Mojo Article (5)
Then, of course, there was Live Aid. It's easy to forget that in the run-up to the show, Queen were political pariahs. In October 1984, they visited South Africa and played seven shows at the Super Bowl in the gambling centre of Sun City. It was a breach of the cultural boycott that provoked outrage and disapproval, epitomised by Steve Van Zandt, who created Artists Against Apartheid and recorded ( I Ain't Gonna Play In No) Sun City as a direct response. Roger Taylor admits that, in retrospect, the South African concerts were a mistake. But both he and May stand by the principles that led them to perform there. In Taylor's words, "The black and the white communities were delighted that we'd gone there. We'd had a huge hit in the black market in South Africa with I Want To Break Free and Brian went and presented the Soweto Music Award."
Then, in the spring of 1985, while the band were touring Austalasia and Japan, Bob Geldof approached Jim Beach, by then Queen's manager, asking for them to appear at Live Aid, and adding with characteristic tact: "Tell the old faggot it's gonna be the biggest thing that ever happened." How could he refuse?
"Live Aid was a shot in the arm," remembers Roger Taylor. "We sere so jaded by that point. We didn't think we'd tour again for five years if at all - we'd just had it. But we thought we'd better rehearse a bit, and we ran the whole 17 minutes into one medley of hits: why bore them with something they've not heard before? We didn't have a sound-check, but we sent our brilliant engineer to check the system, so he set all the limiters for us. We were louder than anyone else. I remember being in the audience and hearing the first few acts thinking that I could hardly hear them. You've got to overwhelm the crowd in a stadium."
This was where Queen's middle-class work ethic, and their intelligence, really paid off. As Geldof later put it, "Queen were absolutely the best band of the day. They played the best, had the best sound, used their time to the full. They understood the idea exactly - that it was a global jukebox…they just went and smashed one hit after another…it was the perfect stage for Freddie: the whole world. And he could ponce about on stage doing We Are The Champions. How perfect could it get?" As at Knebworth a year later, the most awesome sight of all was that of the entire audience clapping to Radio Ga Ga. "I'd never seen anything like it in my life," says May. "and it wasn't calculated, either. Everybody thinks that everything about Queen was calculated and sure, some of it was. We weren't stupid. We understood our audience and played to them. But that was one of those weird accidents, because of the video."
Even the original track only had one clap after every repetition of the title-phrase. "But our producer thought it would be nice to put an echo on it
. The video-producer thought, 'Oh, that's nice, a double-clap. We'll have people actually doing it,' because it was a parody of Metropolis. Everybody saw that video, because it was one of our most successful, and then the first time we saw it happen was at Live Aid. And this is not a Queen audience. This is a general audience who've bought tickets before they even knew we were on the bill. And they all did it. How did they know? Nobody told them to do it."
Buoyed up by their triumph, and the massive back-catalogue sales that Live Aid provoked, Queen set out on a massive trek through Europe - the first and only profitable tour in their entire career - in the summer of '86. But not long after that triumph, the three other band members were confronted with the news that Freddie Mercury had AIDS. "We discovered about Freddie in 1987 or '88: we were in Switzerland. We'd all known that something wasn't right, but that really did bring us together, knowing that he was on borrowed time. There was nowhere to run, so we just went on and did what we could. He was getting tragically frail towards the end."
"As soon as we realised Freddie was ill, we clustered around him like a protective shell," May agrees. "We were lying to everyone, even our own families, because he didn't want the world intruding on his struggle. He used to say, 'I don't want people buying our f*****g records out of sympathy.' We all became very close. We grew up a lot."
The two post-AIDS Queen albums were The Miracle in 1989 and then, in February, 1991, Innuendo, which was arguably their best work since A Night At The Opera. "It wasn't one of the more successful, but it was one of the better ones," agrees Taylor. "Freddie and I were very disappointed when I'm Going Slightly Mad wasn't a big hit (it peaked at 22 in the UK): we really liked it."
By then Mercury's illness, though still not officially admitted, was too evident in his appearance, no matter how heavily made-up, to be ignored. Pictures appeared in the tabloid press, showing a desperately thin, hollow-eyed Mercury, his suit hanging off his skeletal frame, en route to lunch with his doctor. The photographer, Jason Fraser, agonised for a fortnight before releasing the shots, rationalising his decision by the fact that Mercury had been in a public place and that his desperate physical condition was a legitimate news story. But when I spoke to Roger Taylor in 1994, he was still upset by the shots. "I saw one full-page picture, grainy as hell, you could tell it had been taken a quarter of a mile away, and I thought, what is the point of that? It's not news. It's just horrible. Catering to the lowest common denominator always works, but it doesn’t mean you have to do it.
"It was tragic that that terrible bloody disease should break up Freddie's career, because he was improving and improving as a singer and a performer. It was just a terrible shame. He felt that he couldn't deliver what was expected of him. I miss him tremendously.
"After Freddie died (on November 24th 1991) I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I threw all my energy and all my persuasive telephonic powers into helping to organise the tribute show. So that was good for about three months and it kept my mind off what on earth I was going to do. I took a holiday for about a year, not sure if I even wanted to be involved in music any more. But then the bug came back and I started writing songs again. I thought if I was going to get back into this very tough business, I might as well write about things that affected me and that I thought were important."
He also joined the other three (I think he means two survivors -author's mistake) survivors to work on Made In Heaven, the posthumous album compiled from unreleased Queen and Mercury tapes: "It took a couple of weeks to get over the sound of Freddie. The worst things were the little spoken ad-libs in between the takes, that was weird. But after a while you know every breath and they cease to be poignant, it's all just part of the material."
Made In Heaven sold more than seven million copies world-wide, including 1.5 million in Germany alone (a platinum album, marking that fact, is hung on the wall of Taylor's studio), proving that Queen's popularity remains as great as ever. The survivors, meanwhile, have to get on with the rest of their lives in the band's shadow. Taylor affects and air of easy-going acceptance: "The power of the brand-name is something you have to accept. I make my solo records mainly for fun." But I suspect that beneath his casual exterior, this ambitious and competitive individual would share Brian May's rueful confession to being frustrated with the obscurity of his solo material: "I think I've done some damn good stuff and some of it warranted wider exposure."
In the final analysis, though, May absolutely stands by his work with Queen: "There isn't one of our albums I'd want to apologise for." Just back from a family holiday in the US, he reports that, "There is an enormous wave of re-acceptance of Queen in America at the moment. I was swamped with people saying how much we had influenced their lives, much more so than over the last few years.
"There seems to be a vast pool of respect for us in the younger bands. Lots of them seem to have us firmly in their library of influences. It includes people that I would never expect like Cypress Hill, who I would have thought were the total opposite end of the spectrum. I went to see them with my son and expected to be reviled backstage and they all clustered round and said how important our stuff had been to them. They used the expression 'closet rock fans'/ And of course there's a lot of rock bands: Guns'N'Roses (whom May once supported as a solo artist) held us in great respect."
I ended my trawl through Queen's back pages certain you'd have to be a seriously devoted fan wholly to agree with May's assessment of their work. But you'd have to be a major-league curmudgeon not to find at least a dozen great songs that inspired affection and respect. Most of all, though, I'm left with one final image of my conversation with Brian May. We were sitting in his kitchen, drinking tea made by him this time. The tape-recorder had been turned off, the notebook put away, when May - with that expression of slightly pained musing that is so characteristic - almost whispered, "You know, I sometimes think that Fred was almost lucky to die when he did." Freddie never had to watch his powers decline, or see the band fade away into obscurity. And, of course, by dying he gave Queen a longer, more powerful lease of life. As he might have said, you know how it is darlings…the show must go on. And on.