“Record Collector wanted me to ask you about Bowie and Queen, because they’re doing big things on them this year.”
“We’ve got nothing good to say about Queen. Apart from the fact Freddie Mercury hated the Pet Shop Boys… because he remembered that I slagged off Queen when I was at Smash Hits, which I did (laughs). And somebody at EMI told me ‘Freddie Mercury fucking hates you’, by the way. Though Elton John said we’d have really liked ‘Melinda’, as he called him, as a friend: ‘Oh, you’d have loved Melinda. She was fabulous.’ And we probably would’ve done, actually.”
— Neil Tennant interview with Steve Pafford, 2002
What the hell we slighting for? Well, if you had the chance to hop in a Tardis and rewrite musical history who would you exterminate faster than a shooting star?
Let me play devil’s advocate and suggest Queen, if I May. Because a camp over the top spectacle fronted by a gay Indian/Middle Eastern man becoming one of the biggest bands in history should be brilliant, shouldn’t it? It’s just a pity they frequently spoiled it all by being not that great, with a canon of terribly tawdry, conceited tunes. Though I lay the blame at one person in particular.
Care to chat?
Once ensconced in the Tardis, I’d time travel back to the early 1970s but not to deady Freddie. No, I’d wanna make a supersonic woman of me and get rid of the guitarist to save the singer. Hmmm, still, despite his many faults that Bombay boy showed promise. Imagine if his life had been saved and Queen an enduring drum and bass fuelled three-piece.
Mercury may have died three long decades ago, but he’s still the rock star’s rock star, bigger than ever in fact, exerting enough magnetism to reel in new fans who are too young to remember him firsthand.
At the other end of the spectrum, the now inexplicably knighted ‘Sir’ Brian May was always my least favourite thing about Queen, a man so vain he married himself. May may be a brainy, sensitive Cancerian (oh, hi!) but with that dreadfully modified axe in his hands he’s little more than a turgid tripemeister with a poodle perm.
I freely admit I find it impossible to revere any guitarists, but I have a particular loathing for May’s preposterously pinched guitar tone. It always sounded like he’s using a creaky old cello fit for the knackers yard, with zero passion or fire. His playing has a stiff, formal quality to it — basically just a geeky scientist standing there awkwardly operating his instrument like a piece of lab equipment.
Echoing the other Pet Shop Boy, Chris Lowe, I think the only May song I really loved was The Show Must Go On and that’s obviously because it’s an atypically synth-driven topped with the failing Freddie’s tear-jerkingly poignant vocals, forever identified as the one that was in the charts when the flamboyant frontman came to his untimely passing in November 1991.
Let’s not dock around the Brighton Rock, Mr Anita Dobson is largely responsible for the majority of hideous howlers in the regal quartet’s catalogue: I Want It All, Now I’m Here, Tie Your Mother Down, Fat Bottomed Girls and the ubiquitous We Will Rock You? Just macho bags of misogynist cack that reek of testosterone and perming lotion.
That’s not to say Who Wants To Live Forever and Flash are terrible tunes. The latter film theme was certainly an enjoyable earworm, thought the 11 year-old mini me at the time. I freely admit, too, that I did stifle a chuckle and wonder if he was being slightly over-dramatic when BBC DJ Peter Powell bloviated on his Radio 1 weekend show in 1986, sounding almost as pompous as the regal quarter themselves when he revealed he’d planned to play the latest Queen 45, Who Wants To Live Forever, but as it was “so boring” he changed his mind.
Queen were a band who reek of excessive pride and vanity, all flashy surface and very little soul, and not helped by their admittedly brilliant frontman with his crass braggart persona and soaring operatic vocals that conveyed the emotional range of a newsreader.
Mr Mercury? With his trademark flippancy, the former Farrokh Bulsara once described his band’s songs as like, “disposable razors — use them, darling, then throw them away.”
But 52 years since Queen’s debut album (itself recently luxed-up as a multi-disc box set) that seems an evermore-unlikely scenario.
Do you remember a gig in such a bygone time called Live Aid? It took place forty years ago. You know, the one with Bowie, Elton and a hideously out of tune Madonna. Live Aid was momentous, miraculous, inexplicable and unforgettable. It changed the music industry and charity-giving forever and brought the world together in a way that had never quite happened before.
Now all the hoo-ha surrounding its 40th anniversary has simmered down, a fleeting remembrance of sorts.
On that gloriously balmy day, my sister Stella had disappeared to her friend Shelley’s place, and I watched the bulk of the London leg with my parents, which I suppose seemed rather fitting, what with the “coming together” of generations and the return of several hoary old rock acts from the 60s and 70s that were presumed dead and buried.
By early evening, Mother had cooked dinner, but conscious of the schedule that had been printed in the day’s newspapers I didn’t want anything to cause me to miss a moment of David Bowie’s set, not even food. We three watched Queen’s showstopper of a performance, and as Freddie Mercury started singing Bohemian Rhapsody my father said of the porno ’tached performer as he began Bohemian Rhapsody:
“Look how close his mouth is to the microphone. He’s practically eating it.”
Mercury’s music lives on… as does his trademark ‘tache. And what a mooie it was. There’s even a Facebook fan page devoted to discussion of the great man’s lip furniture.
His Under Pressure collaborator David Bowie once described Mercury as, “of all the more theatrical rock performers, Freddie took it further than the rest… he took it over the edge. And of course, I always admired a man who wears tights. I only saw him in concert once, and as they say, he was definitely a man who could hold an audience in the palm of his hand.”
There was no greater example of that unnerving power than at Wembley Stadium on 13 July 1985.
Before playing Live Aid, Queen timed their rehearsals down to the last second, and arranged a cleverly constructed medley that allowed them to cram six of their greatest hits into their allotted slot. Sorry, correction: five of their greatest hits and Hammer To Fall. Although Fred’s new solo LP was languishing at a lowly No.70, the narrative that Bob Geldof and the Bo Rhap movie perpetuates that Queen were rusty and all washed up was a hilarious misnomer.
The boys had only finished a tour of Japan two months earlier. Not only that but in 1984 they set a record by placing five Top 30 hits in the UK charts, the first four — taken from their 11th LP The Works — each authored individually by a different member, which was followed by the non-album and godawful Thank God It’s Christmas, unremittingly scribed by May and Taylor.
Not only that but with the first three of those 45s hitting No.2, No. 3 and No. 6, Mercury made the top ten again in September when his solo single Love Kills edged to the 10 spot the same week Queen’s Hammer To Fall was sliding out of the Top 20.
Ah yes, Hammer To Fall — by the worst of the Works 45s. If Radio Ga Ga was penned by drummer Roger Taylor, I Want To Break Free by bassist John Deacon and It’s A Hard Life by Freddie himself, I think you can guess who was responsible for this leaden monstrosity.
Aye, Mr Brian Harold May himself, though I have to admit the song’s over-inflated tumescence masks the fact that there are actually some interesting lyrics concerning how fleeting life is, when living under the “shadow of the mushroom cloud”, which we all were at that time.
And the point of this article?
History won’t care at all. Happy birthday Bri.
Steve Pafford
*Back Chat is an English idiom referring to impertinent or impudent replies, especially to a superior, though it’s debatable if Neil Tennant would have ever considered Queen his superiors. Here‘s his August 1982 review that was alluded to in the header. Funny, the future PSB man spells Freddie’s name wrong, dishes on Brian yet makes no mention that the dance song’s author is not the unwieldy guitarist but the often brilliant bassist Deacy. It’s a funny life.
