Montserrat said, “Fine. That is what we will do. An album.”
So, in the space of two hours, Freddie’s pet project quadrupled in size and once more he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to do it or not. He wasn’t certain that he could come up with enough ideas.
Straight after eating, Mike Moran and Montserrat went to the piano because she wanted to try out the vocalise, ‘Exercises In Free Love’. She only had a short time to spare before her rehearsal and in that time, she decided that she would come back to the hotel after the rehearsal was over. Mike Moran was given four hours to completely transcribe the song from tape onto manuscript paper. She duly returned with Montsy to spend the ensuing few hours trying out ‘Exercises In Free Love’ to see how well it suited her voice. When she had exhausted Mike Moran, she left, taking the manuscript with her. He hadn’t even photocopied it.
Freddie’s party flew back to London, exhausted but elated. He couldn’t wait to get to work. Freddie went into the Townhouse Studio and started work straightaway.
At the end of the week, Montserrat flew into town because she was giving a recital at Covent Garden which she naturally insisted Freddie attend. This time there were about six of us in the party including Mike Moran. Jim Hutton and Joe were there, as well as myself. The arrangement was that in return for Freddie attending upon her at her recital, she would attend upon Freddie for a post-performance supper at his home, Garden Lodge in Kensington.
To Freddie’s surprise, towards the end of Montserrat’s show, Mike Moran made his excuses and left his seat, saying, “Sorry. Gotta go to the loo.”
Well into her encores, Montserrat stopped and announced, “Now, we have a change of pianist. I am now going to perform a song for the first time in public. It has been composed by someone whose name you might know but not from inside this opera house and who just happens to be sitting over… there!” She pointed at Freddie and at the same moment Mike Moran walked on stage and Freddie wished that the ground could have been opened up. You have to realise that in opera houses, during recitals, lights are never dimmed totally and Freddie was fully visible, dressed as he was in a pale blue suit.
Montserrat made him stand up and take a bow, which he very reluctantly did and then tried to hide in his seat. She then proceeded to sing ‘Exercises In Free Love’ which, unknown to Freddie, she had been rehearsing intensely the whole of the previous week. While the audience reaction couldn’t be described as ecstatic, it showed many people there a fact that few realised. Music is very difficult to categorise. Freddie least of all ever dreamed that something that he wrote would ever be performed in such an august hall. To me, that night just went to show that music is music, whoever composes it.
The arrangement on departure was that Freddie would go straight off home to get the supper ready! I was to accompany Montserrat. She said she was going to execute her version of Freddie’s “Take the money and run” scenario after the concert which meant in her world that she would not as per normal stand at the stage door signing autographs. For some reason, though, some two hundred people found their way to her dressing room so she took the money and ran about an hour and a half later!
The Opera House had tried to facilitate her exit by arranging for her car to be parked outside the back door but this all had to change when, ten minutes later, Montserrat, Montsy and I were scrambling over scaffolding and holes in the ground as the Opera House staff had forgotten to mention that some reconstruction had begun.
We eventually got to Garden Lodge with much laughter en route in the car about midnight. I heard later that Freddie had been pacing the kitchen wondering whether he’d been stood up.
After dinner, Freddie fully expected Montserrat to take up her wrap and go. Instead she asked where the cigarettes were and wanted to know what work he had done in the week since she had seen him. He was actually very honest and admitted that not a lot had come out of his week’s work but because Mike Moran was there he would be happy if Mike wanted to play the ideas on his piano, the same piano incidentally that Freddie had used to write ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Little did Freddie know it but this was to be the start of a mammoth session even by his own standards.
On my tape of the evening, there are snatches of various melodies, some of which were to be later used on the album Barcelona including the title track which had emerged in the last week at the Townhouse Studio in London’s Goldhawk Road. Freddie was constantly asking Montserrat if she was okay and shouldn’t she be going home because she had a flight to catch at eight-thirty and she would reply by asking for another cigarette at which Freddie would burst out laughing. Afterwards, Freddie told me that it was one of his most enjoyable times because he had got to know his idol and they spent five hours having fun. If you were able to hear the tape, you would be caught up with the infectious laughter and the good time that was had by us all.
Because of Montserrat’s work schedule, Freddie’s work on the album was almost dictated for him. He knew the first track had to be ‘Barcelona’ as it had to be ready for the submission of all the prospective anthems to the city because the selected anthem would have to be finished for the arrival of the Olympic Flag in Barcelona in 1988, four years before the actual games.
In some ways, recording for this album was a lot less strenuous than with most Queen albums both because of Freddie’s inspiration from Montserrat personally and also his dedication to and passion for the project as a whole. A lot of the material can and must be looked at as autobiographical as this album mirrored exactly the real Freddie Mercury.
Freddie knew that he would only ever be able to have Montserrat for perhaps two days every other month. Montserrat knew her commitments as with all opera stars had been organised on a schedule of anything up to five years ahead. Therefore, Freddie’s method was going to have to change drastically.
The way he went about this was to record a complete track minus Montserrat’s vocal. He would then, with his vocal track already completed, use his falsetto voice to put a guide vocal track in for her. He would do this for maybe two songs and then with the voice part on manuscript, send these off to Montserrat in time for her to look over them before her arrival in London. It was actually during the recording that their relationship changed a little. After the first session, where Montserrat put her vocals down on ‘Barcelona’, Freddie clapped his hands with joy and exclaimed, “This is it! I’ve got it. I have her voice on my tape. I now have her voice!” You could see in his face what that really meant to him after all the years of admiring her, he now had trapped that fabulous voice. He listened to the tape over and over again and was once again awestruck with what Montserrat was capable of doing. It seems strange but from then on, he found it more and more difficult to talk to her and a lot of what he wanted her to know, he would tell me and then I would tell her. It was like the awe had overtaken him and he felt he wasn’t able to talk freely to her again. This by no means diminished their working relationship and with each track which she completed for him, he grew more and more ecstatic.
I think it was more through pressure of time than his inability to write all the words that he used others to assist him with some lyrics. Tim Rice, of course, he had met while working with Elaine Paige on her album of Queen songs. Because he had offered ‘Ensueno’ to Montserrat as a present those months before in Barcelona, he asked her to provide the words for that song which is the one track out of the seven on the album where they were both at the microphone at the same time. To many this might sound incredible but with modern recording techniques, believe me anything is possible.
It was on this track that Montserrat made Freddie sing in his natural voice which, as you can hear, is a baritone rather than the forced tenor which he naturally used because it delivered what was expected of a pop/rock’n’roll vocal performance. Again, it was a time when he found out the benefits of having had singing lessons for many, many years. One of the main things teachers impart to their pupils is the ability to control which Freddie, never having had a
singing lesson in his life, wasn’t able to master. So, at the point where the voices get quieter and quieter, while Montserrat stood still at the microphone, Freddie had to take steps further and further away from the mike so that the voice faded through distance rather than control as he exhaled. As Tim Rice said, “Freddie had an amazing set of pipes”, but while never really showing off, Freddie knew he had an amazing voice which he realised came to him naturally. Although he wasn’t around to hear it, I think even he would have been astounded at how almost all the vocalists in the Aids Awareness concert following his death had to drop the pitch several tones in order to perform his songs.
The song ‘Barcelona’ basically describes his admiration of Montserrat whom he saw as the embodiment of not only her native city but the spirit of a people. ‘La Japonaise’ expresses his love for all things Japanese, his own ‘living treasure’ on earth. Freddie found a Japanese translator in England who not only translated his lyrics into Japanese but also wrote them out phonetically for him and Montserrat to sing. ‘The Fallen Priest’ was most theatrical due to Tim Rice’s input but it does mirror his love of the operatic and the theatrical. It was Freddie’s contribution to grand opera other than ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. The upbeat side of ‘The Golden Boy’, ‘Guide Me Home’ and ‘How Can I Go On?’ showed his appreciation of gospel and the deeply personal aspects of writing and composing.
There were a couple of other ideas which Freddie would like to have attempted with Montserrat at this time, one of which was a recording of ‘La Barcarole’ from Offenbach’s The Tales Of Hoffman but due to Montserrat’s restricted time availability, this was put on the back burner, possibly for a later date. Montserrat, for her part, adored the upbeat side of the album and wanted to attempt more in this direction as it was so new and strange and wonderful to her. The whole project excited her. There is a point in ‘Barcelona’ when he made her ‘trill’ in harmony with her own track, layer upon layer upon layer and she was thrilled with this, having never had occasion to do it before.
Montserrat became very emotional at the first playback of ‘How Can I Go On?’ because of the sentiment and the sound of Freddie’s voice talking the lines that she sings after her. Tears flowed down her cheeks and almost brought tears to Freddie’s eyes as he saw the depth of her emotion. Perhaps he too was actually listening to the words for the first time rather than living inside them.
While Barcelona took a lot out of him, it showed him how much music there was still inside him and Queen therefore once again embarked on the recording of another album. The Miracle was made over a period in 1988 and 1989. The band were eager to record and from the results, five singles were issued, of which four were top twenty hits. It was indeed a miracle.
I’m not sure whether Freddie was a hundred per cent over the moon about this album. He was very pleased with the result but perhaps he found it a little strange to be working in partnership with the other three members again after having to please only one other person for the past two-and-a-half years. This was the first album where all the tracks were suddenly credited to the band as a whole as opposed to each separate member. Maybe this stopped some arguments and made the accountants’ lives easier but in the studio things were just as fractious. As anybody in a long-term marriage knows, which is basically what the Queen partnership was, tantrums and walkouts have to happen so that people can make up, get back together again and let life be good once more.
However, for the record, I can assert that ‘Khashoggi’s Ship’ is Freddie’s. ‘Party’ was, of course, Roger’s. ‘The Miracle’ itself was a true studio collaborative creation. ‘I Want It All’ is down to Brian. ‘Rain Must Fall’ is Freddie… The guitar is the giveaway where Brian’s tracks are concerned. The guitar work on them is unrestrained although he was very happy to contribute what was wanted of him on all the other tracks. The band didn’t change their time-honoured way of working just because the accreditation had been changed.
It must be remembered that at this time it was patently obvious to us all that something was wrong with Freddie’s health, but exactly what it was he refused to talk about. I suppose for that reason, we in his house were thinking more about him than what he was producing. Like, was he wearing himself out? In those days, it was obvious to suspect that what he was suffering from was HIV infection but no one knew. People only really knew for sure and certain on November 23, 1991, when Freddie chose to release his statement acknowledging that he had Aids. However, that he was sick with something we were absolutely certain and we were very, very worried although he himself made no allowances for his invalid state in his recording schedule.
Freddie continued his association with Townhouse and the Olympic complex in London as well as working in Montreux. Freddie had decided that if he was going to ‘the office’, then it might as well be on his doorstep. By this time, on his visits to Montreux, Freddie was no longer staying at the Montreux Palace Hotel but rented what became known within the group as Duck House. There were ducks of the feathered and the carved wooden variety absolutely everywhere. The owner obviously had a passion for them. It was a beautiful villa in a setting on the edge of Lake Geneva in Montreux.
It was during these visits that he grew to appreciate the peace and quiet that this alpine town had to offer whereas as we know in the past he had found it somewhat dull. He surprised us all one day by announcing that he would like to buy a permanent place somewhere in Montreux. Jim Beach had already made his home there and so the wheels were put in motion to look for a suitable property. I believe approaches were made to the owner of Duck House who at that time was not in a selling mood. No specific details were given to Jim Beach, just a general ‘home’ idea.
1990 brought the ideas for Innuendo to the fore. Freddie must have realised by now that time was really short. He must have known deep inside that this would be the last album that he would be involved in. I’m not even sure that he was thinking in terms that went as far as ‘an album’. He was going from track to track which was basically what he did until the end of his life. While he had a voice, he would continue recording.
Once again, the work was recorded between London and Switzerland. This time, though, the London studio was Metropolis in Chiswick. Mountain Studios was not Freddie’s idea of a perfect studio set-up. I think the reason was that the studio itself was on a different level to the control room and there was no quick walking through a couple of doors to hear something being played back. Everything in Montreux was communicated from the control room to the studio and vice versa via both audio and visual monitors. This, I think, is a fairly rare configuration because in both Townhouse and in Metropolis Studios in London, it was a matter of feet between the studio and the control room. Freddie felt that because he could see the producer through two sheets of plate glass, it made the recording easier. The same applied to the Musicland set-up.
Freddie really loved the Innuendo album. Listening to it, you hear some of the more flamboyant aspects coming back into the arrangements. Whereas The Miracle had been a bit straight and basic, Innuendo had all the flair and magic of Freddie’s fingerprint. It was like he was putting his stamp on what would be his swansong because I obviously cannot count Made In Heaven as his, although I am sure he would be very happy with the results of John, Brian and Roger’s very hard work.
Again, five singles were released from this album. Each time, he brought a cassette of the day’s work home, he was incredibly excited. Even if some of us might have been asleep, he would wake everyone up and make us listen. He was giving it his all. He didn’t care that he would fall into bed totally exhausted. If we were still worried that all this hard work was shortening his life, he made it very clear that he didn’t care. Once he had started work on this album, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, going to stop him from completing what I believe he considered some of his best work. He always considered his best work as that which he did with Queen. Freddie and Mike Moran still remained very close and Freddie thought Mike would
bring out the best on the keyboards on ‘All God’s People’. Freddie after all had only ever got to Grade Three or Four on the Royal Academy of Music’s piano exams and Freddie only ever wanted the very best on this album. The four tracks whose words and musical outline were Freddie’s are obviously ‘All God’s People’ and ‘Slightly Mad’, as well as ‘Delilah’, which, as all Freddie-lovers know was written about his favourite cat. On first listening, everybody was shocked because they couldn’t understand writing a song about a girl who pees on his Chippendale suite. It is not until after this part of the song, that it is revealed that he is indeed writing about the cat. I think some people may have even been offended. But, did that worry Freddie? This time, we were amused.
And then, of course, there was ‘Bijou’, the fourth. For those of you who remember BBC Radio’s Round The Horne, the title perfectly describes Freddie’s ‘little trifle’ that he insisted on going on the album and which of course afforded such a wonderful showcase for Brian May. Who else but Freddie could come up with a title like ‘Bijou’?
The whole world thought that Freddie was being prophetic in ‘The Show Must Go On’ although he never wrote the lyrics for this song. The whole album is of course prophetic because Freddie knew it would be his last but it is not the final goodbye from Freddie which is how the world has come to see it. While he knew his music would always be played, he didn’t see himself as the ‘great composer’ and therefore the idea of consciously writing his own epitaph would never have occurred. Events force a meaning especially on lyrics and words where none was originally intended. For example, songs like ‘The Show Must Go On’, given different circumstances, is actually a very triumphant, ‘up’ song.
One of the tracks that sticks in my brain is ‘Going Slightly Mad’ when I distinctly remember Freddie coming home and having great difficulty with the lyrics. This again was one of those occasions where he came in and we were searching for about three hours for the elusive words. And with ‘All God’s People’, he was having his last blast at gospel which he loved.
Freddie Mercury: An intimate memoir by the man who knew him best Page 13