It became clear to Jack Nelson that Queen needed to be seen on tour. They were not yet headlining material but securing a good support slot was vital. Nelson knew Bob Hirschman, manager of Mott the Hoople, and through him he secured for Queen the job of backing them on their forthcoming UK tour. Initially this wasn’t straightforward, as matching support bands to headliners isn’t easy. An established band often won’t risk being upstaged by too good a support act, and it’s equally undesirable to be backed by a dull performance that leaves the audience restless. Hirschman hadn’t heard Queen play and it was proving a difficult sell. A £3000 contribution to sound and lights helped to ease his qualms and give Queen the job.
Queen hadn’t played live for several weeks, so Nelson organised half a dozen gigs for practice. Starting off at Golders Green Hippodrome on 13 September, the band had dates abroad in Germany and Luxembourg, before returning home for three London venue performances. The last two of these were in early November with a return to Imperial College. A former fellow student recalled that Queen were the loudest band on the planet that night, and journalist Rosemary Horide gave them a glowing review.
The twenty-three-date Mott the Hoople tour, which stretched from Edinburgh to Bournemouth, began on 12 November at Leeds Town Hall. It was Queen’s first real taste of life on the road, playing every night in a different city, and proved an invigorating experience. For Mercury the adrenaline was still pumping when the first gig was over. Instead of getting some sleep before heading to Blackburn the next day, he sought out a bit of nightlife, as one now famous nightclub owner, Peter Stringfellow, recalls:
‘I first met Freddie when he came into my Cinderella Rockerfella club in Leeds, and I thought he was a really nice bloke, obviously not a mega star yet and so he had no entourage surrounding him. He sat at my table, and we had a laugh and a few drinks. I had a Polaroid camera and asked if I could take his photo. As I say, Freddie wasn’t a star, but what a performance it turned out to be! I thought to myself, “This guy is certainly different!”
‘I went through two packs of film before Freddie decided that one shot was all right to keep. He promptly insisted on destroying the others. His vanity was out of all proportion, but the way he scrutinised each photo and discarded it until one came out just right I suppose, with hindsight, was a lesson in professionalism. Apart from that we had a good night.
‘I had absolutely no idea that Freddie was gay then. There was nothing in his behaviour to remotely suggest it. But I’d say that was the first and last time I had a truly enjoyable evening with him. Later on he was always completely mobbed.’
At this point the only crowds Mercury saw were those that turned up for Mott the Hoople. But with each gig his confidence was building. There were no passengers in Queen, though it is true to say that with Roger Taylor hemmed in behind his drums, and John Deacon and Brian May being naturally retiring, the onus was heavily on Freddie Mercury to electrify each performance. It is something he perfected to a fine art in later life, but even in these early days Queen were beginning to draw their own reaction, as Tony Brainsby confirms: ‘I also handled Hoople, and both bands had met for the first time in my office when it transpired they were to go on the road together. That tour was one helluva experience. You came out of gigs just breathless with it all.’
Someone else who recalls Mercury at this time is his ex-Ibex friend Mike Bersin. Queen were appearing at the Stadium in Liverpool, and Bersin had gone to see him for old times’ sake: ‘I went backstage to the dressing room,’ he says, ‘and found Freddie pacing up and down muttering. “What can I say? Give me something to say!” I wasn’t sure what to make of it, then someone handed him a copy of the Liverpool Echo, which he flicked through while he was still pacing. Suddenly he stopped, peered at an article and snapped the newspaper shut, saying, “OK. Got it.”
‘I went out front to watch, and Freddie walked up to the mike and said, “Good evening, Liverpool,” adding, “Nice one, Kevin!” – which was a reference to Kevin Keegan, who’d scored a vital goal for Liverpool Football Club. Nobody had been sure of him at first, with the way he was dressed and that, but suddenly the place erupted, and they were all completely on his side. That was typically Freddie. It’s that amount of attention to detail which made him different.’
The tour ended on 14 December with two gigs at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. Elated by the experience and at having established a strong rapport with Hoople, Queen’s performances were exceptional enough to leave their audiences wanting more. The six-week tour had proved a success, something unfortunately not echoed in the music press. The media either criticised the band or, worse still, ignored them. Tony Brainsby is blunt about this and says: ‘They accused Queen of being a hype band, when in reality they resented that their management put a lot of money behind them, and I was successful in getting them plenty of exposure. They chose to overlook the fact that Queen had a big following before their first single. When a band is receiving fan mail that early, then you’ve obviously got something special on your hands. And Freddie was an easy target for any journalist out to make a name for himself.’
For all Mercury’s antics, which grew wilder the more journalists went for him, Brainsby confirms that for as long as he knew him, the star never admitted that he was gay. ‘He never said, “I’m gay.” In the early days, in fact, he’d make a point of telling people that he had a girlfriend called Mary. But their love lasted throughout his entire life, which was quite surprising in the circumstances. It must’ve been very hard when Freddie later became overtly gay. I mean he was always obviously campy and had that iffyness about him. But that was different to being gay, and he only ever referred to being bisexual. But he and Mary had an unusually strong bond, and, I’d say, the way it lasted showed that Freddie had a true depth to him that wasn’t perhaps obvious to many. Later he flitted from one gay relationship to another, but Mary was always the rock.’
Shutting out the critics, Mercury focused instead on Radio One recording sessions that Queen had booked with Bob Harris; sessions that still stand out in Harris’s memory: ‘Freddie was so special. He always gave 100 per cent. To give an example: one Monday morning early – and hard after probably the busiest time of their lives right then, when they might’ve been forgiven for perhaps coasting a bit – I was watching from the control room, and there was this pin spotlight on Freddie. And there he was, giving so much to his performance that the veins were literally standing out on his temples and neck. I thought, how much more can you give?’
As to why Queen elicited such a poor response from the music press, Harris suggests that: ‘It possibly stemmed from their inability to label Queen and because of their own inadequacy they took it out on the band. When Queen were huge, and they still attacked them, it was the same old thing. The British press love to build ’em up and knock ’em down. They just don’t or can’t recognise achievement and leave it at that. You sometimes get the feeling that they feel duty-bound to smash holes in people. Part of it, of course, stems from a worry that they could be accused of sycophancy if they constantly admire anyone’s work.’
After the stint with Hoople, Queen played four more gigs to the year’s end; the final performance of 1973 taking place on 28 December at Liverpool’s Top Rank Club in support of 10cc. It was the last show Ken Testi was to book for Queen: ‘By then I was working in a shop in Widnes,’ he recalls. ‘Brian had phoned to ask if I wanted to become their personal manager. Naturally I was thrilled, and I asked what the money would be like. I hated having to ask because for myself, I wouldn’t have cared but I had a mortgage to meet. Queen were now getting £30 a week each, and I was offered £25, which I thought was good, but I had to say no.
‘It was everything that my life had been leading up to, and I had to turn round and refuse. But on that money I couldn’t make the payments on the house, and I also had to look after my mother and sister. One can’t live on what-might-have-beens but I’ve regretted it to this day.’ Queen’s final link with the
man who had done so much for them came at the Top Rank Club, when they featured on a bill that included a local band, Great Day, in whose line-up was Ken Testi.
For Mercury, although they had released a single and album in Britain and the States, it was still only the beginning. It was too far from the eternal spotlight he craved more than ever. The Liverpool show ended their most successful year yet, and on the strength of the UK tour, Mott the Hoople invited them as support on their tour of America. The music press had enjoyed dubbing Queen, ‘Britain’s Biggest Unknowns’. If Mercury had his way, they would soon be proved wrong.
SIX
One of a Kind
Queen’s drive to reach the top shifted up a gear in 1974. The band played twice as many gigs as in the previous twelve months and by autumn had reached the number two slot in Britain with their single ‘Killer Queen’. But the way up proved to be something of a minefield. The band was booked to headline in January at the open-air Sunbury Music Festival in Melbourne, but Brian May had unfortunately been taken ill. After inoculations for travel to Australia, his arm had swelled up and become gangrenous from a dirty needle. Rehearsals for their first headlining foreign tour suffered as a result, but it was not to be the only disruption.
Since his days fronting Ibex, Mercury had harboured a passion for dramatic stage lighting, an interest shared by the other three members of the band. Now that resources were less tight, they could indulge this to better effect. Proud of their new and specially designed lighting rig, they had had it transported, along with the rest of their equipment, to Melbourne. Because the apparatus was complicated to use, they also took over their own crew to operate it, something that, unfortunately, upset the local technicians. On arrival Queen had sensed a general air of resentment that an unknown British band had been chosen to headline in preference to their own Aussie groups, and this grievance was aggravated by the imported lighting-rig operators.
Already concerned that May’s arm would be too weak to last a performance, Mercury himself developed an ear infection. The antibiotics prescribed him were so strong that he began to feel increasingly drowsy as the day progressed. As they waited for darkness to begin to fall, so that the light show would be most effective, he found it hard to psyche himself up for the show. Out front the audience began a slow handclap, and as Queen prepared to go on, the show’s compère didn’t help when he introduced Queen as ‘stuck-up pommies’. As soon as Mercury launched into the first number, he was immediately disoriented when he realised his ear infection made it impossible to hear himself sing. Conscious of the huge disappointment this show was becoming, the rig gave out just when it was dark enough for the lights to be seen at their best. Sabotage was suspected.
Far from buckling under the strain, Mercury pushed himself to the limits to perform. Brian May battled valiantly with an extremely painful arm, and John Deacon and Roger Taylor focused on the music. By the end of the performance their effort had paid off, as the crowd’s hostility evaporated, and they demanded an encore. Queen were more than happy to oblige, until the compère took the stage and manipulated the audience into calling instead for the return of one of their own bands.
Furious at the humiliation, their ordeal continued the next day when the press got in on the act and slated them. By now Mercury’s ear infection had worsened, and he was also running a temperature. For these reasons alone, even without the worry of May’s gangrenous arm, Queen pulled out of the second night’s performance. With the promoters’ wrath ringing in their ears, they boarded a flight for England and went home.
It had been a costly exercise. Not only had they paid the return air fares to Australia themselves, but the tour had turned into a damaging fiasco. So early in their career, this was bound to have been demoralising. Yet Brian May vehemently denies this, insisting that none of them thought it disastrous. Clearly, though, they could have done without bad relations with the Australian press adding to the hostility from the British media.
As individual music-press journalists disparaged them, the music magazines themselves published annual polls that showed the strength of Queen’s popularity on the street. In February, for example, NME readers placed Queen second to Leo Sayer as the Most Promising Newcomer.
February saw the US release of Mercury’s first Queen single ‘Liar’, which sank without trace. Undaunted, he anticipated EMI’s next release, again one of his own compositions, which was planned for a couple of weeks later. Although Queen hadn’t proved big earners for the record label yet, they had acquired an ally in Ronnie Fowler, EMI’s head of promotions. Impressed with their sound from the first spin of a white label, Fowler plugged Queen everywhere he went.
Every new group’s ambition was to appear on BBC One’s prestigious Thursday night Top of the Pops. Fowler received a call from its producer Robin Nash one Tuesday evening. David Bowie’s promo clip for ‘The Jean Genie’ hadn’t arrived in time for the show, he said; did Fowler have any ideas for a replacement? Fowler, of course, suggested Queen. Unfamiliar with the band’s work, Nash asked to hear a demo, which he fortunately liked. But, as artistes in those days mimed to special backing tracks, the demo was useless. EMI and Queen seized their chance, when that night Fowler persuaded Who guitarist Pete Townshend to relinquish some studio time and allow Queen to record the necessary tape. At the BBC studios the next day they prerecorded their slot for transmission the following night.
Mercury and the band stared at the bank of televisions in an electrical shop window, all four glued to the glass. It was 21 February 1974 as they watched themselves perform ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’, a single not yet released. The song showcased Mercury’s weakness for swirling crescendos and fantasy lyrics. It fades incongruously at the end into a sing-a-long of the very English ditty, ‘Oh, I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside’, which Ken Testi recalls recording back in 1973: ‘I joined in on the reprise at the end of “Seven Seas of Rhye”. So did Pat McConnell and a whole bunch of us. I seem to recall an awful lot of reverb, and Brian played the stylophone on it. But it was done in one day, and we were all totally pissed at the time.’
Keen to capitalise on Queen’s appearance on the show, Ronnie Fowler and Jack Nelson blitzed the radio stations next day with white labels. When EMI rush-released the single on 23 February, the combination of the TV exposure and subsequent airplay secured Queen their first hit. By the second week of March, it had reached number ten. Their follow-up album Queen II should have been in the shops by now and could have benefited from the single’s success, but a spelling mistake on the sleeve had delayed its release. Britain was limping along on a three-day working week, crippled worse by an oil crisis, and the government had imposed restrictions on the use of electricity. All of this delayed sorting out this minor printing error.
Basking in the first flush of success, Freddie Mercury hailed it as the beginning of something big. Even so, he had no idea of how huge they’d become. He was certainly ambitious, but so were scores of others. He once prophesied that Queen would survive for five years, which in the days of disposable pop equalled for ever. Towards the end of their forthcoming first headlining UK tour, he declared: ‘I’ve always thought of us as a top group.’
Preparing to go out on the road with this top group for their vital tour, Mercury felt it was inappropriate to buy his stage wear from Kensington market or to use a helpful but amateur seamstress. Persuading Brian May to join him, he approached fashion designer Zandra Rhodes. ‘Freddie had loved the tops I did for Marc Bolan, and what I was doing with a variety of fabrics right then, and he came to me knowing very much what he wanted,’ says Rhodes. ‘My workshop then was an absolute deathtrap in a brownstone building in Paddington, which had a winding rickety staircase with a low ceiling leading to it, and I vividly recall Brian stooping forward with Freddie just behind him as they tramped up to see me.’
After the embarrassment of stripping off before a roomful of machinists to try out various styles, Mercury opted for two particular outfits. One, in white satin with a
glorious pleated-wing effect, would become world famous. But although he had arrived fired up with his own ideas, he was happy to be guided by the professional: ‘Even if someone has had wonderful artistic training, it doesn’t always follow that they know best, and Freddie was always extremely appreciative of what I did, which was lovely,’ says Rhodes. ‘Queen’s look was very much part of their success and has always been important to their whole make-up in conjunction with the music. I think, in fact, that they only toned it down when Freddie became ill and started trying to look straight.’
Excited by his two sumptuous Rhodes creations, Mercury felt vibrant as their first headlining UK tour commenced on 1 March 1974 at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool. It was hard work, especially for Brian May. One month after the Sunbury Music Festival, his arm was still sore, something initially aggravated by the fact that Queen were playing alone, with no support band. By the time they reached Plymouth’s Guild Hall, they were touring with Nutz, a Liverpool band who remained on the bill as support for the rest of the dates. This tour saw the birth of the audience’s curious habit of singing ‘God Save The Queen’, while awaiting the band’s arrival on stage. Later, Queen closed their shows with the national anthem.
With the success of ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’, everyone fixed on the launch on 8 March of Queen II. Its most distinguished physical feature was its innovatory white and black sides instead of the traditional A and B. The original material on it clearly appealed too. As they toured the country, the band discovered that the audience were often word-perfect with the lyrics. Within a fortnight Queen II had reached the top forty in the album charts.
Freddie Mercury: The Biography Page 8