Mojo Article Continued (4)
Queen were now a hit-making band. Seven Seas Of Rhye had made their first ever chart entry on March 9th, 1974, rising to Number 10. And that November - accompanied by an appearance on Top Of The Pops which saw Freddie mincing around in the studio in skin-tight satin pants (he wore them so tight they had to be unzipped before he could sit down) and a waisted fur jacket - Killer Queen rose to Number 2, kept off the top spot by David Essex's Gonna Make You A Star. They toured America, again using a support slot on a Mott The Hoople tour as a spring-board for their own success.
Then, in the spring of 1975, they visited Japan and discovered for the first time what it felt like to get star treatment. Thousands of fans were waiting to meet them at the airport. Huge arenas were sold out. Every TV show wanted them as guests. "We encountered something like Beatlemania there," Taylor recalls. We came back after being demi-gods and playing five nights at the Budokan or something (two, actually) and I went back to my bedsit in Richmond, 120a Kew Road. We were still on 60 quid a week."
The band were increasingly unhappy with their relative poverty - John Deacon, who was now married, had been forced to plead with Trident for the £2,000 he needed to put down a deposit on a house - while their managers were driving around in Rolls Royces. The word got out that they were looking for new representation. The legendary Don Arden thought he might have a chance of getting a contract, especially since Freddie had taken a shine to one of his staff, a man who is now a director of a major record label. According to this employee, Arden offered him £1,000 to sleep with Freddie, hoping that this might secure the deal. The man said no: he was heterosexual. And what's more, he pointed out, he had a girlfriend - Sharon Arden, Don's own daughter.
In the end, there was a gay connection, because the band's new manager was John Reid, who had made his name as Elton John's personal and business partner. Reid proved his worth almost immediately with one simple decision: insisting, despite all arguments to the contrary, that Bohemian Rhapsody should be Queen's next single, the first off their fourth album, A Night At The Opera. Roy Thomas Baker, the man ultimately responsible for assembling the epic, describes Bo Rhap's creation thus: "Freddie was sitting in his apartment and he said, I've got this idea for a song.' So he started playing it on the piano - it had some words missing and there were some bits of melody he hadn't worked out - just the basic framework. Then he stopped and said, 'Now, dears, this is where the opera section comes in.' I went, Oh my God…
"It was going to be a brief interlude of a few Galileos and then we'd get back to the rock part of the song. When we started doing the opera section properly it just got longer and longer, and we added more and more blank tape. Every day we thought, It's done now, and then Freddie would come in with another lot of lyrics and say, 'I've added a few more Galileos here, dear,' and it just got bigger and bigger."
Gary Langhan remembers the recording process well. "I wasn't there for the basic track, because they did that at Rockfield. But then they came to Sarm for all the guitar and vocal work. The song arrived in three sections and they were given funny nicknames - which, sadly, I can't remember - but Fred knew what he was doing. With Queen, unlike some bands, the big picture was very much in place. The reason for being in the studio was to complete this picture, not to make it or design it and I don't think there was ever a feeling that it might not work. That was never in the equation.
"There were technical hurdles to overcome, but they worked through that and got a system of how to do the vocals efficiently and quickly and how you'd do all the marshalling of the tracks. Sarm had 24-track recording, which was very advanced for the time. This was where technology and Fred went together because here was a medium he could use to further his greatness. When 24-track came along it must have Ben like the sun coming out for him, the fact that he could use multi-tracking to do all these vocals."
But even 24 tracks- six times the number available to The Beatles on Sgt. Pepper - were soon used up, as Langan explains. "The drums, the bass and maybe a guide guitar and piano from Fred have got to be 10 or 12 tracks and it only leaves you another 12 to fool around with, which isn't very much when you look at the amount of vocals that are going on. You had to keep bouncing things down without losing the quality of everything, and we couldn't go back a stage. Once you'd gone down a route then nine times out of 10 it would destroy what you'd already done, so you had to make sure that what you were doing was 100 per cent right, because there was no 'undo' button in those days."
Finally, though, the completed Rhapsody was ready for playback. "I can remember the time when we played the mix back from start to finish. I stood at the back of the room and my jaw was on my chest. I just hadn't heard or felt or witnessed anything like this track. It was just amazing. You knew then it was destined for such greatness. It had this whole charisma about it."
The resulting magnum opus was far too long and far too mad to be a conventional single. But once Kenny Everett had pinched a copy of the tape and played it 14 times in two days on London's Capital Radio, and Top Of The Pops had broadcast the revolutionary video that Queen made to promote the song (on the basis that it would be impossible to play live, or even quasi-live on TOTP), it became a phenomenon. The album from which it was taken - A Night At The Opera - was, and is, equally impressive. Wildly eclectic, and yet unified by the band's instantly identifiable sound, it's a perfect distillation of early-period Queen, with May's blistering attack on the band's former managers, Death On Two Legs, complemented by Roger Taylor's auto-erotic wall of sound I'm In Love With My Car and John Deacon's charming (and refreshingly human) You're My Best Friend. There are even a couple of Temperance Sevenesque pastiches - Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon and Seaside Rendezvous - thrown in for good measure.
A Night At The Opera roared to Number 1 on the album charts in December 1975, at the start of a 50-week stay. It made Queen into bona-fide superstars and it left them with an immediate problem: what next? The answer, 12 months later, was: more of the same. A Day At The Races had almost identical album artwork, another Marx Brothers title and a very similar blend of styles. According to Brian May, "We regarded A Night At The Opera and Day At The Races as twins. Some of Day At The Races is a baroque masterpiece - mainly the stuff that I didn't write - and I feel very proud of it.
"One of my favourite tracks is the Millionaire's Waltz, which was recently used in a ballet by the legendary French choreographer Maurice Bejart. It's a great choice because it is so rich in invention. It staggers me, the stuff that Freddie put into it. The bass lines are phenomenal, and listening to what I did on it I can't even remember how I arrived at all that stuff. Sometimes there are 10 different things going on at once - different guitars, with different sounds, going different places. "
"Somehow it all works, but having done it, we looked at it and thought that this was as far as we could go in that direction - so we should go the other direction. We'd already decide that we had saturated ourselves in multi-layered production before the Sex Pistols came along, so (in 1977) we deliberately made News Of The World to go back to basics and find some vitality again. It was viewed as an answer to punk by some people, but we'd arrived at that conclusion all by our little selves."
Just in case they should be tempted to revert to their old ways, the Pistols were working next door. "We'd looked at each other with real distrust," Roger Taylor remembers, "but strangely enough we became quite friendly. The drummer and guitarist were very down-to-earth guys, but Johnny had a big charisma about him." And then, of course, there was Sid Vicious - or 'Mr Ferocious', as Mercury used to call him.
The second track on News Of The World was We Are The Champions, a song that has since become both an anthem and a source of critical and political disgust. Taylor's view of the lyric is that it shouldn't be taken at face value. "No time for losers," he says, "is a silly line, but it wasn't written seriously. It was a throw-away."
May, as one might expect, has a rather different take. Pointing out that We Are The Champions was the one song in Queen's repertoire that always worked live, anywhere in the world, no matter how much of a disaster the rest of the show had been, he says, "You can read it as pure arrogance. But in concerts there are no losers and the losing streaks in ourselves are forgotten, so it works as a self-affirming thing. I remember saying, Your can't do this, Fred. You'll get killed. He just said, 'Yes we can'"
By now, success was starting to impose strains on the members of Queen as four intelligent, egotistical men began to pull in different directions. Money was a constant source of conflict: immense resentment was caused by the cash earned by Roger Taylor when I'm In Love With My Car was used as the B-side to Bo Rhap, for example. And the creative arguments within the group that had long acted as a form of quality control became ever more venomous. Increasingly, Mercury would be in one studio laying down vocal harmonies, while May toiled ion his multi-layered guitar solos somewhere else, neither one talking to the other.
Roger Taylor agrees that by the time Jazz was released in November 1978, the band were less hungry, less fresh, and increasingly jaded. Worse was to come as they settled down at Munich's Musical studios in the spring of 1980 to record the tracks that would become The Game. "We went through a bad period in Munich," admits May. "We struggled bitterly with each other. We were all frustrated with each other. I remember John saying I didn't play the kind of guitar he wanted on his songs. We all tried to leave the band more than once. But then we'd come back to the idea that the band was greater than any of us. It was more enduring than most of our marriages."
Ironically, this period of creative stagnation saw Queen enjoy their greatest triumphs in the US as both Crazy Little Thing Called Love and Another One Bites The Dust hit the top of the singles charts and The Game became a Number 1 album. They wee able to sell out four straight nights at Madison Square Gardens, but it was to be a short-lived phenomenon. A combination of factors - a switch of contracts from Elektra to Capitol; the failure of the movie Flash Gordon, for which they had written the soundtrack, and the mass-market disapproval of Freddie's increasingly obvious gayness - ensured that there would be a 10-year gap until their next top 5, The Show Must Go On. Their last-ever US show was on September 15th, 1982, at the Los Angeles Forum, "I remember suddenly realising that we weren't packing them in quite as much as we used to," Taylor recalls.
"We always assumed that we would go back," says May, "but events overtook us. I know Freddie was very keen for that last album (Innuendo) to be accepted in the States. But we never got there and even the impact of Freddie's death wasn't anything like as big as the impact of Wayne's World. It wasn't the same as in Europe."
But at the very point when they lost their North American audience, they found an even more fanatical following in South America. Something about their music crossed boundaries of language and culture. As May puts it, "There was always some place where we where shit-hot and we could go and be ourselves and not worry."
Their work, though, became increasingly unreliable, culminating in 1982's Hot Space, an unsuccessful attempt to turn into an R&B dance act. By now, Mercury in particular was leading a life of unbridled hyperpromiscuous decadence. Then, in the mid-80's, Queen suddenly rediscovered themselves as a hit-making act. Their brand of polished pop-rock was now the staple form of radio and video product: from Duran Duran to Foreigner to Def Leppard, bands who had clearly been influenced by Queen's grit-free sound were topping the charts. And now the technology existed to create, at the simple touch of a button, the effects over which they had laboured for months. Even more importantly, just as the hits began to dry up for May and in particular, Mercury, so Deacon and Taylor found their voices as songwriters.
It was Deacon who wrote the stripped-down Another One Bites The Dust (Queen's biggest-selling single ever worldwide, exceeding even Bohemian Rhapsody, it was also funky enough to be sampled by Grandmaster Flash), put the bass line (again, much sampled) onto Under Pressure, and then came up with I Want To Break Free. Taylor, meanwhile, contributed Radio Ga Ga, It's A Kind Of Magic and One Vision. Love them or loathe them, these were massive hits, hitting sections of the marketplace that Queen had never come close to before.
More to the point, they emphasised a unique aspect of Queen's career: they are the only four-piece band in rock history which contained four individual songwriters each capable of writing chart-topping material. So if ever one band-member was running low on creative gas, there was always someone else to take over in his place.
Even so, there was an increasing sense within the band that the scale of their success had seriously diminished the motivation that had once been so strong. John Deacon: "When we first started, we were very future-thinking. We wanted to do this, or go there. We wanted our albums to be successful here, there, and everywhere and we worked really hard at it. But once we'd achieved that and been successful in so many countries in the world, it took away some of the incentive."