Queen Read online

  “The concept of Queen is to be regal and majestic.

  Glamour is part of us, and we want to be dandy.”

  —FREDDIE MERCURY

  QUEEN

  THE ULTIMATE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE CROWN KINGS OF ROCK

  by

  PHIL SUTCLIFFE

  with

  PETER HINCE

  REINHOLD MACK

  MICK ROCK

  BILLY SQUIER

  and

  ROBERT ALFORD

  MELISSA BLEASE

  JON BREAM

  JOHN BUCCIGROSS

  GARTH CARTWRIGHT

  STEPHANIE CHERNIKOWSKI

  STEPHEN DALTON

  JIM DEROGATIS

  HARRY DOHERTY

  DAVID DUNLAP JR.

  ANDREW EARLES

  CHUCK EDDY

  GARY GRAFF

  DAVE HUNTER

  GREG KOT

  ROBERT MATHEU

  JAMES MCNAIR

  JEFFREY MORGAN

  DANIEL NESTER

  SYLVIE SIMMONS

  CONTENTS

  1 Foreplay: The Making of Queen

  2 The White Side And The Black Side

  3 A Little High, A Little Low

  4 Music And Love Everywhere

  5 Making The Rocking World Go ’Round

  6 Playing The Game

  7 Under Pressure

  8 Break Free

  9 Want It All

  10 Goodbye Everybody—I’ve Got To Go

  11 Carry On, Carry On

  Selected Discography And More (Also Selective)

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Contributors

  Index

  FREDDIE MERCURY, EH? Remember him, imagine him, picture him. From the black, skin-tight bodysuit slashed to the waist, the black nail varnish, and the posturing of the early ’70s—a Baryshnikov, a stallion, a satyr, a centaur—to the cropped hair, the gay moustache, the ironic eyebrow raised, the ermine, and the crown of the mid-’80s. Then bow down in unworthy awe, if that’s your inclination. Or shake your head and roll your eyes if it’s all too much. Or, if what you see somehow hits the spot, just laugh and cry and sing along.

  You could never ignore Freddie Mercury. Even when he was a nobody with nothing to declare, this fundamentally shy and secretive man could stride down the King’s Road, London, flaunting a red velvet suit with fox-fur trimmings—so like a star that everyone asked, “Hey, who’s that?”

  First reported flyer for a Queen gig, August 21, 1971, Tregye Country Club, Carnon Downs Festival, Truro, U.K. Courtesy Ferdinando Frega, Queenmuseum.com

  Although a reconstructed Queen has gone back out on tour in recent years fronted by master singer Paul Rodgers, Mercury’s magnetism is the sine qua non of Queen’s eccentric rock ’n’ roll immortality. The band comprised four remarkably diligent and ambitious musicians—gifted songwriters who each wrote smash hit singles—but they would never have established a place in the cultural memory without the catalyst, the firestarter, the stadium bestrider that was Freddie Mercury.

  Early handbill, 1973.

  Not surprising that while May, Taylor, and Deacon grew up in a mundane London suburb and small-town Cornwall and Leicestershire, respectively, winged Mercury blew in from Zanzibar.

  Ian Dickson/Redferns Collection/Getty Images

  THE GUITARIST

  Brian Harold May lived a noisy life from the cradle. Born on July 19, 1947, and growing up in the outer-London sprawl of Feltham, Middlesex, amid the bedlam of aircraft taking off and landing at London Airport (now Heathrow), the skies always mattered to him. His favorite comic-strip hero was The Eagle’s Dan Dare, “pilot of the future.” His father, Harold, a World War II fighter-bomber radio operator, became a draftsman for the Ministry of Aviation. Bonding via DIY and a fascination with BBC TV’s new astronomy program, The Sky At Night, presented by the engagingly hyperenthusiastic Patrick Moore, father and son built a telescope together (May still uses it).

  Harold played ukulele too. Brian liked it so much his parents bought him an acoustic guitar for his seventh birthday. Captivated by The Tommy Steele Story, a 1957 (auto)biopic starring England’s own cheeky Cockney rock ’n’ roller, he built his own old-fashioned crystal radio (with his father’s help) and started buying 45s: U.K. skiffle king Lonnie Donegan, and Americans Connie Francis, the Everly Brothers, and Buddy Holly. Naturally analytical, in a 1991 interview for Q magazine May told this writer that he studied Holly’s backing group, the Crickets: “I wanted to know how the harmonies worked, what made one harmony affect you in a certain way.”

  May contrived a DIY amplifier for his acoustic by hooking it up to his dad’s homemade radiogram, a wooden furniture like console featuring a radio, turntable, and speakers. He loved the sound and asked his father and mother, Ruth, for a proper electric guitar. They said it would cost too much. “We were really close to the breadline. My mother used to secrete sixpences in jars to try and pay the gas bill,” May told Ian Fortnam in an unpublished interview later posted to rocksbackpages.com in 1998. So Brian and his father built one.

  1984, circa 1967. From left: Tim Staffell (vocals), Dave Dilloway (bass), Richard Thompson (drums), John Garnham (guitar), and Brian May (guitar).

  The rightly renowned “Red Special,” which May still plays, was “a matter of being poor. We set about it with files and chisels and penknives”—and a piece of a friend’s discarded mahogany mantelpiece, some mother-of-pearl buttons, a knitting needle, and motorbike valve springs. Only the pickups cost money. They finished the job in eighteen months, by fall 1963.

  Early the following year, with friends that included guitarist Tim Staffell, May formed a band called 1984. “It mainly came from shyness,” said May. “I thought, If I was up there I wouldn’t have to deal with always being rejected by women.”

  The band embarked on four years of going nowhere. While they played covers at minor local gigs, May felt alternately inspired and deflated by the Beat Boom greats who appeared most weekends at clubs within a few miles of Feltham in Eel Pie Island, Richmond, and Twickenham.

  Every touring band needs an Isetta. A cagey Brian May and members of 1984.

  U.S. promo copy of the Smile single “Earth” b/w “Step On Me” (1969), which was never released commercially. Courtesy Ferdinando Frega, Queenmuseum.com

  “We used to see The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, and The Who at The Crawdaddy [in Richmond] and that really affected us,” he said. “1984 had been into the technicalities and a bit scornful of the blues. But Clapton and The Yardbirds were about raw sex and anger, and with The Who it was total anarchy and destructive power—frightening. Then Hendrix . . . I thought I was pretty damn good, but when I saw him at the Saville Theatre [central London, probably January 29, 1967] I couldn’t believe it. Deep jealousy, that was my first emotion. That period felt like the beginning of Creation. Suddenly, amid all the drug culture and peace and love, people were discovering that when you turned a guitar up to max it had a life of its own. It was so new and dangerous, wonderful to be a part of it.”

  Meanwhile, despite his father’s constant worry that he would sacrifice his academic future to rock ’n’ roll, May proved an exemplary schoolboy; he left in summer 1965 with such good grades in Advanced-levels maths, applied maths, additional maths, and physics that Imperial College, London, awarded him a scholarship to study physics, which led to him specializing in infrared astronomy (Imperial’s staff boasted four Nobel Prize winners in physics at the time).

  May and Staffell (by then studying at Ealing College of Art in West London) started growing their hair and writing their own songs, while adding Hendrix’s “Stone Free” and Eddie Floyd’s “Knock On Wood” to their covers repertoire. But the Summer of Love year ended grimly for 1984. As Staffell told this write
r in 2005, a would-be whiz-kid manager “kitted us out with furry Afghan waistcoats, velvet with little mirrors all over them, crushed velvet loons, platform shoes, makeup.” He got them on a huge Christmas show at London Olympia, overnight December 22–23—way down the bill to Pink Floyd and Hendrix. May would always remember “plugging into the same stack that Hendrix had plugged into. It sounded like the whole world when he played through it. For me, it sounded like a transistor radio,” he told Fortnam. After 1984 performed to the largely unconscious at 5 a.m., they came off to find their wallets stolen from the dressing room and their van towed away by the police.

  Discouraged, May left the group early in 1968 to concentrate on his BSc final exams. That summer the Queen Mother presented his degree in a ceremony at Royal Albert Hall. His results were so outstanding that Britain’s premier astronomer, Sir Bernard Lovell, offered him a job at Jodrell Bank Observatory near Manchester. But he turned it down, preferring PhD studies at Imperial instead. “I had this burning thing inside me, knowing I wanted to play the guitar,” he later explained, and London was the place to do it. That fall he and Staffell began again. With a new name, Smile, and Staffell moving to bass and lead vocals, May pinned an ad to the students’ union notice board: “Brilliant Drummer wanted for Heavy Guitar band—must be able to play like Mitch Mitchell, Ginger Baker, Keith Moon.” Challenging.

  Roger Taylor replied.

  THE DRUMMER

  He came from way out in the sticks—naturally, given his father Michael’s work for the Potato Marketing Board. Roger Meddows Taylor (the middle name a family inheritance) was born on July 26, 1949, in a village, Dersingham, Norfolk, near the East Anglian coast. Oddly enough, he was welcomed into the world by the Queen, who was opening the new maternity wing at West Norfolk and Lynn Hospital (this was Queen Elizabeth, who later became the Queen Mother and, in due course, presented May with his degree). The family first moved ten miles to King’s Lynn, then, when Taylor was eight, right across the country to a similarly small town, Truro, in Cornwall, England’s most western county.

  The Reaction, circa 1966.

  © Michael Putland/Retna UK

  He began his musical career that very year, thrashing ukulele in a diminutive skiffle group sweetly named the Bubblingover Boys. “When I was a really young kid, I was inspired by Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard,” Taylor once recalled.

  Always clever in class, if not diligent, in 1960 Taylor won a scholarship to the ancient Truro School. But he already had an instinct for percussion. He told Robert Santelli for Modern Drummer in 1985 that his father found him an old snare drum, then a cymbal, then bought him a secondhand and cheap Ajax kit for his Christmas present in 1961. Roger saved up for a high-hat about two years later. The entire ensemble cost about £12—even less than May’s “Fireplace” guitar. When he joined local group Cousin Jacks, though, he started on guitar.

  Sadly, Taylor’s parents separated in 1964. After that, he lived with his mother, Winifred, who told Jacky Gunn and Jim Jenkins, authors of Queen: As It Began, that “Roger was so ambitious and his confidence was immense. He just knew that one day he would make a name for himself and be living in London.”

  He certainly showed a touch of quiet pushiness when, the following year, he started drumming with the top band in Truro, Johnny Quale & The Reaction, purveyors of Elvis, Roy Orbison, and Beatles covers. Within a few months, Taylor replaced Quale as leader and singer. Although he remained on the drum stool, over the next couple of years he urged the Reaction in the general direction of his heroes, “Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, and Bob Dylan. Archetypal influences I suppose, but why not?” The Reaction covered them all, and Taylor’s drumming strove to combine the influences of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Mitch Mitchell and Keith Moon, who bedazzled him when the Who played Camborne Skating Rink on October 15, 1965. Taylor even experimented, Moon-style, with pouring lighter fuel on a cymbal and setting fire to it.

  Taylor finally pulled off his longed-for move to London in September 1967. After scoring useful A-level grades in biology, chemistry, and physics, he accepted a place in the London Hospital medical school’s dentistry degree course—not his passion, but he wanted the student grant. His first year proved uneventful, though. Come summer, he was back in Cornwall, co-promoting so-called “happenings” (the Reaction plus psychedelic light show) in a marquee on the rugged, undeveloped beach at Perranporth.

  However, the new university year turned the trick. May’s ad naming Mitchell and Moon as inspirations caught the eye of Imperial student Les Brown, Taylor’s Truro pal and flatmate in Sinclair Road, Shepherd’s Bush, West London. He passed it on, and Taylor wrote a letter introducing himself. A musical relationship that’s lasted forty years and counting took moments to fall into place.

  The audition lodged in May’s memory: “I went to the Imperial jazz room, which I’d booked for the evening, and Roger was there already, hitting the skins, fiddling around, turning knobs. I said, ‘What’re you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m tuning them.’ I’d never seen a drummer do that before! I was impressed. He’d got great energy, but he was very neat too, particularly with the snare drum; he’d do these ththththrump things which started and finished very cleanly and precisely on time. Immediately, the sound of my guitar and his drums had that hugeness. We hit it off like brothers too. . . .”

  Tim Staffell added, “Roger was confident and flamboyant. Funny, too. I said, ‘We want to be loud, but we want to be intelligent.’ Vocal harmonies and the power trio thing. So Roger was it!”

  Smile debuted at Imperial that October 26, supporting Pink Floyd (probably the night May met his long-term girlfriend and future wife, Chrissy Mullen). Taylor organized their next couple of gigs back home—hence the billing: “Smile Featuring The Legendary Drummer Of Cornwall.” After the long journey, friends and family would always put them up for the night.

  Still studying, though, the band couldn’t rehearse and gig regularly, so they remained in a state of flux, which May sometimes found depressing—especially because, just before their own first gig, they’d seen an early Led Zeppelin show, at the Marquee, London, on October 18. “I felt sick because they’d actually done what we were trying to do, only a lot better,” said May. “Zeppelin and Jeff Beck defined what everyone else was blindly trying to get to.”

  Soon they encountered one persuasive reason to be cheerful. Early in 1969, May and Taylor met an Ealing College classmate of Staffell’s named Freddie Bulsara. Noting a shared enthusiasm for glam silk scarves and fur coats (though only Bulsara had black-varnished nails), they talked at length. “We came together through Hendrix,” Taylor told David Thomas in the August 1999 Mojo. “Freddie was a complete Hendrix freak. He once saw him 14 nights in a row in different pubs. . . .”

  Before long, the four were flat-sharing in Ferry Road, Barnes, an otherwise posh southwest London suburb where May and Staffell, strumming away in the front room, unwittingly wrote the first Queen song, “Doing All Right.”

  THE SINGER

  Farrokh Bulsara came to rock ’n’ roll from a different planet. Born to Parsee Indian parents on the East African island of Zanzibar on September 5, 1946, he grew up in the Zoroastrian faith and an old British colonial setting. His father, Bomi, was a cashier at the courthouse; his mother, Jer, ran the household and domestic staff (their daughter, Kashmira, was born in 1952). When Farrokh—the correct spelling, judging by the handwritten birth certificate—was eight they decided to send him to an Indian boarding school, St. Peter’s in Panchgani, a hill station about fifty miles from Bombay (now Mumbai). At least it was close to his maternal grandparents and aunt, with whom he’d spend breaks and holidays if he didn’t go home to Zanzibar.

  The adult Freddie (he was given the nickname by classmates at St. Peter’s) reflected to Melody Maker’s Caroline Coon in 1974: “My parents thought boarding school would do me good, dear. I look back and think it was marvelous. You learn to look after yourself.” You also learn a very English accent, which later helped Freddie
keep his origins lowprofile. But he did experience the notorious boarding-school hazards; he told NME’s Julie Webb, also in 1974, that he’d been regarded as “the pretty boy” or “arch poof” and “had the odd schoolmaster chasing me. . . . I’ve had my share of schoolboy pranks. I’m not going to elaborate further.”

  Apart from the pranks, he pitched in: choir, dramatic society, learning piano, sport—he told Queen biographers Gunn and Jenkins, “I could sprint, I was good at hockey and just brilliant in the boxing ring, believe it or not!” (His father wrote to the school to discourage this last activity.) What’s more, he and his friends had access to a Dansette record player with a stack of pop 45s. Jer Bulsara told The Times in 2006 (she was eighty-three) that after watching Elvis Presley on TV during a vacation he vowed, “‘I’m going to be like him one day.’ Farrokh always wanted to be a showman.”

  At twelve, Freddie formed a beat group called the Hectics. At school dances he pounded piano through covers of Elvis, Little Richard, Fats Domino, and British rock ’n’ roller Cliff Richard. His return to Zanzibar in 1962, at his own request, interrupted his band life for several years, it turned out.

  By then the colonial idyll had waned. Zanzibar gained independence in December 1963. The following month, a revolt by the African population against the Arab-dominated regime saw Indian residents caught between factions. The Bulsaras packed two suitcases and fled. Jer remembered an excited Freddie, full of “swinging London” pop star dreams, exclaiming “England’s the place we ought to go, Mum!” But for her—and Bomi, already in his fifties—the enforced migration proved “very hard.”