Mojo Article (2)
For a young band to have Queen's rampant ambition might have come across as cool, sod-you cockiness in Blairite '90's Britain. In the strike-ridden, right-on early '70's, it was infinitely more offensive. So music press disaproval dogged Queen from the start. In 1973 EMI thrust them onto the national staaage with a heavily-promoted gig at the Marquee and a £5,000 (phew!) advertising campaign for their eponymous debut album, thereby persuading many hacks that the band were nothing more than hype. When, in 1974, Queen II was released, Record Mirror described one track - Roger Taylor's Loser In The End - as "the worst piece of dross ever committed to plastic" and summarised the album as "The dregs of glam rock. The band with the worst name, have capped that dubious achievement by bringing out the worst album for some time. Their material is weak and overproduced...as a whole it is dire. Brian May is technically proficient, but Freddie Mercury's voice is dressed up with multi-tracking. A lot of people are pushing Queen as the band of '74. If this is our brightest hope for the future then we are committing rock'n'roll suicide."
Three years later, as the punk revolution consigned bands like Queen to the dustbin of history, the NME ran a ferociously scathing profile of Freddie Mercury (so ferocious and so scathing, in fact, that it ensured he virtually never gave a full-length press interview again in his life). The headline was, "Is This Man A Prat?" A year later, when the marketing of Fat Bottomed Girls and Bicycle Race via a video, single-sleeve and poster featuring a horde of naked models on bikes was causing a considerable, and entirely predictable rumpus, the NME ran a rear-view photo of Freddie with the caption, "Fat Bottomed Queen". Not that they were homophobic or anything...obviously.
The irony of all this is that Queen, of all bands, really paid their dues. Their story begins, not with Freddie Mercury, but with Brian May. Born on July 19th 1947, the son of a civil service engineer, from Feltham in Middlesex, he was turned on to playing the guitar by going to see The Tommy Steele Story. Inspired by the Shadows, his taste ran to pure instrumentalists like Les Paul and Django Reinhardt; he and his pals at Hampton Grammer School would get together in the bike sheds to trade riffs from the latest records. The blues, they thought, were a bit beneath them: "We were a bit scornful. We were into the technicalities of chord structures."
Then he saw Clapton. "He based himself totally around that Albert King, B.B.King, Howlin' Wolf scene, and turned our whole world upside down. The Yardbirds were about more than just playing notes; this was raw sex and anger."
Along with an understanding of the music, came a dawning awareness of the power of performance. "I saw The Who many times, and there was an element of total anarchy and destructive power that was frightening. I remember seeing them in some seedy little Soho club with about 50 people there and they just destroyed the place.
"Hendrix had that frightening quality as well. I'd put a lot of work into playing guitar and was thinking I was pretty damn good. But Hendrix came along and destroyed everyone. I was deeply jealous, that was the firs emotion I felt. A friend played the B-side of Hey Joe, Stone Free, and Hendrix was playing scat and singing along with it and I thought it had to be a trick that he'd cooked up in the studio. When I saw him at the Savile Theatre, supporting The Who, I couldn't believe it. I felt excited, overwhelmed and also completely deflated. He changed all of our lives in an instant."
By then, May was at Imperial College, studying for his physics degree, and torn between the career in science for which he was being educated and the music to which he was still magnetically drawn. "My father sacrificed his life so that I could get a good education. So I found myself propelled along a scientific line, because I happened to be good at physics. I did four A-levels in science, a physics degree and post-graduate astronomy, though I never finished my phD on Motions of Interplanetary Dust.
"All the time this other part of me was bursting to make music. My dad had been the same but had denied it to himself. He played piano in a dance band as a kid, but then the war came along.
When he came back, he had a wife and a baby on the way - he had to get a 'proper job' and give up his musical aspirations. He thought I was wasting my education going off to play in this group called Queen. I also wanted to live with my girlfriend - and unforgivable crime. He hardly wanted to speak to me for a while.
"Then, much later, he saw us play Madison Square Gardens and understood the force and the fulfillment there was for me. He said, 'I'm so envious because I shut that part of me out of my life. You've achieved more in your life than I ever will. 'It was a terrible moment. I felt very sad and thought about it for a long time. So I went back and had another conversation with him, explaining that his life had enabled me to do what I was doing. It wasn't long before he died, so it was important to straighten that stuff out. I only realise now how much pain I caused my dad. It's the most painful thing to experience that kind of rejection from a child. I'm finding it with my children now. I digress..."
Well, yes and no. Because May's father played a crucial role in the Queen legend as the man who helped Brian make the guitar that has been his musical mainstay for more than 30 years. "It was made in our little house in Feltham, in a spare bedroom converted into a workshop. It's all still there - I haven't been able to deal with it since my mum died two years ago - and I went baack recently and found all the tools we made."
So they not only built the guitar, they built the tools that built the guitar? "Yes, we were very scholarly about it. We felt all the people who had been making guitars had just been lucky. For instance, I remember seeing a Fender Stratocaster and it was just a happy accident that the tremolo worked. I thought I could design something better by scientifically going back to first principles." With help from his father, he did. Two years of evenings and weekends produced a guitar made from a fireplace, bits of an old table and assorted bizarre components including a saddlebag-holder and knitting needle (for the tremolo arm) and the springs from motorcycle engine-valves.
By 1967, May was playing in a band called 1984 with a pal from Hampton Grammer School called Tim Staffell. Their highpoint was supporting Jimi Hendrix at Imperial College, but May left the band to pursue his studies and his own music, keeping in touch with Staffell, who went to Ealing College of Art. The two of them wanted to keep making music together, but they needed a drummer, so in the autumn of '67 May put an advertisement on the noticeboard at Imperial College, saying that he was looking for a drummer into Ginger Baker, Mitch Mitchell and Keith Moon. Enter Roger Meddows-Taylor.
He'd grown up in Cornwall, and gone to Truro School (a minor public school, also attended by future Liberal MP David Penhaligon). Taylor's school band, The Cousin Jacks, played a benefit gig for the Young Liberals, which actually lost money, although as Penhaligon later admitted, "That might be a reflection on the Young Liberals." Taylor had three musical heroes: John Lennon, Bob Dylan...and Jimi Hendrix, whom he'd seen in Bristol, driving the 100-odd miles from Truro for the gig. In late 1967, Taylor was a dentistry student at the London Hospital, and was alerted toMay's ad by his flatmate Les Brown, a student at Imperial. Roger met Brian at the college bar, talked music and then May wrote a letter setting out his musical ideas. "He seemed quite intelligent," Taylor later told Bob Harris.
Looking back, says May, "I remember being flabbergasted when Roger set his kit up at Imperial College. Just the sound of him tuning his drums was better than I had heard from anyone before. It was amazing. Roger has a flair and a polish to his drumming which I've never heard in anyone else. He's unequivocally a great rock drummer and any drummer you talk to will say so. Taylor Hawkins from the Foo Fighters - Roger is absolutely the bible to him, and Dave Grohl feels the same as well.
"Roger and I hit it off like brothers, and we've been together the longest, which may be why we fight so much. The sound of my guitar and his drums worked from the beginning. It gelled and it had thet hugeness."
May, Taylor and Staffell (the bassist/vocalist) formed a band called Smile. "It had the beginnings of the magnificence I was after," says May. "We made a record for Mercury of America, which was disastrous. They only pressed about 10 of them. It was thouroughly depressing, business-wise. Tim gave up in disgust and he was within his rights to leave us becaouse he had an offer to join (ex Bee Gee Colin Petersen's group) Humpy Bong, who'd had a hit and been on Top Of The Pops. Roger and I were left with no group. We wondered if we should give up. But then yound Freddie Bulsara arrived on the scene."
Farroukh 'Freddie' Bulsara, alias Mercury, was born on September 5th, 1946, the son of a court cashier from |Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania). His family were Parsees, an ethnic group who had fled their home country of Persia in the 8th century, rather than abandon their |Zoroastrian religion in favour of Islam. In 1955, the Bulsaras sent young Farroukh to St Peter's public school in Panchgani, near Bombay, India, where he was educated until 1963. By then, his parents had been forced to flee Zanzibar settling in England - in Feltham, Middlesex, a few hundred yards from the Mays (unbeknownst to them).
Cut to 1969. Mercury was a friend of Tim Staffell's at Ealing College of Art and had become a fan of Smile. "Freddie was a very big advocate and appreciator of our talents," May recalls. "He had this thing that we were presenting ourselves all wrong. He was into the show as a show, which was a pretty unusual idea in those days because the fashion was that you had to wear jeans and they had to be split and you had to have your back to the audience, othewise it was pop. Freddie had the idea that rock should be a show, that it should give you something that was overwhelming in every way."
"We came together through Hendrix," says Taylor. "When we spoke to Freddie, we discovered we had the same musical tastes. He was a complete Hendrix freak. He once saw him 14 nights in a row, in different pups every time."
Mercury had always been musical, but Taylor recalls that he was by no means the finished article. "Freddie had a natural musicality, it was a real gift, but he had a very strange vibrato when we first met, which some people found rather distressing. But he applied himself and forged his own persona. He invented himself."
To May, Mercury's musical gift was his natural eccentricity. "Freddie wrote in strange keys. Most guitar bands play in A or E, and probably D and G, but beyond that there's not much. Most of our stuff, particularly Freddie's songs, was in oddball keys that his fingers naturally seemed to go to: E-flat, F, A-flat. They're the last things you want to be playing on a guitar, so as a guitarist you're forced to find new chords. Freddie's songs were so rich in chord-structures, you always found yourself making strange shapes with your fingers. Songs like Bicycle Race have a billion chords in them."
He had humour, too - an outrageous, camp sensibility that was one of Queen's most prominent, and controversial, characteristics. But beneath the 'darlings' and the Moet and Chandons lurked a more thoughtful character. "Freddie's stuff was so heavily cloaked, lyrically," May recalls. "But you could find out, just from little insights, that a lot of his private thoughts were in there, although a lot of the more meaningful stuff was not very accessible. Lily Of The Valley (Sheer Heart Attack) was utterly heartfelt. It's about looking aat his girlfriend and realising that his body needed to be somewhere else. It's a great piece of art, but it's the last song that would ever be a hit."
There was one final gift. Keith Richards recently described the Stones' earliest ambitions to me by saying. "We just wanted to turn London into the South side of Chicago." Well, Freddie wanted to turn it into the metropolitan Opera House. Lots of late-'60's , early -70's rockers talked about creating rock operas, but no one had as instinctive an operatic sensibility as Mercury. Perhaps that's what made Queen's songs so popular in Latin countries. It certainly accounts for the way that their most poplular tracks are both as imposing and as hummable as Verdi's best marches or arias. Right from the earliest days, and tracks like In The Lap Of The Gods, Mercury was able to create epic, audience-swaying, singalong chants. BothdLap...and the verse of We Are The Champions are waltzes - perhaps he wanted to turn London into down-town Vienna, too.
The final addition to Queen was John Deacon, a 19-year-old science student, on bass. "We tried a lot of bass players out, "May recalls, "and we came to realise that a bass player wasn't just someone who filled in the low ends. Again, it was lucky, because one of our girlfiends knew someone whose boyfriend was John. So, having been through a lot of hugely thunderous bass players, this quite shy guy turned up with his immaculate Rickenbacker bass and immaculate amplifier, plugged in, and as soon as he started putting bass lines to what we were doing we realised it was right."
As befits such a self-effacing individual, Deacon was less overwhelmed. He later observed he was "possibly the one person in the group who could look at it from the outside, because I came in as the fourth person in the band. I knew there was something but I wasn't convinced of it until possibly the Sheer Heart Attack album."