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A SILHOUETTE OF A MAN

Posters on bedroom walls, articles in newspapers, venues sold out, people constantly seeking an autograph, songs on the radio - evidence of Queen’s success was everywhere by the beginning of 1975. Naturally, people assumed Queen’s fame was matched by their prosperity. It was bizarre, therefore, that after selling out venues holding nearly 3,000 people they should return to their modest rented flats and houses. Brian May lived in a dreary room in a house in South Kensington, and the only access to it was through a steamy downstairs boiler room. Freddie’s flat was damp with fungus on the ceiling and John Deacon was desperate for money to put down as a deposit on a new house for himself and Veronica.

They petitioned Trident and Norman Sheffield agreed to treble their weekly allowance to p 60 per band member. It was far in excess of the average weekly wage in 1975, but in comparison to the cash coming in via concerts, record sales and publishing royalties it was a pittance. Queen tried to persuade Trident to provide ‘gifts’ as an alternative to cash sums, but Roger Taylor’s request for a car and Freddie Mercury’s for a piano went unheeded.

In its allegedly miserly treatment of Queen, it is easy to perceive Trident as unscrupulous, but the business of finance in the music industry is inordinately complex. Basically, all the money invested by Trident in Queen was recoverable before any profits would be shared out. This meant Queen had to ‘pay back’ Trident for considerable expenses like the recording costs of the first alburn: wages for retainers like Jack Nelson and Tony Brainsby; and sundries like hotel bills on tour, road crew wages and the fee to support Mott The Hoople. From the very beginning Queen had an obsession with professionalism, the best money could buy, and it was usually Trident that paid the high price for this fervent commitment. For example, ‘Sheer Heart Attack’, although funded by EMI and not Trident, cost an estimated £30.000 to record, an immense amount at the time.

Obviously, when the hit singles arrived, Queen were impatient to receive some of the funds they were generating. It was a natural instinct, an assumption fuelled by their friends’ incredulity when they were told of the paltry wage they were receiving. It didn’t seem right, but, in the accounting system used by the music business, it rarely did. Similarly, anyone examining the situation before the hit singles, when Trident was thousands in arrears to a group who were demanding nothing but the best, would have sympathised with the company.

The situation was compounded by the multiplicity of agreements which Queen had signed with Trident. This meant that unlike other artists who could, for example, earn royalties from record sales or song publishing while they resolved a management dispute, practically all of Queen’s income, or lack of it, came via Trident. There was a myriad of technical quarrels and contradictions between Queen and Trident, and indeed between Jack Nelson, Queen and Trident, The contract had been too ambitious from the beginning, far too cloying, but it was only - as in all contracts - when it was tested that the deficiencies came to the surface. At one point, while Queen were arguing earnestly that John Deacon should receive £4.000 to enable him to buy a house for himself and pregnant wife. Trident revealed that Queen actually owed £190.000 to the company.



In retrospect, Trident should have opted to appease the band and pay them more money, if only to protect its investment for a longer period. It refused to budge beyond its offer of £60 per week, however, and so, in December 1974, Queen employed the services of a music business lawyer, Jim Beach, to help extricate themselves from the Trident contract.

Despite the contractual problems, Queen travelled to the United States at the end of January, 1975. to start a lengthy tour that would take in 38 shows, Organised by the well-known British concert promoter, Mel Bush, the tour began in Columbus, Ohio on February S. Fourteen shows later. Freddie was complaining of severe throat pains and a specialist at Philadelphia University Hospital diagnosed nodes and advised him not to sing for three months. He defied the doctor and sang that very night. Another specialist advised Freddie that a rest of a week or two would allow his throat to recover, so Queen restarted the tour on March 5 in Wisconsin.

Like Queen, Jack Nelson had his own brooding altercation with Trident. It would appear that Trident was not deducting a percentage from Queen’s royalty account to direct specifically into a management ledger. This meant Nelson was on a quasi-wage rather than a profit-linked share of the money accrued by Queen. As he had devoted the best part of two years to Queen’s cause, it was understandable that he would feel disappointed. In the music business, unlike almost any other, its players expect to earn money in perpetuity Tor their efforts, not fixed sums (even extraordinarily high ones) for a limited period. Usually managers, A&R staff. producers and even sundry courtiers agree on ‘points’ - a percentage drawn from royalties that often last throughout a group or record’s lifetime. In July 1974, Jack Nelson left the employ of Trident, and consequently, Queen.

Queen were aware that their records had been well received in Japan, but nothing could have prepared them for the response they received when they landed in Tokyo in April 1975. There were 3.000 exuberant fans waving banners, blowing kisses, clicking away with pocket cameras, and the bewildered looks on Queen’s faces revealed the depth of their surprise. Japan had taken to Queen on an unparalleled scale. In the opinion of its youth, Queen were bona fide pin-ups. «Suddenly we vxere stars.» said Brian May. «We’d had some success in England and America, but we hadn’t had adulation and been adored, and suddenly, in Japan, we were pop stars in the same way as The Beatles and The Bay City Rollers, with people screaming at us, which was a big novelty, and we loved it and had a great time.» It ts easy to plot an affinity between Queen’s image and the traditional clothing work by geishas, but this is to overlook the capacity of the Japanese to embrace the new with ingenuous passion.

Queen’s commitment and devotion to their Japanese fans was absolute. Unlike many of their contemporaries they did not pay lip service to the country simply because it was on the other side of the world. Their first Japanese tour embraced several major cities including Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, Fukuoka, Okayama, Shizuoka and Yokohama. Even on this first tour, Japanese film crews, recognising the significance of the band, were making documentaries and some of the venues, like the famous Budokan Hall in Tokyo, held up to 10,000 fans - more than three times as many as Queen’s typical UK venue. Japan, like the US. had phenomenal spending power, and this fact had not escaped Queen, EMI or Trident. Japan and the US together were the two most important ‘territories’ in the world and Queen’s early and determined incursion on this lucrative market was a masterful strategy. It ensured that their income, and marvellous future wealth, was bedded in the most fertile soil on earth.

Time away from Queen was scarce, but early in 1975 Freddie Mercury stole a couple of weeks to work with an aspiring singer/songwriter called Ed Howell. Along with his friend. David Minns, who was managing Howell. Freddie attended a show at the Thursday Club in Kensington where Howell was previewing material from his debut album, the prosaically titled (and deliberately misspelled) ‘Eddie Howell’s Gramaphone Record’. Signed to Warners as a solo performer, Howell had already eked out a modest reputation as a staff writer for Chrysalis Publishing.

The Thursday Club show was beset with problems: the power failed after just twenty minutes and the rest of the set had to be performed acoustically. David Minns, with support from Warners’ charismatic publicity officer, Moira Bellas, had cajoled a good number of celebrities to come to the event and Phil Collins joined Ed on stage to play congas. Freddie also considered taking the stage but respectfully held back, not wishing to possibly eclipse Ed.

After the performance Ed Howell joined David Minns and Freddie who were sharing a table with the DJ Kenny Everett and his wife, Lee Everett. They moved on together to the White Elephant nightclub on the banks of the River Thames. Freddie reassured Ed that it had been a successful show. «I was obviously a bil nervous about meeting him, but I could tell he was a very generous bloke, generous in spirit,» said Ed Howell.

«He was really up about everything and made a bit of a fuss. He was fairly flamboyant in his dress and demeanour but there was a heart beating in there.»

Freddie was particularly captivated by Ed Howell’s song, ‘The Man From Manhattan’. The lyrics had been inspired by the Mario Puzo book. The Godfather Papers, and were written on Howell’s return from a holiday in New York. He was intrigued at the time by the double moral standards of the Mafia and envisaged the song as pop sleaze, with haunting trombones and a muse not dissimilar to The Kinks’ ‘Dead End Street’. Freddie asked for a demo tape of the track and a few days afterwards a limousine called at Ed Howell’s flat to take him to Freddie’s house in Holland Park.

Ed Howell soon realised that his own design for ‘The Man From Manhattan’ was set for burial under Freddie’s avalanche of ideas. «It was difficult for me to maintain the original idea,» he said. «I have worked with quite a few people since but none of them quite like Freddie. He was like a kid in a toy shop. He worked his way meticulously through every note of the song. I vividly remember him sitting at this huge Yamaha grand piano in his flat. He was so keen to work that he had a tape recorder with him when he picked me up in the time and he would be singing ideas into it.».

Word reached Warners, and its staff were understandably delighted to have a fairly established star produce one of their embryonic artists. Budgets had previously been tight (Ed had released three singles which had not charted m the UK) but money was suddenly made available as Warners presumed Freddie’s sanction would stimulate Ed Howell’s career. For his part, Freddie was «just another muso’ when around Ed- «He would turn up in the hmo and dressed as if he was going on stage, dressed to kill I suppose, but that was the way he was. full on. But when we were all sat around the piano in the studio he did his utmost to create an air of equality.».

At Freddie’s request, the recordings took place at Sarm East Studios in Brick Lane, Whitechapel. Two renowned session musicians were hired as a rhythm section, Barry de Souza on drums and Jerome Rimson on bass. Ed Howell played acoustic guitar. Freddie the piano and backing vocals, and Brian May the lead guitar parts. Ed Howell had previously produced his own material in a strictly monitored environment and was quietly astounded by the new modus operandi. Freddie insisted that no one from Warners should visit the studio and expense was no consideration. He would adjourn sessions if he felt the mood was not right and the team, tea boys and tape operators included, would visit one of the celebrated curry houses along the nearby Brick Lane. The studio bill, which was £60 per hour at peak time, was even allowed to run up while Freddie sent someone out to find a bell to be sounded at the very end of the song. The bell arrived late and the party was by then ensconced in another Indian restaurant. The search for the bell and the ‘dead’ hours it created in studio time had cost Warners nearly £400.

Inevitably, Ed Howell «lost’ the song as his own, but remained philosophical. «I had this really concrete idea, the trombones and everything, but it became this Queen thing,» he said. «It was difficult to maintain my identity. It did not go the way I envisaged but Freddie stretched me and it was an important part of my musical development. He was such a professional, so dedicated to what he was doing.» During recordings, with Freddie lost in the vibes, he often quipped to Ed: «If this isn’t a hit we’ll sue someone.»

The song had started to pick up regular radio airplay when the Musicians’ Union suddenly intervened. It had been informed that Jerome Rimso,. an American, was neither a member of the union nor in possession of a work permit. During the Seventies the union was highly proprietorial, sometimes its xealousness actually impeded a musician’s career. Television appearances on influential programmes like Top Of The Pops were lined up but they had to be pulled. Ed Ho well was lett with a single that reached the Top 40 throughout the rest of Europe but failed to chart in his home country. Freddie, to his credit, had freely allowed his name to be associated with the project (indeed, he was very proud of the record), but he was out of touch - enmeshed once more in Queen business -as the record slipped quietly from the public’s grasp. Ed Howell was eventually released from his contract with Warners but continued writing songs for other performers, including Frida Lyngstad Fredriksson from Abba and Samantha Fox. In 1995 he secured the rights to «The Man From Manhattan’ and released it again on his own label. Bud Records.

During the summer of 1975 Queen properly addressed the dispute with Trident, though it was to prove very expensive. In aggregate terms, the corollary of the negotiations was that Queen had to pay Trident severance pay of £100,000 (which was covered by an advance from EMI Publishing) and a one per cent royalty on their forthcoming six albums. Trident, for its part, agreed to relinquish its claim on the band’s management, production and sub-publishing.

Although management heavyweights Don Arden and Peter Crant had shown lukewarm interest, Queen eventually replaced Jack Nelson with John Reid, the Scot who had masterminded Elton John’s remarkable rise to fame. Jim Beach was still working industriously on the band’s behalf and was to remain by their side permanently, dealing with the abundance of financial affairs.

In the midst of this management discord, Freddie worked on a song which was to become a bench mark in the history of rock. The potential for an idiosyncratic and classic song had been there almost from the beginning, indeed many of the elements fully realised on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ were present in skeletalform on ‘Queen’. Before he started on the song, Freddie Mercury had a distinctidea of how it would be arranged. «It didn’t just come out of thin air,» said Freddie.» I did a bit of research, although it was tongue-in-cheek and a mock opera. Why not? I certainly wasn’t saying I was an opera fanatic and I knew everything about it.» f.

It was nearly six minutes long and Freddie faced great pressure to edit it down, especially from John Reid, but he steadfastly refused. He was unsure, however, whether it would be a commercial hit and sought the advice of his good friend, Kenny Everett, who assured him it would be ‘number one for centuries’. «He was very unsure aboul this piece of genius,» said Everett. «It was very odd when you look back on it, because it was so great. It was like Mozart saying. ‘I don’t know if my clarinet concerto is going to take olf. It’s silly really. I mean, it’s got number one written all over it from the first note.».

Ken Testi visited Queen during the recording of’Bohemian Rhapsody’ and hung out with them for a few days. He visited the studio with Roger Taylor to listen to how the song was developing, «They were doing Brian’s overdubs at the time.» Testi recalls. «I was unaccustomed to overdubbing and this backwards and forwards stuff. It was very hard for me to get a handle on it, it was impossible to understand. At the end they played the whole track through to me and I still couldn’t get my head around it. I asked Freddie would anyone play it and he said, ‘Of course they’ll play it, my dear. It’s going to be fucking huge’.»

Delighted to meet up with his old friends again, Ken Testi detected an aura of exhilaration within the group, probably brought about by their disentanglement from the Trident contract. «I especially noticed that Mary and Freddie were lovely together.» Ken said. «She was a lovely woman and always fussing over Freddie. He would ring her from wherever he was and ask her to send over some cotton socks post haste, that kind of thing. They both seemed to have a shared pleasure in other people’s company, they took pleasure in entertaining. They were always able to make an occasion out of humble ingredients. They lived in this first floor bedsit with a tiny kitchenette but had managed to get these really nice plates with a nice design and they couldn’t wait to have people around.»

John Deacon was the newcomer to Queen, at least as far as Ken Testi was concerned, and Ken was interested to know how he was considered by the others. “He was clearly quieter than them, and I asked them what they thought of him,” Ken recalls. «I thought that they might be finding him tough-going, but they had warmed to him very quickly. They were sure he’d stay the course. They said he was a good chap and just what they needed.».

On a drinking session in Putne,. Ken Testi discovered that Roger Taylor had not changed his irregular ways. «It was a real beer and skittles pub.» Ken recalls. «Roger ordered a Mackeson and I said, ‘What did you want to order one of them for?’ He said, ‘Well, no one else is drinking it’. Roger always wanted to be different than everyone else. He would never wear jeans because of that. He was always the one who was going to be the most susceptible to stardom and I’m glad he got what he wanted. I think it mattered most to him.».

Ken Testi returned to Liverpool and submerged himself once more in the music scene. He managed the influential Deaf School which featured Clive Langer, who went on to become a respected producer, rising to prominence chiefly through his work with the band Madness. Ken was also a major figure behind Eric’s, the Liverpool club which played host to the burgeoning new wave scene.

Unavoidably, Testi’s meetings with Queen became infrequent, though the band (minus Freddie) visited a jazz club he was running, during a night off on their 1977 tour. «I met up the next day with Brian May and we had tea and btscuits at the Adelphi Hotel.» Testi remembers. «We went to the Pier Head and sat together on top of a building by a landing stage. It was just me and Brian with his minder walking up and down behind us. I don’t think he really needed the minder, we were miles away from any one. We both had a good heart to heart, it was absolutely lovely. It was rare to find Brian actually seeming happy. He is a gentle soul given to deep thought, I don’t think he’s capable of a flippant answer, but that’s not to say he’s not humourous.» As the two friends walked back towards the waiting vehicle. Ken Testi was overtaken by memories. An image of Queen on stage came to mind, Freddie in full swing, the audience screaming their adoration. He then remembered Freddie sitting quietly in his Liverpool home, patiently teaching his youngest daughter how to play draughts. «Bohemian Rhapsody’ took three weeks to record and in places featured 180 vocal over dubs. It was recorded in separate sections, held together merely by a drum click to keep it in time. Much of the middle section was ‘busked’ with Freddie returning to the studio constantly to add extra vocals.

To accompany the single, Queen decided to shoot a promotional film at Elstree Film Studios. In just four hours on November 10, 1975, and at a cost of P 4.50O, they created the first successful promotional video, and also one of the most memorable. Directed by Bruce Cowers, it borrowed heavily from the cover image created originally by Mick Rock for ‘Queen 2’ but the otherwise eerie, shadowy film had much of its own striking imagery. The degree to which it later planted itsetf on the nation’s psyche was remarkable.

The single was a taster of the band’s forthcoming album. ‘A Night At The Opera’ and the UK tour to promote both records began at the Liverpool Empire on November 14. During the first part of the tour ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ made a fairly unspectacular ascent of the charts, almost as if it was taking the public time to absorb, comprehend, and. finally, enjoy it. It entered the chart at number 47, rose to seventeen, nine, and then, on November 25, while Queen were in a hotel preparing to appear at the Gaumont in Southampton, they learned they had scored their first ever number 1.

Queen, and the four people within the group, had accomplished their dream. The journies which began in a tiny Leicestershire village, in the rich green fields of Cornwall, on the black pitch streets of London’s suburbia, and on the plains of Poona, were now complete. Their passage had taught them much about human nature; greed and generosity, opportunism and perseverance. They had in a few years touched upon emotions and experiences others would take a lifetime to encounter. Simultaneously, their own personalities had been amended in response to this imaginary world they had created within the real world.

The proxy people - publicists, advisors, spokesmen, lackeys - could each relate the authorised, burnished view of the musicians who comprised Queen, but their comments were always at the bequest of the mothership. Perhaps the most sincere commentary of the Queen of December 1975 - number 1 in the charts, their faces, looking out from every television, concert halls packed to screaming pitch - would come from an outsider hidden in the shadows, the obligatory enormous bunch of keys hanging from his belt.

In on-the-road terms, Trevor Cooper was in the lowest caste of all. A roadie for the support group, Mr Big, he was in the metaphorical cheap seats, but the vantage point was ideal for a crystalline view of Queen. «They really were good guys.» he says without hesitation. «They demanded perfection and Freddie would sometimes throw tantrums but it was because he always wanted things to be right. You could tell Freddie was gay by his effeminate gestures but he could swear like the best of them. He’d be ‘fuck this’ and ‘fuck that’ and the next minute he was calling everyone ‘darling’ and having a laugh.» There was confirmation of Queen’s ‘good guys’ status - they let Mr Big borrow their equipment; Brian May paid them the respect of watching them almost every night; no one was ‘chewed off’ in front of anyone else; and Roger Taylor even played football with a handful of roadies using a cabbage at a hotel in Bristol.

In Manchester, at a show at the city’s Free Trade Hall, Trevor Cooper witnessed Freddie’s poise and strength of personality. «I saw him literally shrink this six foot bloke down to an inch,» he recalls. «Queen had just taken the stage and this bloke shouted to Freddie, «You fucking poof, or something like that. Freddie demanded that the crew turn the spotlight on the crowd and find this fella. He then said to him, ‘Say that again, darling’ and the bloke didn’t know what to do. Everyone was laughing. He just had this ability to cream an audience, milk it. If he’d have said take your clothes off, they would have done. He was a showman, one of only very few in the world.».

The tour crew all noted John Harris’ remarkable dedication to Queen. He had remained the ‘fifth’ member of Queen through all the business machinations and his position at the sound desk was as indisputable as Freddie’s at the front of the stage. «That bloke ate, drank and slept Queen,» said Cooper. “It was all he thought about, all he cared about. He didn’t seem to have any other life. He taped every single show and when we were on the tour bus the next day he would be listening to it through his headphones, he was that keen to get it spot-on night after night. If things were going wrong, effects not working or an instrument not sounding right, I think John used to take it too much to heart He seemed to think it was his job to do something about that kind of thing but it wasn’t his fault. The band didn’t give him a hard time, but it was as if nothing else mattered in his life .

Girls were constantly pestering the group, and the roadies shamelessly exploited the situation. They were generally promised that in order to meet the group, they first had to have sex with them. Trevor Cooper had fall sex with eighteen girls during the tour, while a lighting roadie had twenty-four. “And they weren’t dogs either,” insists the rapacious Cooper. “Nowadays we would have been dead Freddie was just unlucky. Queen seemed to be really clean living then, they always seemed to be around their girlfriends. There was no sordid stuff. I only read about Freddie in Hamburg and all that stuff after he died. When I knew him he wasn’t anything like that. Maybe he was trying to get to where he wanted to be and once he got there he changed”.

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ spent nine weeks at number 1 and had sold more than one million copies in the UK by the end of January 1976. ‘A Night At The Opera’ also reached number 1 and within two months had sold 500,000 copies. Only Abba whose ‘Mama Mia’ superseded ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ at the top of the charts, sold more albums than Queen during 1976. The Swedish group lasted until 1983 when, caught hopelessly out of time, the hits dried up and the petty arguments ran to spleen. Queen& They stayed together, grew older, argued occasionally, laughed occasionally, changed with the times, had more hit records, enraptured the world at Live Aid, and then, on November 24 1991, a loathsome disease caused the death of their singer and main songwriter - someone who had never been just a silhouette of a man.


Date: 2015-02-16; view: 1097


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