Mojo Article (3)
In the meantime, the band, now called Queen, started playing live, mixing the London college circuit with dates in Taylor's old Cornish stamping grounds. On August 23rd, 1970, they appeared at the lecture theatre at Imperial College, promoted by a hand-written ad on the college noticeboard. A few months later, on February 20th, 1971, they supported Yes at Kingston Poly: admission 50p.
It would be three years before they released their first album, and as Taylor says, "It seemed like forever. That's why Freddie and I started our stall in Kensington Market. We were selling artwork from some of the students at Ealing. Then we sold Fred's thesis, which was all based on Hendrix. There were some beautiful things - there was Planetscape and he'd written the lyrics of Third Stone From The Sun - things like that are probably worth a lot of money now. Then we went to very old second-hand clothes. We'd get bags of Edwardian silk scarves from dodgy dealers, the place would be full of dust, and take them, iron them and flog them."
When Hendrix died, on September 8th, 1970, the stall closed for the day as a mark of respect. "When we all started sharing a flat," May once recalled, "Fred would bring home these great bags of stuff and say, 'Look at this beautiful garment! It's going to fetch us a fortune!' And I'd say, Fred, that is a piece of rag." But it was the rags that financed the grandiose schemes. "We managed to get some demos done and went round everywhere," says Taylor. "A lot of people were saying they were interested, but nobody was actually signing anything. We were turned down by EMI. Then we signed to Trident Productions, a very happening studio at the time. The Beatles were in there, George Harrison. Bowie did Ziggy and Hunky Dory there, loads of stuff. In fact Freddie and I saw the first Ziggy gig at Friar's Aylesbury. We drove down in my Mini. We loved it. I'd seen him there about three weeks before in the long hair and the dress. Suddenly you saw this spiky head coming on stage. You thought, wha-a-at??? They looked like spacemen."
In a recent Internet interview; Bowie was asked if he had been influenced by Queen, to which he replied, "I doubt it, since Freddie asked me to produce his first album." "Certainly not!" Taylor exclaims. "But David was producing Lou at the time. We were taking the down-time. Literally, they'd be coming up the stairs and we'd be going down the stairs. David probably remembers it slightly differently, but I doubt he was being 100 per cent serious. Knowing David, very little he says is!"
The sessions took place in November 1971. Right from day one, Queen had very specific ideas about how they wanted to be recorded. "From the beginning, we were fighting to get reality into the sound. I remember having this huge argument with some guy when we first started to record, because he wanted to put the guitar amplifier into a sound-absorbing box, so that it wouldn't leak onto anything else, and stick a mic in front of it. He said, 'We can do anything with that, after the event. We can put echo on, make it sound any way you want.' I said, No you can't. It will sound like an amp in a dead box, and it's true.
"We were in a situation where the studio people were our managers, so we had to record at Trident, which was known for its sound. It was a kind of trademark, and it was the exact opposite of what we wanted to be. The drums were all close-miked and covered in sticky-tape to make them dead. We wanted everything to sound like it was in the room, in your face. We had this incredible fight to get the drums out of the drum-booth and into the middle of the studio, and to put the mics all round the room.
"I remember Roy (Thomas Baker) saying that the only way to get a good performance was to play it 50 times over. I said, 'No: the only way is to get the first performance and keep it. I can play it 50 more times, but you'll go back and you'll hear that the first one has something special.' I'm not putting down Roy at all, because he brought a great perfectionism to it and a flawless technical approach. Between the two of us we were fighting the whole time to find a place where we had the perfection, but we also had the reality of performance and sound. And it didn't really happen 'til the second album."
Trident licensed Queen to EMI, but for 18 months, with the album in the can, nothing seemed to happen. May remembers "going on the number 9 bus up to town every day with Freddie to pummel the company into doing something, because we felt that the album had gone cold. David Bowie had risen from Aylesbury to heaven. Groups like Nazereth were all over the radio and we couldn't get our foot in the door."
The first album - simply titled Queen - was eventually released on July 13th, 1973. It was not a hit, but there were a few signs of things to come. Mike Appleton, producer of the hugely influential BBC2 TV show The Old Grey Whistle Test, came across a white-label copy of the album at his office and - completely unaware of the record's identity or that of its makers - put it on the turntable. Side one, track one was Keep Yourself Alive. Appleton liked it so much that he commissioned Phil Jenkinson, who used to set songs to surreal compilations of old movie footage, to put together some accompanying visuals. Appleton: "I just gave it to Phil, and said, Let's put this on. We'll say on the programme that we don't know what the hell or who the hell, but if anyone out there knows, could they please call us. It was a different industry back then!"
"It came in a series of small steps," says Taylor of Queen's rise to stardom. "Our first album sold quite well in America, not huge amounts, but it was the first hint. We built up a small live following and that kept the egos afloat. We used to play a place called the County Ballroom in Taunton. It would be packed, and then we'd go back three weeks later and it would be even more packed. We realised we were getting really good on stage. Then we got the tour support to Mott The Hoople, and that's what we wanted - to get round to the main towns and be seen; we were, and it worked. We developed a following quickly and it was loyal. We didn't support (in the UK) again."
By then, too, they were beginning to develop a distinctive visual image, due in large part to their meeting with the photographer Mick Rock. He had been working with David Bowie, then making Pin-Ups at the Chateau d'Herouville (the legendary Honky Chateau), when Ken Scott suggested he go to meet this new band that had a management contract with Trident: Queen.
At that point, Rock, a 24-year-old Cambridge graduate, was a bigger player in the business than Queen. The four band-members were hugely impressed by his work with Bowie and the fact that he had shot the covers for both Lou Reed's Transformer and the Stooges' Raw Power. As for Rock, "The first thing that struck me was how confident they were. No one knew who they were - I didn't have a clue what their music was like - but they had a sense of their own destiny. They were obviously very intelligent, too, but I'd been spoiled working with David Bowie and Lou Reed, because they were both extremely bright."
The band was a genuine democracy: decisions depended upon majority approval. But, says Rock, "I realised after a while that when it came to the visual end of things, Freddie's opinion was the strongest. He had been trained at art college and designed the band's logo. So he was the one I had to zero in on. They wanted me to extrapolate an image for them. They wanted to be absolutely fabulous." So in December '73, Rock organised a photo session. "They'd never been in a photo studio before," he recalls. "They were very naïve about these things." The result was a set of pictures which showed the band posing topless (and, unless you looked very closely, apparently bottomless, too), pasted in make-up and pouting for all they were worth, in true glam-rock style. If the idea was to get the band noticed, it worked. "The shots created quite a bit of fuss at the time," says Rock. "Everyone started putting them down and they got quite a lot of stick. But those were times when to be hip you had to be queenie - I used to wear mascara and rouge - and of course they weren't gay. Even Freddie was living with Mary Austin in those days."
Aside from the other three members of Queen, Austin was the one constant in and finally the inheritor of the bulk of his estate. As Rock recalls, "They used to live in a little apartment Freddie Mercury's adult life: first his girlfriend, then his personal assistant in Holland Park. I went round quite often for a chat. I'd hang out and have tea and what struck me was that they seemed like a very domesticated couple. Mary was not demanding of the limelight and she was very accommodating of Freddie. She was like a little wife. She'd make tea and bring it in. They clearly had a very close relationship and I have no doubt that there was sexual involvement. But I also have no doubt that Freddie was what one would have called bisexual. Once Bohemian Rhapsody hit, his relationships with men became more overt. But that didn't necessarily preclude dabbling with a lady here or there - I do know of one or two names!"
His analysis of the other three band-members shows that little has changed over the past quarter century. May was both the main co-writer with Mercury and the band's worrier: "He could always see the potential negative side of things." Deacon was very polite, very sweet-natured, but "not a communicator. The limelight didn't seem to mean much to him." As for Roger Taylor, "He certainly had plenty of verbal input and in some ways he was the most traditional rock star of them all. He was the womaniser. And he was the first one I ever talked to about drugs."
Rocks biggest contribution to Queen was the creation of the front-cover imagery to Queen II, which would later inspire the video for Bohemian Rhapsody. The band had told him that the record was to have a Black Side and a White Side, and they wanted photography to match. By chance, Rock had recently been working with the Canadian photography collector, John Kobal, who had paid him in photographs, one of which was a dramatically lit black-and-white shot of Marlene Dietrich, taken from the 1932 film Shanghai Express. One night during the Mott tour, Rock took Freddie aside and said he wanted to use the Dietrich, shot as the basis for the Queen II cover. "Freddie was tickled pink," he remembers. "But the rest of the band were not so thrilled." They wanted to go with a white shot on the front cover and it was only thanks to heavy persuasion by both Mercury and Rock that they were persuaded to change their minds. Which, as it turned out, was an amazingly fortunate decision."
By March 1974, Queen II was out and with it the band's first hit, Seven Seas Of Rhye (a version of which had been included on the first album). By then, says Taylor, "We were finding a certain way of doing things. I remember making Queen II and thinking, this is getting interesting."
May agrees. "I have a great affection for that second album, which never really became a world-beater because it was not perhaps as accessible as Bohemian Rhapsody. But if you listen to things like The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke or Father To Son, all the elements that people loved in Bohemian Rhapsody were there. The third album was Sheer Heart Attack, where we went in the opposite direction and simplified it so that people would damn well find it accessible, which worked…and then with Night At The Opera we just went for it, the whole thing."
"We really got there on Sheer Heart Attack," says Taylor. "It 's still one of my favourites. It's got a lot of fire and it's slightly more streamlined - Queen II is a bit lumbering in places. We were working very hard in the studio by then. There's a song on Heart Attack called Bring Back That Leroy Brown that’s incredibly complex in terms of instrumentation and arrangement - there were countless hours labouring over that. Even the harmonies on Killer Queen took quite a while because we tried all the different inversions of versions and they never sounded right. We must have re-recorded the vocals four or five times."
One witness to the Queen recording process was Gary Langan, who later became a founder-member of The Art Of Noise, but who was then 20 and working as an assistant engineer at Sarm West Studios in Basing Street, just off Ladbroke Grove. He worked with Queen from the mixing of Now I'm Here, on Sheer Heart Attack, through to the recording of News Of The World (Innuendo was also recorded at Metropolis Studios, in Chiswick, of which he was a co-founder). His first job gave him some indication of what was to come, as he gaffer-taped two Revox A77 tape-machines to the control-console to help create a primitive version of the sort of phasing effect that nowadays comes straight from a box. "I remember thinking, This is mad," he says. But he very soon learned that there was always a method to any of Queen's madness. "They'd work really, really hard. The level of professionalism and musicianship was far superior to most other bands at the time." The basic backing-track of drums, bass, guitar and piano (played by Mercury) would be laid down live. Then, says Langan, the real work would begin. "Fred was very rarely away from the console, especially on Night At The Opera. He would sit next to Roy at the console. He and RTB were hilarious. Roy would just egg him on, geeing up the campness.
"The performance was the big thing. There's a performance in each and every one of Queen's backing vocals. They would work so hard at that, and that was what Brian would be striving for, too - the ultimate performance of the solo or guitar-part that he'd written.
"Brian was possibly the slowest. Doing a solo with Brian, you'd just bring in your sleeping bag because it would go on and on. He was completely meticulous, note by note. If he was working on what we'd call a guitar orchestra, he'd have a big picture already there. It wasn't fumbling around - they were extremely focused, all of them. Fred would be as meticulous with his vocals as Brian was with his guitar. They were the two largest amounts of time consumption."