duo Wham!, Michael had carved out a reputation as a serious songwriter and solo performer. On the night, his performance of ‘Somebody to Love’, aided in no small part by the London Community Gospel Choir, came close to matching Mercury’s for verve, energy and pure showmanship. ‘George Michael was the best,’ agreed May. ‘There’s a certain note in his voice when he did “Somebody to Love” that was pure Freddie.’
‘Freddie loved the George Michael track “Faith”,’ recalls John Brough. ‘I remember talking to George about that after the tribute concert, and he said that “Somebody to Love” was the most difficult song he had ever sung in his life. He said, “It’s ridiculous. One minute it’s up here, one minute it’s down there …”’ ‘I was living out a childhood fantasy,’ said Michael later. ‘It was the proudest moment of my career, but mixed with real sadness.’ At that time, George had still not discussed his homosexuality in public. A year after the tribute concert, his then-secret boyfriend would die of an AIDS-related illness.
Elizabeth Taylor had, supposedly, been among those rattling their jewellery in the VIP seats at Queen’s last show in Los Angeles. The Hollywood legend, now sixty years old, ramped up the celebrity count no end when she arrived onstage at Wembley, ‘not to sing’ as she assured the crowd, but to offer advice. ‘Use a condom!’ she implored them. ‘The world needs you to live.’ It was a heartfelt sentiment, but even to an audience in which many, no doubt staunchly heterosexual males had been moved to tears by Freddie Mercury’s memory, Taylor’s speech was a step too far. Traditional British cynicism, buoyed perhaps by the thousands of pints of lager sold during the day, took over, and the audience’s catcalls and laughter were clearly audible amid the applause.
For some in the Freddie Mercury camp, Guns N’ Roses’ lead singer Axl Rose was the concert’s unwanted guest. Guns N’ Roses thrived on the
ir reputation as latter-day hellraisers in the Stones/Led Zeppelin tradition. But their singer had been accused of racism and homophobia after their song ‘One in a Million’ mentioned ‘immigrants’ and ‘faggots’. Axl Rose’s presence on the bill was deemed controversial. It was a shock, then, to see him walk out onstage alongside Elton John to perform ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.
‘I’m a big fan of Axl,’ insisted Brian May. ‘He’s a mouthpiece for honest feelings which he shares with all sorts of other people. The fact that he speaks honestly about being scared of gays is actually very valuable, and the fact that he came out when he did our concert and said, “I’m doing this because I feel for Freddie and because I feel that this issue involves everybody.”’
In Axl Rose, Elton had also achieved the seemingly impossible and found a rock star with a temperament to match his own. Earlier in the day, he had been unceremoniously turned away from Rose’s dressing room, while complaining loudly ‘But I’ve got to do a duet with him in two hours!’ On the night, the pair acquitted themselves well; Rose’s midriff-revealing T-shirt and leather skirt suggesting he was perhaps more in touch with his feminine side than some might have thought. While Rose scampered across the stage like an over-enthusiastic puppy, Elton played the role of the elder statesman, even putting an arm around him during the song’s closing verse.
Yet even Rose’s leather skirt couldn’t match the grand finale for high camp. That prize fell to the concert’s final act Liza Minnelli, coincidentally now signed to Hollywood Records, who turned ‘We Are the Champions’ into a showstopping Broadway show tune, now featuring a ramshackle choir of hirsute rockers, both young and old. While Minnelli emoted outfront, Roger Daltrey, Axl Rose, various members of Extreme, Metallica and the German heavy metal band Scorpions (who hadn’t played but showed up anyway) appeared behind her, arms around each other’s shoulders: a giant, swaying backdrop of fringed leather, polka-dot shirt-tails and split ends. It was an image that captured the very essence of Freddie Mercury and Queen: that strange place where spit-and-sawdust heavy rock met musical theatre. As The Times’ critic later wrote: ‘Liza Minnelli proved in her brilliant finale rendition that Freddie was a cabaret diva in trousers.’
Yet The Times also posed the question: ‘What would the man himself have made of it?’ There was no sign of Mercury’s beloved Aretha Franklin, but then she’d also turned down a request to play Live Aid, as had Michael Jackson. Montserrat Caballé, the opera singer who had made such a musical impact on Mercury’s final days, had also been unable to attend. Peter Hince maintains that some of those present instead were there for their own aims. ‘I’m sure some of them were thinking, “I can get my career back on course,”’ he sighs. ‘It was almost like Celebrity Big Brother.’
Yet, as Roger Taylor explained, the show had been meant as a ‘dual-purpose event’. It had achieved its aims: celebrating Mercury’s life and music, and raising awareness of the disease that had killed him. Profits from the Wembley concert and its later video release would be donated to the Mercury Phoenix Trust, the AIDS charity established the year before, which listed May, Taylor, Jim Beach and Mary Austin as its trustees.
Staging the Wembley concert had preoccupied Queen’s remaining members for months. The question they faced now was: what next? John Deacon dropped out of view and returned to family life; his wife Veronica was now pregnant with the couple’s fifth child. (A son, Luke, was born in December that year.) For May and Taylor, giving up would not be so easy.
In April, Queen had bagged an Ivor Novello award for ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’, but May had also been awarded his own Novello for ‘Driven By You’. Back to the Light, his first solo album since 1983, was now close to completion. In the meantime, Taylor had finally called time on The Cross. Their final album, 1991’s Blue Rock, had been pieced together while the drummer was working on Queen’s final sessions, and he had taken a back seat, even allowing his bandmates to take many of the lead vocals. But Blue Rock had only been released in Europe, not in the UK. Taylor had also started a family with Debbie Leng, who had given birth to their son, Rufus Tiger, in March 1991. May summed up their shared situation: ‘Apart from the grief of losing someone so close, suddenly your whole way of life is destroyed. All that you have tried to build up for the last twenty years is gone.’ Elton John went one better: ‘For May, Deacon and Taylor, it must be like keeping a fabulous Ferrari in the garage and not being able to drive.’
Meanwhile, there were reminders everywhere. In May that year, the US teen-comedy film Wayne’s World gave Queen’s profile its biggest boost yet in the US. The movie, a spin-off from a regular sketch on NBC’s comedy show Saturday Night Live, charted the misadventures of a pair of suburban teenage rock fans, Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar. In one momentous scene, the duo and two of their friends drove through their neighbourhood with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ playing on the car’s cassette deck. The foursome’s karaoke vocals and headbanging routine became a huge hit.
Wayne Campbell had been played by the comedian and writer Mike Myers who had lived in London in the 1980s. He knew Queen’s music, and had contacted Brian May about using ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. ‘Mike Myers phoned me up and sent me a copy and said, “You make sure Freddie hears it,”’ said May in 2010. ‘Freddie was already not well by that time but I took it round to him and he loved it.’ The singer had also hoped that the song’s performance in the movie might give Queen the break they needed in the US. As he told May at the same time: ‘I suppose I have to fucking die before we ever get big in America again.’
In the end, it was Wayne’s World, more than Freddie’s death, which revived Queen’s American fortunes. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was re-released in the US and went to number 2 (the proceeds donated to the Magic Johnson AIDS Trust, named after the HIV-positive basketball player). Another compilation, Classic Queen, followed the single to number 4. Meanwhile, in England, Montserrat Caballé, backed by the European Chamber Opera, gave a charity performance of Mercury’s favourite opera, Il Trovatore, at London’s Whitehall. Mercury and Caballé’s ‘Barcelona’ single was re-released to celebrate the city’s hosting of the 1992 Olympics, giving the duo a Top 5 hit.
In September, Brian May released Back to the Light. ‘I wanted to make this record on my own, with nobody else to argue with, just to see what happened,’ he explained. May’s last solo release, Star Fleet Project, had been an exercise in guitar virtuosity; the songs on this one were more contemplative. One track, ‘Nothing But Blue’, was about Mercury, and had been completed the night before his death; another, ‘I’m Scared’, found May reeling off a list of extraordinary fears and insecurities. The album went Top 20 in Britain, while the first single, an earnest ballad titled ‘Too Much Love Will Kill You’, which May had premiered at the tribute concert, became a Top 5 hit. With a South American tour, supporting Joe Cocker, in the offing, May now faced the challenge of fronting his own live band.
May’s touring party included Spike Edney, bassist Neil Murray, guitarist Mike Caswell (later replaced by Jamie Moses) and showman drummer Cozy Powell, with May as lead guitarist and lead vocalist. ‘I’ll never be Freddie – he was the ultimate stadium rock singer,’ he explained. ‘A few years ago, I don’t think I would have even tried to front a band. It would have been too intimidating. My role now is to be me.’ May fought through his nerves and proved an able frontman. The tour’s penultimate gig found them opening at Buenos Aires’ Vélez Sársfield, where Queen had headlined their historic Argentinean show in 1981.
In death, though, as in life, it seemed as if Freddie Mercury would have the last word. With May on tour, EMI released The Freddie Mercury Album, a compilation of remixed solo tracks. The album and a remix of ‘Living On My Own’ would put the late singer back into the UK Top 5 singles and albums charts. Another live album, Queen at Wembley Stadium, went to number 2. With a VHS release for the Freddie Mercury Tribute concert also out in time for Christmas, and a brief Smile reunion at London’s Marquee club, 1992 became one of
Queen’s busiest years yet.
May’s need to keep working found him back on the road the following February. The Brian May Band had been booked for a US tour, but some theatre shows were badly attended. Drafted as a support act to Guns N’ Roses, May found himself playing bigger venues, but at the mercy of the headliners’ volatile lead singer. After a contretemps with their sound engineer in Birmingham, Alabama, Axl Rose flounced off and refused to finish the gig. The next few dates were immediately cancelled.
When the tour resumed, The Brian May Band would often arrive onstage to rows of empty seats, as fans, slurping on soft drinks and chewing hot dogs, drifted in and out. In March, they played the Boston Winter Gardens; a venue in a city that Queen had once owned. ‘For the first time in twenty years, I’m going out in front of people who really need to be shown what I do,’ said May. ‘It’s a question of being very patient, which is very, very different from what I’m used to.’ Brian was insistent that he didn’t want the gigs to be a ‘re-hash of a Queen show’. But he faced the same problem encountered by the likes of Robert Plant and Mick Jagger before him: how to escape the shadow of his former band. As the Boston Globe reported: ‘Although some of the new material has a nice kick to it, it was the Queen classics, “Hammer to Fall” and “Now I’m Here”, that fared best.’
In May, the band returned to headline throughout Europe and the UK, including two nights at London’s Brixton Academy, which would be recorded for a live album. Barely pausing for breath, May led them back to North America in October for another headline tour. Between shows, he graciously fielded questions from the press about Freddie Mercury, while revealing more about his personal life than he’d ever done before: how the end of Queen as a touring band, the death of his father and the break-up of his first marriage had left him ‘very unhinged’. If playing live was, as he put it, ‘a great therapy’, there were still drawbacks. The Brian May Band were not Queen, and The Danforth Music Hall in downtown Toronto was not the same as the city’s Maple Leaf Gardens, where Queen had once headlined two nights. Smaller audiences, smaller venues, even smaller dressing rooms … It was a sobering experience.