04-XX-1978 – Creem
Queen’s Royal Flush
by Penny Valentine
Roger Taylor: We Will Trump you!
“Blokes in the audience…think he (Freddie) is just weird, very weird.”
QUEEN HAD been successfully oversold before I got a chance to catch up with them. Flamboyant success, Freddie Mercury’s endless egomanic conversations printed in full in the press, records that surely bore more the hallmarks of solid calculation than inherent honest rock and roll…you could admire the manipulation but you didn’t have to like the results. By the time I became curious enough to find out what all the fuss was about I’d already made my assessment – they might impress with their live work in terms of effect, but I wasn’t going to like what they stood for.
Nearly two years ago in Birmingham, watching them from the side of the stage, I made a peculiar discovery. I didn’t like or understand them any better but what startled was the surprising innocuousness of it all. They were so polite, so clean and nice. Roger Taylor says now they can be very rude to people; he quotes Freddie Mercury’s recent run-in (resulting in a verbal triumph, at least, for Mercury) with Sex Pistols Rotten and Vicious. Even so, my immediate expectations of Queen being violently outrageous were quashed. Brian May, grimly concentrating, could be heard actually counting into his guitar solo; was heard apologizing to Mercury when they accidently bumped together during a particularly zealous Mercury twirl. And Mercury himself, this supposed doyenne of sexual stage acrobatics; his ballet-dancer muscles bulging through his all-in-one unzipped cat-suite, reverted to nothing more threatening than a holiday camp leader once the music stopped. He extolled the audience to enjoy themselves, he wanted everybody to be happy, he even said things like “jolly good” in a frightfully British way. Despite the pouting and bum wiggling, Mercury appeared oddly asexual.
“That’s a very good way of describing his effect,” said Roger Taylor thoughtfully. “I think Freddie’s appeal on stage is exactly that, it’s the way he comes across. At the start it used to be that blokes in the audience really identified with him in a strange way, but later…well mostly they think he’s just weird, very weird.”
Pete Brown, the band’s co-ordinator, told me that I ought to see some of the mail that comes in for Freddie. Very strange. “I told you about the one that…” he said to Taylor who nodded in my direction. The conversation suddenly lurched to a halt. “The thing is,” said Taylor hurriedly, “that they don’t quite know what he’s all about – let’s face it, he has got more and more preposterous on stage!”
Overt show business stage presence and ornate records have been Queen’s path to success. Taylor doesn’t deny it, although he frowns on any critical tie-up between stage and recorded work which he doesn’t see as calculated: “Although I agree that our recording sessions aren’t spontaneous – there’s a lot of work and planning that goes on. That’s one of the reasons I cut a single last summer, just for a bit of fun.” (He put out ‘I Wanna Testify’ in England and Europe and recouped his 5000 pound recording costs.)
Taylor, a founder member of Queen, has a very clear idea of what the group was to stand for when it started, what traps it fell into on the way up, and why the band have such an insular image and can come across as self-obsessed and money minded. Taylor is a carefully calculated interviewee. Physically he resembles Rod Stewart under shock treatment.
When I spoke to him the band had just returned from a two month U.S. tour where they had finally managed to crack the South: “Very important,” said Taylor knowledgably. “And very difficult – it’s culturally divided from the rest of the States.”
They are only the third British band that’s managed to do it, said Brown. “The Who didn’t, Zeppelin and the Stones did.”
News Of The World was about to be certified gold and ‘We Are The Champions’ was doing quite well. This was January; the album had been out six weeks. Everybody seemed very pleased.
News Of The World was a risk, Taylor emphasized. A calculated one? “Mmm perhaps. The thing was that Day At The Races had not sold better than Night At The Opera and that was worrying. It hadn’t sold less, just not better, and that didn’t seem the way things should be going. In retrospect I can see why now but at the time I thought it was the most brilliant thing we’d done.”
Of course let’s remember that we’re talking here not about the odd meagre hundred thousand, but four or five million at a time – don’t such figures become unrealistic? “Oh well they’re meaningless in a way, they’re just the relative values of what we’re working with,” he shrugged. “Really it’s an appreciation of how many people enjoyed the album, not just how much money you’re going to make because you’ve sold so many records. When we first started I don’t think we realized when the moment came we made money – after all it’s such an indirect process in this business. I mean for so many years you seem to be in debt, then you see all these telephone numbers, meaningless figures, fortunes you have to pay back…You never seem to have any money of your own for years and it takes a while to realize because you don’t see the green ones, you don’t get it in used pound notes.
“You know,” he said, laughing: “Freddie has absolutely no idea about money, the value of it or anything. He knows once he didn’t have it and now he has credit cards, but I think the only time he’d know he didn’t have any money again would be if a machine chewed up his credit card – and he still wouldn’t understand.”
Queen currently run as one of the biggest groups in the world. America, Japan and Australia are their biggest markets in terms of million dollar sales. They have a permanent road crew of six – one of the few bands who keep a salaried crew even when they’re not working. If they do seem obsessed about making money out of all this, said Taylor, a lot of that goes back to the early days when they worked just as hard and saw nothing. You learn, he nods, and you get very suspicious, and the group turns in on itself more and more as a result.
January seemed a time for change. There’s a rumor that the band may well settle in America which Taylor evaded talking about, though he admitted that the next 18 months have already been mapped out for a “world tour.” Management changes are also in the air. For nearly three years they have been managed by John Reid, who negotiated them out of their messy early problems and laid the way clear for them to fully capitalize on their major British following. It was a deal similar to the one he made for Elton John at roughly the same stage in his career. The split, said Taylor in good press release jargon, “is very amicable on both sides” – what Reid and the band gave to each other at the start was exactly what they both needed and now, it seems, each need is different.
It seems obvious a new management company would function solely round the band, meeting only their needs, having only their interests at heart. It’s symptomatic of what the band wants – just like the highly efficient fan club run on solid business lines which was set up initially to control the enormous publicity rip-offs the band saw happening all over the world. Complete control?
“It may sound quite a selfish attitude. But it’s the only way you can take things away from the corporate structure of record companies and all those things that interfere with you. You need power and to have power to wield you need success as a lever. You attain that and use it to get as much as you can.
“Eventually it’s down to the four of us – backs against the wall – as it always has been. But, I agree, it’s better to employ people than to work for someone bigger than yourselves. That doesn’t mean we’re power mad, but I’m sure it works out better for everyone. It does mean we can eventually have our own way artistically and financially. It’s what the Beatles wanted with Apple.
“On the other hand,” he frowned, “We’re NOT four young businessmen of the year, we’re – we started off as rock musicians and we still are. But you have to be alert in this business. That’s a lesson born out of experience with us. I don’t mean to sound bitter but…at the end of all this you do have to come out with something. It’s the freedom to do what we want, whatever that something is. At the moment we’re still entertaining people and I don’t think our time’s come yet when we want to do more than that. But it will, and then we have to be able to get on and do that for ourselves without anyone else being involved in that decision.”
So despite all the charges laid on them, the images they evoke, Queen basically see themselves as just “entertainers”? “Of course,” emphatically. “Good grief – that’s all it comes down to with everyone, isn’t it? I don’t think there’s anyone who’s heightening people’s consciousness right now. I think we’re making good music and entertaining people and our concerts are a form of escapism and that’s how it should be. For now. Of course there are people who come along and heighten the level of popular music – Dylan, John Lennon, Hendrix – and it would be great if eventually we could do something that important.”
Punk music isn’t even halfway to doing just that? “I don’t know, let’s see what happens. At the moment it’s suffering from all the worst symptoms of hype and the oldest plagues of the business possible. It’s so much crap right now. I like raw rock ‘n’ roll mind you, and I like the Sex Pistols album but…there’s nothing new, it doesn’t mean much at the moment.”
When Queen first started, said Taylor, they knew what they wanted to be: a heavy band with balls who managed to combine that with melodic harmonies. Since then success, what people see in them musically and collectively, press reaction – specifically in Britain where it’s been fairly lethal – may have partially moved them away from that premise. Last year there certainly was a crisis point:
“We got very insular, shut off, self-protective. It wasn’t just the press thing – that niggles you, but when you can see it obviously doesn’t effect album sales you stop worrying. I mean Queen is a band people either love or hate with a vengeance, that’s okay. Basically I suppose we had too much time on our hands. We were holed up in England and we’re always at our most depressed when we’re not working. We got a bit fed up and lacking in inspiration. We couldn’t decide as a group whether we should do more touring or less – everyone had different ideas. Personally I’ve always enjoyed being on the road but sometimes the others go off the idea. Sometimes Brian decides it’s hell, Freddie’s the same – other times they love it. Now we realize that we need to be out there working.”
To come out of that period and cut a track as ego-filled as ‘We Are The Champions’ seems the height of cheekiness.
“Certainly it’s a very ego-centric song. We thought ‘well it may be but – sod it.’ But really you know it’s meant to be a collective ‘we’ – meaning us, the audience, whoever’s listening. It’s not meant to say ‘we are the best fucking group so up you,’ more a sort of general bonhomie, a ‘let’s all rejoice’ feeling.” He smiled, satisfied with his explanation.
Still these days it doesn’t seem to surprise him as much as it once did that Queen may, in some quarters, be considered one of the most self-indulgent group around; a bunch of self-satisfied posers.
“Of course it stops you being taken as a ‘serious’ musician, and that’s a drag and there is some permanent damage in that quarter as far as the British press is concerned. But I think we’re much less ‘gimmicky’ now than we ever were. We definitely went for effect and got a lot of flak for that. But at the same time we had a lot of people coming to see us simply because what we did was effective. We decided to calm it all down, because we did get quite extreme at one point and felt we should prove we didn’t have to rely on the smoke bombs and stuff.
“When we started the visuals were a natural part of us – inherent exhibitionism! But I didn’t realize how some people would see that. Quite a lot of people who are close to me now originally thought I was a complete prat…I remember I had to get over this Queen barrier, which I had never realized existed. I suppose I was pretty naive not to imagine people had very strong opinions of what we were like by seeing us on stage. My friends have said ‘oh we thought you were such a show off and my current girlfriend really couldn’t stand me at all originally…
“I don’t know if Queen do have a collective image, or what it might be. We are very protective about the band, but you live in a cocoon of Queen. If you’re not careful you get a bit sick of it all and lose sight of what the band stands for at all. Things have obviously changed from the beginning and at various times I’d say certain members of the group haven’t taken it seriously. I suppose I always have because being a musician is all I ever wanted – I never did want to be a biologist. That’s why I don’t understand well-known bands who say they hate recording but there’s a lot of money in it, or they can’t stand going on the road. I’ve always enjoyed it all. And I’m still a rock fan even though, it’s true, I may not have to pay for the albums and concert tickets I want. I probably listen to as much radio, for instance, as anyone else and I’m not out of touch. Freddie? Well he hardly listens to anything. Someone bought him an Aretha live album and he played that for a year solid but mainly it’s Mozart, Chopin…but that’s alright.”
Mercury has just finished producing an album by singer Peter Straker; Taylor is building a studio in his house “to lay down a bit of raw rock and roll,” and the next stage for the band appears to be the exploration of digital recording techniques. Considering what they’ve managed to do with delay loops and over-dubbing I must have gone slightly green at the thought of them getting their hands on infinite over-dubbing. Taylor laughed:
“Our music has got much simpler recently, really, despite what people may think. In terms of studio use and recording techniques ‘We Are The Champions’ is the most simple track in the charts at the moment. Still,” he said slyly, “maybe we’ll take two years off to do a digital album…and this time go completely over the top once and for all.”
