Freddie Mercury: An intimate memoir by the man who knew him best Page 12

  In the relationship with Mike Moran, there was outwardly no boss. I think that both parties admired each other for different talents and abilities. Freddie, amongst the rest of the world, found it difficult to believe what Mike Moran could do with his fingers. For those who have not been fortunate enough to be a witness in my position, I can only confirm that given any keyboard, Mike Moran can play up a masterpiece. For one of Freddie’s birthdays, Mike gave him a cassette on which was written simply, ‘Happy Birthday’. However, on the tape he had taken the familiar ‘Happy Birthday’ theme and then created half-a-dozen variations in the styles of different composers. Quite superb. Freddie just threw up his arms in joy as he listened to it. I think Freddie really enjoyed this collaboration because the end results were achieved without confrontation whereas so much of Queen’s work, although superb, was coloured with the memories of confrontation and conflict. It was because of the prospect of argument and disharmony that on occasion Freddie would refuse to go to the studio.

  Freddie and Mike had been in the music business for approximately the same amount of time and they were equals. While Freddie had the more meteoric rise, Mike Moran had been a mainstay and continual presence behind more famous artists than himself. Mike was also quite content to allow Freddie to do the shining in public.

  So, it should not come as any great surprise that the next product of this burgeoning partnership was one of Freddie’s great joys, ‘The Great Pretender’. This was recorded in early 1987 in Mike’s studio in his old house in Radlett in Hertfordshire. Freddie went off with Peter Straker late one morning with Terry driving them without really letting us at the house in on ‘the secret’.

  Much later that night, he came back, obviously thrilled, pissed out of his brain, clutching a copy of his day’s work and played us the rough mix of ‘The Great Pretender’. I don’t know that the original plan was ever to release it as a single, but over a short period it became apparent from the comments from everyone who heard it that this version of the song had prospects. Perhaps one of the main reasons it was released was because Freddie already had his idea of what was to happen in the video and so, obviously, the only way to make a video practical was to release a single. Even Freddie, while having enough money to do it, wasn’t silly enough to spend a huge amount of money to make a video just to make a video. That vain he wasn’t! By March ‘The Great Pretender’ had reached number five in the national charts.

  In the context of studio recording, I have to mention Scrabble. Whenever boredom threatened to raise its ugly head, the Scrabble board was brought out and anybody available was press-ganged into playing. Freddie didn’t care how many people played just as long as the game was in progress. Quite often there would be four teams with two or three people on each team. He insisted no one was left out from tape-op to other superstars. I suppose it must have been the boarding school upbringing again but he was quite ruthless when playing and also, if truth be known, wasn’t the most gracious of losers. Dictionaries were only ever used, however, after the fact. Just to check. Having said all this, Freddie wasn’t on the losing team very often. He had a very good mind, not only for the words themselves but also for their most advantageous placing. We started to take Travel Scrabble with us at one point but the flights weren’t really long enough – especially Concorde ones – for him to get bored.

  Whenever he caught me playing solitaire or patience in the studio, he regarded it as a waste of time and that other things should be being done with that time. He himself was entirely uninterested in card games. Any games. Anything where memory was a requirement. With Scrabble, everything was in front of him, not unlike the elements and intricacies of a studio’s sound desk and the contents and whereabouts of all the tracks. It was, after all, only a matter, like Scrabble, of configuring your assets to greatest advantage.

  We now progress to what I believe was the pinnacle of his solo work. It is in recounting the recording of his Barcelona album that I can go into greatest detail about Freddie and the way he worked because it is unalloyed by any overall Queen consideration or involvement. This album above all others was something he and only he wanted to do. He didn’t do this album to rake in a fortune. It was done purely for his own delectation and where it led, he didn’t care. As you will see, it was an entirely different recording process to any he had previously encountered. It was almost as though he was growing up. If Queen were his childhood playmates, Mr. Bad Guy and ‘The Great Pretender’ were his rebellious teenage, then Barcelona was the final flowering of the grown man and it’s the grown man who then went on to record The Miracle and Innuendo.

  It must also be borne in mind that although nobody else knew, perhaps Freddie was getting an inkling that all was not well with his health. In hindsight, he often said that he had thought that Barcelona might be his last work and so of course he was thrilled when he made it through The Miracle. He never even dreamed that he would see Innuendo completed.

  Barcelona was his essence. Because it was a record he desperately wanted to make, he was determined that it was to contain the best of Freddie Mercury he could offer. After all, it could have been his memorial.

  Although a great deal of Freddie’s work had been considered as operatic, he in fact knew very little about opera and even less about opera singers although by the time Barcelona came about, I could recognise many similar traits between the diva of the opera stage and the diva of rock’n’roll.

  For the following recording I am prepared to accept either the blame or the praise. Up until early 1981, Freddie had a passion for the voices of operatic tenors, mainly Luciano Pavarotti. He was always taken aback at the control that tenors maintained over their voices, the only operatic vocal range in which at that point he had any interest. He realised that this was the culmination of years of training for most of them and was fully appreciative of the result, particularly the way some could produce high notes extremely softly. Now, that was control as far as he was concerned.

  Until January 1981, he had only heard Pavarotti’s voice on disc or tape or perhaps, occasionally, on television and so as I became aware of Pavarotti’s appearance at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden that month, I persuaded Freddie to put his money where his mouth was and Freddie subsequently bought some tickets for the opera.

  As we took our seats all dressed to the nines in evening clothes, I gave him a rough outline of the plot of Un Ballo In Maschera by Giuseppe Verdi. He was excited at the prospect of hearing his hero live. Freddie was used to recording and then going out on tour to reproduce the recordings live. With Queen in particular, they tried to ensure that the live version was easily recognisable and comparable with the studio version. Freddie now wanted to see if that was the same in opera. The lights went down and in this particular opera, the tenor has his first big aria in the first scene. Freddie really enjoyed it. During the scene change, I explained to him the action moves to a Gypsy Fortune Teller’s camp where the heroine makes a brief appearance trying to find some herbs to make her fall out of love.

  “Well I certainly don’t need any of those, do!?” piped up the voice beside me. The scene began and the soprano made her unheralded entrance. While the piece that she sings is only a small trio, this soprano certainly made her presence felt. Freddie watched and listened spellbound. The soprano sailed and soared through the trio which exploited much of her talent and range and power. At the end when the heroine slips away, Freddie’s jaw had dropped and he applauded wildly. Once the applause stopped, he broke all opera house tradition and started talking, asking me, “Who is this woman… What’s her name?… Tell me…” His words almost tumbled out, so excited had he been. I looked in the programme just to double-check. It was indeed, as I had thought, Montserrat Caballe.

  It was Montserrat who had been a major contributor to my own love of opera as on April 22, 1975, my first night of work at the Royal Opera House, she was singing the role of Leonora in Il Trovatore. It was a coincidence that Freddie’s favourite aria in opera was
to be ‘D’ Amor Sull’ Ali Rosee’ as sung by Montserrat on one of her early opera aria discs. Having fallen in love with her voice, Freddie took great pleasure in taking the disc into the studio with him, putting it on a turntable, plugging it into the main speakers and turning it up full volume. It amused him to hear the orchestra members’ seats making a noise and the pages of the score being turned.

  “My god, this is real! You couldn’t fake those noises.”

  He learned a lot about her voice this way as prior to our night at the opera he had shown little interest in female voices. His love for Montserrats voice never diminished but it wasn’t until 1986 when he was on tour in Spain that he made his admiration public on Spanish Radio. When asked by the interviewer whose voice he most admired, I believe the expected answer was to have been Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson or Prince. He surprised everybody by saying that it was Montserrat’s. He accentuated the fact that he was not being patronising just because she was Catalan and he was being interviewed in Barcelona.

  Freddie thought nothing more of it until Jim Beach came to him saying that he had been approached by Carlos Caballe, Montserrat’s brother and manager and Pino Sagliocco who was Queen’s concert promoter in Spain and who had first been inspired to approach Carlos Caballe.

  The idea was, what did Freddie think of the idea of writing an anthem for the Barcelona Olympic Games for Montserrat to sing? At first Freddie was very unsure, even a little scared. This was asking him to do something for someone he had admired for so long. It was also a new direction for him, specifically writing with someone else in mind, particularly someone with whom he had never worked before.

  Eventually, with all the powers of persuasion applied to him on one side by Jim Beach and the nagging voice of me on the other, he succumbed and the project was agreed. The original idea was to produce a single which would be entitled ‘Barcelona’, that could be used as a theme for the Olympic Games, to be sung at their opening. Even so, that didn’t prevent Freddie coming up with ideas above and beyond the call of duty.

  A meeting was arranged at which Freddie could meet and present some ideas to Montserrat. He knew her capabilities well by now, having listened to so many of her recordings and after the idea had been finalised, Montserrat had kindly picked a selection of her performances and sent him some video copies that were not available to the general public and, in his turn, Freddie had sent her a full collection of his work including his latest work, his recreation of the classic rock song, ‘The Great Pretender’.

  Freddie knew within himself how much he wanted to make Montserrat do. He wanted to push her to her limits but in the best possible way. He had a few weeks to get the germs of some ideas down on tape to take with us to Barcelona where the meeting had been arranged. Much the same as now, everything had to be organised around Montserrat in that she was hardly ever at home. If you want to get in touch with Montserrat, try anywhere around the world where she is so much in demand. As you will see in the recounting of the recording, Montserrat is a workaholic, one of the things which she has in common with Freddie.

  Mike Moran was the first to be taken on board. Because of the relationship which had developed between the two, Freddie found it easy to collaborate with this genial gentleman. By doing so, the responsibility of some of the difficult intricacies of orchestration was removed from Freddie’s shoulders. This initial collaboration with Mike produced a cassette of three very rough tracks. One of these became ‘Exercises In Free Love’ which then became ‘Ensueno’ on the Barcelona album. The other two were the basic format of ‘The Fallen Priest’ and, similarly, ‘Guide Me Home’ which Mike had put together with Freddie using a falsetto voice to approximate to Montserrat’s part.

  Mike Moran, Freddie, myself, Jim Beach and Terry flew into Barcelona the day before that auspicious meeting in March 1987 and stayed at the Ritz hotel. As you might imagine, the talk over dinner that night was of little else but Montserrat.

  “What’s she doing now.”

  Probably eating, Freddie.

  “No, but is she watching television as well?”

  Probably, Freddie.

  What Freddie didn’t know was that very night Montserrat was in fact giving a recital in a town just outside Barcelona.

  The hotel arranged for a very basic, hi-fi, speaker system to be placed in the Garden Room of the hotel where there was a grand piano in the corner.

  After a very restless night, we all gathered in Freddie’s room. I don’t think I have seen Freddie more nervous than he was that morning. As we went to the lift to go downstairs for lunch, he looked like the condemned man being led from his cell. At one point – and I really don’t know even now whether or not he was serious – he even said, “Come on. I can’t go on with this. Let’s go home!”

  The lunch had been arranged for one o’clock. We walked into the room perhaps five minutes early. There to greet us was a vast circular table with a huge centrepiece which blocked the vision of anyone sitting opposite. That was soon removed. Freddie picked his seat and wouldn’t move. I had ensured that he had two packets of cigarettes with him as he was smoking rather a lot at this point. He wasn’t necessarily inhaling very much but he found cigarettes were the easiest things to use to keep his hands occupied. I was not permitted to sit down as every two or three minutes I was asked to go to the door to see if she was coming yet. I only had to go to the door three times and on the third visit, a wonderful sight presented itself. Without being disrespectful to Montserrat, the scene that I saw reminded me of the lyrics of an old song often sung by Joyce Grenfell which began, “Stately as a galleon, she sailed across the floor…”

  As Montserrat’s procession advanced, the pathway opened before her. People stood back. You must appreciate that particularly in Catalonia, Montserrat is more than a queen. She is the supreme symbol of Catalan culture. She was dressed in a knee-length frock in colours and design entirely reminiscent of a Spanish spring. With Montserrat were her manager Carlos, Pino Sagliocco whose idea the project had been and her niece, Montsy, who was my counterpart both in the court of Montserrat and also that day at lunch, when, that is, I was finally permitted to sit down.

  Freddie didn’t know what to do.

  He could meet Michael Jackson whom he respected. That was fine. But although Freddie was a huge, huge star himself, I don’t think he ever got over an inherent shyness which had been with him all his life. I know that nothing at boarding school takes into account anybody’s fear of being themselves in social situations. Shyness can be crippling and Freddie felt it acutely. I can understand his feeling because while I have played video games and met some of the greatest names in rock music, someone finally arranged for me to meet a not-particularly-famous English opera singer whose career I had followed for many years. When I was led into her presence, I became a gibbering wreck. All I could mumble was, “Oh, it was brilliant.”

  Freddie was now meeting his idol. It was an incomparable moment, one for which nothing could have possibly prepared him.

  She swept into the room through double doors. Freddie jumped up from his seat and after shaking hands, he ushered her to her seat next to him. He said simply, “Hello, I’m Freddie Mercury and that’s it. We’ve started!” and then sat down.

  While Jim Beach and Carlos had met prior to the lunch and were able to carry on a conversation, it took Freddie and Montserrat a few minutes to gauge each other but once the ice had properly been broken, there was no stopping them especially after a glass of Louis Roederer Cristal champagne. After discovering her love of this champagne to which he had introduced her, Freddie delighted in sending Montserrat a full case on her next birthday.

  Once the initial awkwardness had been overcome, it took Freddie and Montserrat about five minutes flat to discover that they shared a wicked sense of humour and the pair started talking nineteen to the dozen. There was much giggling and talking with their hands to make up what they couldn’t manage to say due to their babbling torrent of words. They were each t
rying to communicate in three hours what they’d have liked to have been saying for three months. Montserrat had been kind enough to let Freddie know that she really did only have three hours to spare before her prior commitments to a rehearsal called her away.

  I was instructed to start the tape ten minutes later and the tape was played and rewound, played and rewound several times. The tracks were listened to in silence the first time. On second playing, comments were passed about specific parts that they liked and then other people chimed in with their opinions. Finally they were ready for the food to be brought in at about two-thirty. Strict instructions had been given that no dining staff could be present until called for.

  These musical ideas were there so that the best of them could be taken for a record which, to Freddie’s mind at that time, would consist of the A and B sides of a single, the ‘Barcelona’ track and another, although at that point ‘Barcelona’ as such did not exist. It could have been, for example, that the music for what was to become ‘The Fallen Priest’ could have ended up as ‘Barcelona’. Everything at that point was up in the air. It was when lunch was being eaten that talk turned to how long it took Freddie to record an album… An album?

  It was at this point when Montserrat enquired, “An album? What do you mean by an album?”

  Freddie said, “Oh, you know! You’ve done them. Eight or nine tracks on one disc. That’s an album.”