by Mark Blake
On April 2008, Queen + Paul Rodgers broke cover to appear on Al Murray’s Happy Hour, a TV chat show hosted by comedian Murray in the guise of his alter ego, the Pub Landlord. Queen purists winced at the sight of the trio in Murray’s ‘Green Room’, where May told the host they ‘were going to play something completely new’. They chose their next single, ‘C-lebrity’, which was still four months away from release. The song had a dizzying heavy metal riff and sounded just like a cross between Free and early Queen, but the lyrics – griping about the hollow concept of celebrity in the twenty-first century – suggested Queen were shooting at fish in a barrel. Viewers breathed a collective sigh of relief when the band got stuck into ‘All Right Now’, even with the Pub Landlord on shouty backing vocals.
‘C-lebrity’ was released as a single in August. ‘It’s to do with celebrity culture,’ explained Taylor, who’d written the lyrics, ‘the desperation to get your face on the telly.’ In a world awash with rubbish reality TV shows, Taylor had a valid point. But his comment in Classic Rock magazine that ‘It annoys me that there are so many famous, useless people,’ sounded a little churlish. ‘C-lebrity’ made it to number 33, before disappearing. With the singles market now in terminal decline, this was no great shock. There was still the album to come …
Asked about the making of The Cosmos Rocks, Rodgers saluted his bandmates, while offering an outsider’s view of Queen’s working practices. ‘Brian is a revelation when it comes to harmonies,’ he said. ‘He’d tell us he had an idea for a harmony, troop us into the studio, and there it is. It’s like he’d been carrying the whole thing fully formed in his head.’ Taylor, meanwhile, was reassuringly bullish: ‘We know some people will moan, “Oh, Freddie’s not on it!” Of course he’s not, you dickhead. If they want to know why we’re bothering to do this, it’s because we’re still alive.’ May, on the other hand, was his usual cautious self, telling Mojo that while making the album ‘there had been some arguments, where we all had to go off and have a think.’
The Cosmos Rocks turned out to be a strangely inoffensive rock album. ‘Say It’s Not True’ had been played on the Q+PR tour, and a live version had already released as a free download in 2007. It was the kind of pomp-and-circumstance ballad on which Queen’s reputation had been built. ‘Surf’s Up (School’s Out)’ sounded like a vintage Roger Taylor rocker, but, despite being better than the hackneyed opening track, ‘Cosmos Rockin’, was buried away at the back end of the album. There was another welcome flashback to the past with the ‘boom-boom cha!’ of ‘We Will Rock You’ reprised on ‘Still Burnin’.
Rodgers had already been playing two of the songs on his solo tour. ‘Warboys (A Prayer For Peace)’ and the Bad Company copycat ballad ‘Voodoo’. They sounded like Paul Rodgers songs with Brian May playing guitar and Roger Taylor on drums. What they didn’t sound like was Queen. Once again, the name was the sticking point. Even Rodgers seemed to think so: ‘I was as wary of calling it Queen as anyone else. At first I thought we would use May, Taylor, Rodgers, like Crosby, Stills & Nash …’ The trouble was, Queen albums had always dealt in the unexpected – white funk, gospel, disco, ragtime jazz – however much that may have upset some fans and certain band members. The Cosmos Rocks lacked the unexpected. Taylor’s statement that we’re ‘doing this because we’re still alive’ was heartfelt and honest. But both he and May were unavoidably in competition with their own past.
‘The worst thing on earth would be for it [The Cosmos Rocks] to come out with a whimper,’ said Taylor. Yet that was exactly what happened. The album spent a fortnight on the UK charts, peaking at number 5, before slipping away. It was a similar story in Europe where it made the Top 10 in Germany, Holland and France (even reaching number 2 in Estonia) before disappearing. In America, it scraped to number 47, a better showing, at least, than Made in Heaven. But this was not the comeback of all comebacks.
In the press, reviews ranged from Mojo’s prudent thumbs-up (‘Without Freddie’s decorative flourishes, the onus is on straight-shooting heavy rock’) to the Guardian decrying The Cosmos Rocks as terrible, but not as terrible as the musical, We Will Rock You. But EMI were also guilty of a very poor campaign. At the time, like much of the record industry, the company was in a state of flux. EMI had been bought by private equity firm, Terra Firma, in 2007; a move that had prompted Paul McCartney to leave the label in protest. A year later, Tony Wadsworth, EMI’s chief executive of twenty-five years followed suit. Queen’s new record seemed to get lost along the way. ‘I think the record company did an absolutely shockingly bad job on our album,’ grumbled Taylor later.
There would be no follow-up single to ‘C-lebrity’ and no more TV appearances. Instead, the band did what they did best, and went back on the road. Queen + Paul Rodgers would spend three months on tour, playing arenas across Europe. Tracks from The Cosmos Rocks were thrown in alongside the standards. Rodgers gamely told the press that ‘Killer Queen’ was one of the few Queen songs they couldn’t do ‘as the harmonies are so spot on’. Some wished he’d added ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ to that list. Rodgers struggled manfully with the song, but it just didn’t suit him. Others noticed that he kept forgetting the words to ‘Radio Ga Ga’. Yet with a setlist that now featured Free’s ‘Wishing Well’ and Bad Company’s ‘Seagull’ alongside ‘Hammer to Fall’, ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, ‘Love Of My Life’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ … it was a crowd-pleasing greatest hits set, even if Queen + Paul Rodgers had become what they’d always feared: their own tribute band.
In November, the tour headed to the southern hemisphere for five shows in Chile, Buenos Aries, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. On 8 March 1981, Queen had played their first South American show at Buenos Aires’ Vélez Sársfield. May had played there since with his own group, but this was Queen. The shows were a triumph, but at a press conference on Argentinian TV, it seemed that the questions were only directed at returning heroes Brian May and Roger Taylor, not Paul Rodgers. ‘Paul would be Freddie’s choice to sing with us,’ Brian May told one TV reporter. ‘He would be laughing … I think he is laughing.’ ‘Freddie had a great time here,’ added Taylor with a knowing grin. ‘He’d be very pleased to see us here now …’. ‘He was great with the one-liners, Freddie …’ chipped in May. With their new singer standing just feet away, both men looked and sounded wistfully nostalgic for their absent friend.
Mercury once said, ‘We’ll just carry on until one of us drops dead, or is just replaced. I think if I suddenly left, they’d have the mechanism to replace me.’ Laughing, he’d added, ‘Not so easy to replace me, huh?’ Perhaps not. With the end of the tour in South America, the rumours began that Queen + Paul Rodgers were no more. ‘I don’t know where anyone got that idea,’ protested Brian May, writing on his website. ‘We just need a rest.’ In April 2009, though, Rodgers informed Billboard that his tenure with Queen was over. It was, he insisted, an amicable split. The singer had now signed up for another reunion, with Bad Company. ‘It was never meant to be a permanent arrangement,’ he said. ‘I think we made a huge success of it actually.’
Before the Q+PR tour, Brian May had admitted: ‘Part of me is saying, “Why not stay at home and enjoy the life you’ve created?”’ But this is what I do, and who knows how much longer we’ll be able to do it?’ Back at home, though, May had a new non-musical project to be getting on with. His next book, A Village Lost and Found, was due for publication. Co-written with art conservator Elena Vidal, it explored the work of nineteenth-century photographer T.R. Williams, a specialist in stereoscopic images. The guitarist had, it transpired, spent years trying to identify the village that featured in many of Williams’s pictures. It was a painstaking labour of love. While the press marvelled at this rock star’s most un-rock-starry pastime, to those that knew May’s working methods it made complete and perfect sense. As their old engineer Gary Langan recalled, ‘I can tell tales of Brian May spending a week on a guitar solo.’
Away from Queen and his scientific research, the
vegetarian May was also busy campaigning against fox hunting and badger culling, firing off angry broadsides to a wide array of a wide array of journalists and MPs, and expounding his views on his website, where the comments often made for a compulsive, if on occasions bemusing read (‘I’m not an extremist … but I’ve decided my guitar straps won’t be leather any more’).
November 2009 saw the appearance of Queen’s Absolute Greatest: the hits, repackaged yet again, complete with a second disc on which May and Taylor ruminated about the songs. They proved themselves to be witty, self-deprecating commentators, the ice in their glasses chinking in the background, as they shared fond memories of Freddie Mercury and the many misadventures they’d had along the way.
Contrary as ever, the duo seemed to forget the subject of their last single, ‘C-lebrity’, to appear on both the reality TV music show, The X-Factor, and its US counterpart, American Idol. ‘I’ve not always been positive about shows like this,’ countered May. ‘But there is no doubt that it offers a door to some real genuine talent along the way.’ On American Idol, they performed ‘We Are the Champions’ with the show’s finalists. But it was Adam Lambert, the eventual runner-up, who truly impressed them. ‘He’s the most phenomenal singer,’ said Taylor, ‘and we would like to do something with him.’ There was speculation that the 27-year-old Lambert would become Queen’s next singer, though nothing has come of it. In the meantime, May and Taylor threw themselves into tirelessly promoting We Will Rock You, as the jukebox musical opened in new territories around the world. In summer 2010, Queen left EMI Records after thirty-nine years. With 300 million album sales worldwide, and their back catalogue again up for grabs, all the signs pointed towards a high-profile and highly lucrative fortieth anniversary in 2011.
In the spring of 1964, Farrokh Bulsara and his family had arrived from Zanzibar in the West London suburb of Feltham. Almost thirty-five years later, in the winter of 2009, Queen fans, inquisitive locals, Freddie Mercury’s mother, Jer Bulsara and Brian May gathered in Feltham’s anonymous shopping centre to watch the unveiling of a memorial to Freddie Mercury.
There was so something both incongruous yet strangely fitting about the tribute. The square plaque, depicting a red, white and gold star, set into the ground inside the unprepossessing mall, may have honoured one of the most famous rock stars that had ever lived, but it was also a reminder of the unremarkable, thoroughly suburban world from which he’d come. The plaque acknowledged the four years Farrokh Bulsara had spent in Feltham, after which he’d fled the coop for a nomadic lifestyle, moving between houses and flats in London, leaving Farrokh and even Fred Bulsara Behind, and becoming, to the world at large, ‘FREDDIE MERCURY, MUSICIAN, SINGER AND SONGWRITER.’
‘Freddie, you pursued your dream,’ said Brian May at the ceremony. Through Mercury, May and the rest of Queen had also been able to pursue theirs. Yet while many of their heroes and contemporaries could never survive the loss of such a crucial band member, Queen’s resolve to carry on marks them out as astonishingly and uniquely resilient.
‘We’ll never stand still,’ said Roger Taylor recently. ‘Queen is still alive in Brian and myself. We will do the best we can.’ Whether performing with fellow rock stars, talent-show hopefuls, the cast of their own worldwide musical or commissioning actor Sacha Baron Cohen to star as Freddie Mercury in a forthcoming Queen biopic, the intrepid duo shows little sign of stopping. As long as there is someone willing to take the wheel, the juggernaut that is Queen in the twenty-first Century will continue to roll.
Acknowledgements
Very special thanks to my wife Claire and son Matthew for too many lost weekends; the ever-patient Graham Coster and all at Aurum Press, particulary Lucy Smith for picture research; my agent Rupert Heath and friends and co-conspirators, including Phil Alexander, Martin Aston, Dave Brolan, Dave Everley, Pat Gilbert, Mark Hodkinson, Dave Ling, Kris Needs and Peter Makowski.
This book draws on my own interviews with Brian May and Roger Taylor conducted between 1998 and 2008 for Q and Mojo magazines. Also my own interviews with and contributions from: John Anthony, Mark Ashton, Judy Astley, Louis Austin, Mike Bersin, Douglas Bogie, Mick Bolton, Caroline Boucher, John Brough, Rick Cassman, Tony Catignani, Chris Chesney, Patrick Connolly, Geoff Daniel, Dave Dilloway, Rik Evans, Brian Fanning, Fish, Morgan Fisher, Nigel Foster, John Garnham, Christian Gastaldello, Alan Hill, Peter Hince, Paul Humberstone, Ian Hunter, Gary Langan, Geoffrey Latter, Renos Lavithis, Reinhold Mack, Aubrey Malden, Mark Malden, Fred Mandel, Alan Mair, Laurie Mansworth, Bob Mercer (RIP), Barry Mitchell, Adrian Morrish, Keith Mulholland, Bruce Murray, Jack Nelson, Martin Nelson, Gary Numan, Chris O’Donnell, Denis O’Regan, Jeff ‘Dicken’ Pain, Ray Pearl, Rick Penrose, Glen Phimister, Mick Rock, Steven Rosen, Subash Shah, Norman Sheffield, Brian Southall, Ken Scott, Chris Smith, Billy Squier, Ray Staff, Chris Stevenson, John Taylor, Ken Testi, Richard Thompson, Andy Turner, Kingsley Ward, Susan Whitall, Terry Yeadon and Richard Young. Many thanks to everyone that spared the time to talk to me. Extra special thanks to: Adrian Morrish, Dave Dilloway, Peter Hince and Mark Malden (author of the currently unpublished book, Freddie Mercury: From the Inside Out) for going the extra distance on my behalf.
Numerous magazine articles and interviews proved invaluable during the writing of this book, including many published in Q, Mojo, Classic Rock, Uncut, Record Collector, New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Sounds, Disc & Music Echo, Creem and Rolling Stone. For the best online resource for Queen information, go to: www.queen.com, www.queenzone.com, www.queenconcerts.com, www.queenarchive.com, www.queencuttings.com, www.brianmay.com and Rupert White’s impeccable blog, queenincornwall. Thanks to all webmasters for their help.
Select Bibliography
Queen & Freddie Mercury books
Evans, David and David Minns. This Is the Real Life … Freddie Mercury: His Friends And Colleagues Pay Tribute (Britannia, 1992)
Freestone, Peter and David Evans. Freddie Mercury: An Intimate Memoir by the Man Who Knew Him Best (Omnibus, 2001)
Gunn, Jacky and Jim Jenkins. Queen: As It Began (BAC Publishing, 1992)
Hodkinson, Mark. Queen the Early Years (Omnibus, 1995)
Hutton, Jim. Mercury And Me (Bloomsbury, 1994)
Jackson, Laura. Brian May: The Definitive Biography (Piatkus, 1998)
Jones, Lesley-Ann. Freddie Mercury: The Definitive Biography (Coronet, 1998)
Purvis, Georg. Queen: The Complete Works (Reynolds & Hearn, 2007)
Rock, Mick. Classic Queen (Omnibus, 2007)
Sutcliffe, Phil. Queen: The Ultimate Illustrated History of the Crown Kings of Rock (Voyageur, 2009)
Background
Buckley, David. Strange Fascination: David Bowie – The Definitive Story (Virgin, 2005)
Buckley, David. The Thrill of It All: The Story of Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music (Andre Deutsch, 2004)
Elton, Ben. We Will Rock You (Carlton 2004)
Gorman, Paul. The Look – Adventures in Pop and Rock Fashion (Sanctuary 2001)
Haring, Bruce. Off the Record: Ruthless Days and Reckless Nights inside the Music Industry (Carol Publishing, 1996)
Kent, Nick. Apathy for the Devil (Faber, 2010)
Lydon, John and Keith & Kent Zimmerman. Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (Picador, 2008)
McDermott, John and Eddie Kramer. Hendrix: Setting the Record Straight (Little, Brown, 1993)
Norman, Philip. Sir Elton – The Definitive Biography of Elton John (Pan, 2002)
Rock, Mick. Glam: An Eyewitness Account (Omnibus, 2005)
Van der Vat, Dan and Michelle Whitby. Eel Pie Island (Francis Lincoln, 2009)
Index
Abbey, Pete 1, 2
AC/DC 1
Aerosmith 1
After the Fire 1
AIDS 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
Airrace 1
album covers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
albums A Day at the Races 1, 2, 3, 4
A Kind of Magic 1, 2, 3
&nbs
p; A Night at the Opera 1, 2, 3
The Cosmos Rocks 1, 2
The Freddie Mercury Album 1
The Game 1, 2
Hot Space 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Innuendo 1, 2
Jazz 1, 2, 3
Live Killers 1
Live Magic 1
Made in Heaven 1
The Miracle 1, 2
News of the World 1, 2, 3
Queen 1, 2, 3
Queen II 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Queen: The Complete Works 1
Queen at Wembley Stadium 1
Queen’s Greatest Hits 1
Queen’s Greatest Hits II 1, 2
Sheer Heart Attack 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Star Fleet Project 1
The Works 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Alice Cooper 1
Ant, Adam 1, 2
Anthony, John 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22
Apple Records 1
Appleton, Mike 1
Arden, Don 1
Armatrading, Joan 1, 2
Arnold, Thor 1
Ascott, Roy 1
Ashton, Mark 1, 2, 3
Astley, Judy 1, 2
Aucoin, Bill 1
Audience 1
Austin, Louis 1
Austin, Mary 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25
Ayers, Kevin 1
B&C record company 1
Bad Company 1, 2, 3
Bad News 1, 2
Baker, Roy Thomas 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25
Band Aid 1, 2