EPILOGUE

It’s one of those dead mornings. Even the birds, motionless in the trees, don’t want to whistle and bring it to life. There is a mist out in the distance, rolling from the land to haunt the sea again. This is St’Agnes, a village sculptured from rock in Cornwall. I’m in the company of a delightful but eccentric grandmother. She shows me the church hall where Roger Taylor played with his first band, asks me if I’d like to meet the vicar.

And then I’m lost on a dreary housing estate in Leicester, or is it Feltham. hunting for people who will say. «It’s such a long time ago» or «I can’t remember». I say it doesn’t matter, but it does really. I stop and take a photograph of the youth club where John Deacon played his last concert with The Opposition. The nearby bus queue, all hats and anoraks, ponder whether I’m from the council or an estate agents.

I tried to get to everyone, but it was like collecting sand in a sieve. So many people, hidden somewhere in England or France or the United States, or somewhere else. All with a slant, an insight, an anecdote, a memory bleached by time. As I expected, the surviving members of Queen declined to be interviewed, as did their official representatives. «This isn’t a cash-in. I want to write all sides.» I explained. They’d heard it all before.

Several players in the Queen story are no longer here; many of them Freddie’s dearest friends. Others, however, are still with us, pleased to talk. Queen made a lot of friends, at least in the early days, and this book does not deal with what followed their rise to pop eminence. The greed, sexual gratuity, indulgence, boredom, tension and arrogance that might run parallel to extraordinary fame and wealth is someone else’s story and they’ve probably made enough money from it already.

Any biography is only ever a random assembly of thoughts and recollections, held together by analysis and a perfunctory narrative. This is no exception. It already had its ‘angle’ in its title, so there was no need to resort to scurrility or the inane, or to focus on one band member to the exclusion of the rest.

During the writing of the book I became aware that Queen appeared to have become cool, possibly for the first time ever. New bands namechecked Queen as an influence, some covered their songs. Before Freddie Mercury’s death Queen were a critical joke, a pithy abbreviation of comic iconography. Many critics hold the erroneous conviction that death equals respect and Freddie, were he alive, would cackle (not chuckle) at the irony of Queen’s new standing.

When Freddie wasted away in his bed at Logan Place, Kensington, even the tabloids which had long salivated over his slow death, wrung genuine words of Demotion. The self-assumed sentries of cool, the NMEs and Melody Makers, took longer of course, several years in fact, but Queen, Freddie, the daft songs, the deft songs, they understood that it all had a point, it meant something.

Queen fulfilled the original rock’n’roll elhos: they never grew up. Sure, they became businessmen with a little too much guile, and much of the clandestine shenanigans were distinctly grown up, but the public persona, the bit we got to see. was a perpetual teenager. Freddie Mercury and his disposable razor songs (his term for them) were the child in us all. When Freddie swaggered, preened, gestured and laughed out loud he was the ten-year-old in the playground, the secret self we should never have lost.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 808