QUEEN

My favourite photograph by Queen's Roger Taylor

IT MAY have been real life, but touring the world with Freddie Mercury felt more like fantasy – as drummer Roger, 65, tells Danny Scott

Published: 00:01, Sun, November 9, 2014By DANNY SCOTT

S MAGTouring the world with Freddie Mercury felt like fantasy, says drummer Roger Taylor

“Freddie Mercury and I both loved to have a laugh on tour. If there were shenanigans and good times, Fred and I would be there. This picture was taken on our South American tour some time around 1981.

And yes, things got a bit crazy and risqué at times, but that’s what rock bands do. We were young guys, making decent money and having a ball as we travelled round the world. That’s probably why I love this photo so much.

It says it all, doesn’t it? We’re flamboyant, having a giggle at our own expense and enjoying being in a great, great band.

We played our last shows with Fred in 1986, though at the time I never expected them to be our last shows – none of us did. None of us could foresee that he was going to get ill and die so soon. Saying that we missed Fred doesn’t even begin to explain what we felt at the time, and still feel today.

That was especially true when Brian May and I started work on our new album, which includes stuff we recorded when Fred was still with us. You can imagine what it was like, listening to him in the studio. Just thinking about it sends shivers down my spine. What a voice!

My own introduction to music came quite early. My father didn’t have much of an education, but he was keen for me to get some qualifications and I ended up winning a choral scholarship to a cathedral school.

I loved watching Freddy work the crowd. He was the best – no one could touch him

Roger Taylor

S MAG'This picture was taken in South America some time around 1981'

Back in those days, music was polite and nice – lots of dance bands and orchestras. The guy who changed it all for so many of us was Lonnie Donegan. It was like the punk rock of the 50s when Lonnie came along and knocked everybody for six. That’s when I started searching out real rock’n’roll bands and I wanted to play drums – I wanted to bang stuff!

I played with a few local bands in the West Country, where I grew up, but when I was 18 I moved to London, which at that time was probably the most exciting musical city in the world. I was supposed to be studying dentistry, but all the time I was looking for a band to join. Then I met a bloke called Brian May who played guitar. It’s funny how chance meetings like that can change your life.

We formed a band called Smile, and Freddie Mercury was part of the crowd who used to come and see us play. He knew the same people we knew and I used to bump into him at gigs, standing at the bar watching people like Jimi Hendrix. Fred loved Jimi so much that he went to see him 14 times. I think he saw him nine nights in a row at pubs all round London.

Fred and I eventually started working together on a stall in Kensington Market. We sold clothes and bric-a-brac, and just about managed to earn enough to keep the band ticking along.

What was Freddie like then? Alongside the showman, he was a rather shy introvert. But if the attention was focused on him, he was a natural star, as we all saw after we put Queen together. Week by week, we saw him grow into this character, Freddie Mercury.

I loved watching him work the crowd. He was the best – no one could touch him.”

Queen’s new album Queen Forever, featuring three previously unreleased tracks with Freddie Mercury on vocals, is out tomorrow. The band will be touring in January.

How I built the guitar that rocked The Queen (with a LOT of help from my dad) by Brian May

By BRIAN MAY

PUBLISHED: 21:32 GMT, 27 September 2014 | UPDATED: 21:32 GMT, 27 September 2014

After Freddie Mercury, the other real star of Queen was Brian May’s famously hand-built ‘Red Special’... the guitar he played to screaming effect on all their hits - and on top of Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s Jubilee. Now his new book tells its remarkable - and touching - story

Brian May and his Red Special guitar at the Golden Jubilee concert in 2002. It was hand-made nearly 40 years earlier in his dad’s workshop in their small suburban house in Feltham, Middlesex

At 6.45pm, I step up onto the roof. I’ve had time for the elation to die away. Fear is just outside the door now, barking furiously, but I just feel dark and broody. Focused.

My guitar tech Pete Malandrone climbs on to the dais to check everything is audible, after a day of technical confusion.

He steps down, hands me the guitar. And we wait. 7:20pm – ‘Ten minutes, Brian.’

‘Five minutes, Brian.’ Then, ‘One minute to the lead-in link.’

Silence, then the click track, the snare drum and, finally, the mighty fanfare from the trumpets. I am feeding back – a nice growing, singing note, building up and up in intensity. I’m ready with the pick, an old sixpence with a nice serrated edge. Then I’m in.

I hit the big D chord, and it sounds crunching and massive. I feel joy, hope, history, and it feels like a long road ahead, though it’s actually only one minute 50 seconds. A big run up the fingerboard to a held scream. A moment of air.

Now, the fragile tranquillity of the tune proper. Any slight slip will be most apparent here – everybody knows how God Save The Queen should go.

A deceptively tricky little twiddly bit takes me into the second half of the tune. Don’t rush it. And then I am negotiating the steps up to ‘...send her victorious...’

'From my earliest days on the road to those terrifying, exhilarating moments on the roof of Buckingham Palace, my home-made guitar has been with me all the way,' said Brian

Every note is screaming now. The extra adrenaline really seems to wring out every drop of passion from my body. This is somehow the moment I’ve dreamt of since I was a kid.

Now, the final gap, and three chords remain. Am I home? One – crash. Two – crash. And... The final, gigantic thrash seems to last for ever.

I can see it travelling down my wire, into the amp, out of the speakers, into the microphones, down the cable to the mixing desk, out into the speakers in the garden, into the huge systems in the Mall, in Green Park, in St James’s Park, and into the air towards televisions all around the globe.

I pull off the guitar and push it in the air, and scream my gratitude to the Great Spirit above my head.

It’s June 3, 2002 – the Party At The Palace concert celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee. And for the first time in history, as my son put it, ‘a bloke had stood atop the first building in the land and made a big noise with a guitar’.

That guitar is my Red Special, hand-made nearly 40 years earlier in my dad Harold’s workshop in our small suburban house in Feltham, Middlesex.

I first asked my mum and dad for a guitar for what must have been my seventh birthday, in 1954, and, bless them, they somehow managed to scrape together the seven guineas or so to buy me one.

When I woke up on my birthday, there was this seemingly giant guitar on my bed, gleaming like a toffee apple. I can still smell the varnish.

I loved my acoustic. It’s pretty basic, but to me it was the vehicle, my channel, towards being a guitarist and I’m still very fond of it.

My dad played a ukulele-banjo in a George Formby style and I picked up the chords to those songs quite easily. But suddenly, with singers like Buddy Holly and Ricky Nelson, guitars were amplified, and I wanted my guitar to be electric too.

My dad really was a great dad, and he was helpful with anything I wanted to do. Any passion that I had he’d back me up and get into it.

Brian (with the Red Special) and Freddie Mercury on stage at Wembley in 1984

Starting in 1963, we made my Red Special, my dad and I, in the workshop he had converted from our spare bedroom, in about two years of spare moments, all done with hand tools – planes, chisels and saws, and a lot of sandpaper, fashioning the thing out of bits and pieces.

Some of the time it was quite tough. But it was character-forming. Building this guitar became our lives and you had to learn to forgive yourself mistakes – and we made plenty.

Dad and I got on very well during this period. It’s odd, because the trouble happened later.

At that time I was at school, then went on to university and studied physics, maths and astronomy, and went four years into a PhD in what’s now astrophysics.

I was pursuing the kind of life that my dad imagined I was destined for – something academic – and the guitar was just a great hobby.

The first public engagement I ever played was in 1966, with my first band, 1984, at the Molesey Boat Club in Putney.

It was the Red Special’s first performance too, though it still had the original home-made pickups at that stage.

I used to play things like Happy Hendrik’s Polka by The Spotnicks, a fast song which was really hard to get my fingers around, and a little bit of Cream and Hendrix too.

We used to make about £20 a gig, which was respectable in those days, but by the time you’d paid somebody’s petrol to drive you, you’d go home with 30 bob – one pound ten shillings – or sometimes nothing.

It was only when Queen started that I had to make the decision of whether to carry on with the PhD and finish it off, or go out and step into the void.

We went on tour with Mott The Hoople in October 1973. We’d done odd bits and pieces before, but this was ‘pack your bags’ time. We left home, went out and stayed in crap hotels, because we were poor.

The guitar would suffer problems on occasion. It didn’t stay in tune as well as I thought it would; it was flung about in flight cases and occasionally a wire would break.

Brian with the Red Special at his Feltham home in 1963. The guitar was made 'in about two years of spare moments, all done with hand tools – planes, chisels and saws, and a lot of sandpaper'

We got used to taking it to bits to check all the wiring and poke everything around to make sure it all still worked.

And meanwhile, my dad just could not compute my career choice.

He said: ‘You’ve got this far, you have all this education...’ and, of course, he’d sacrificed a lot of his life to get me my education; he’d worked so hard just to get me through university.

He just couldn’t believe that I was chucking it all away and going out to be a pop star... or a failure.

I was also living with a girl – Chrissie Mullen, who later became my wife – which, to my dad, was unacceptable. He could hardly speak to me because of that.

Add in the fact that I was also giving up this career, which he saw as beneficial to humanity, and our relationship became very strained.

It wasn’t so much arguments as a terrible coldness that invaded us both. It was very sad.

I remember saying to him, on the times when we did speak, ‘Dad, you helped me make the guitar, you’re a part of this, but you’re so against me going through with it.’

And he said: ‘But you’re throwing away your career.’

It was tough. My mum was caught in the middle. She had a terrible time and had what in those days was called a nervous breakdown because she was trying to stay close to both of us.

When she was actually taken away to hospital in a terrible state of collapse, finally both my dad and I realised what we were doing and how destructive it was.

So Dad and I called a truce, which was cemented when Queen went to America and played Madison Square Garden for the first time. [Queen are part of an elite group of artists to sell out two nights there – which they did on December 1 and 2, 1977.]

I flew my mum and dad out on Concorde – he had worked on Concorde’s blind landing system as a radar engineer, but had never been able to afford to fly on it.

They came out with my new wife Chrissie and my newly born son Jimmy, and I put them all up at The Ritz, and said: ‘Order room service, Dad; we’re rich!’

Of course, we weren’t, but he was touched that I’d done that and was happy to be a part of it, although I now think he probably felt very uncomfortable and out of place.

Brian with his parents backstage at Madison Square Garden in 1977. Queen are part of an elite group of artists to sell out two nights there

My parents came to the show. I will never forget that night; the response we got from that audience was just mind-blowing.

And of course, as I have at virtually every show I’ve played before or since, I played the guitar we built together all those years before.

My dad wasn’t a physical, huggy kind of person, but he came back afterwards, shook my hand and said: ‘OK, I get it. Now I see what you are doing, and why it is so important to you.’

That was a big moment for me. It swept away all the problems that we’d had and, from that point on, he was into the music.

After that, all the time Queen were touring, Dad would make little maps back home and put lines on them, showing our progress, constructing graphs of our chart positions – getting into it, in his own way. He just had a problem seeing music as a real job.

We’d talk about it in a more understanding way later on, and joke about it. I’d say: ‘I never did get a proper job, did I, Dad?’ And, truly, I never did.

From my earliest days on the road to those terrifying, exhilarating moments on the roof of Buckingham Palace, my home-made guitar has been with me all the way.

I have wonderful copies now that we use on the road, and we sell Brian May Guitars replicas now too, and I can use them.

So, in theory, I could carry on if I lost the guitar, but it would be a grave and terrible thing because it is like a part of me.

In 1998, Australian Greg Fryer undertook the first full-scale restoration of the Red Special, refinishing the body and fine-tuning every part.

‘Considering that the guitar had been used solidly for over 30 years and all around the world, it was in surprisingly good overall shape,’ says Fryer.

‘Harold and Brian made a very solid and dependable instrument.’

As Queen and Adam Lambert, we played the Los Angeles Forum in July.

The excitement and the roar of approval have been just as stimulating as in the old days, and my old companion the Red Special has been in particularly good voice and as much a part of me as ever.

It’s great to see so many happy faces and feel the energy coming back at us.

For in the final analysis, rock music is all about emotion, passion and connection – and it’s also about guitars.

Abridged extract from ‘Brian May’s Red Special’ by Simon Bradley and Brian May, published on Oct 1 by Carlton, priced £19.99. Order at mailbookshop.co.uk, p&p is free for a limited time only

THE FINISH

'I worked with very fine sandpaper, emery paper, glass paper and finally carborundum paste until I eventually got a glassy finish,' said Brian

'I wanted it to be a natural-ish enhanced mahogany - reddish brown - it brings out the red a little bit, compared to just varnishing on to bare wood. We used a gentle kind of wood dye and then applied lots and lots of layers of Rustin’s Plastic Coating. I brushed it on and between each successive coat, once dry, I worked with very fine sandpaper, emery paper, glass paper and finally carborundum paste until I eventually got a glassy finish. This was another skill my dad taught me – the tables and bookcases he’s made all had perfect finishes! The Rustin’s finish sustained a lot of wear and tear over the year, but it’s held up surprisingly well.'

The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke

The Queen song "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke" from the band's second album was born of Freddie Mercury's appreciation of the work; it makes direct reference to the painting's characters as detailed in Dadd's poem.

Mercury was inspired to write "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke" after seeing Richard Dadd's painting The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke. For the intricately arranged studio recording, Mercury played harpsichord as well as piano, and Roy Thomas Baker played the castanets. Roger Taylor called this song Queen's "biggest stereo experiment", referring to the intricate use of panning in the mix.

The song, like most of the songs on the album, features medieval fantasy-based lyrics, and makes direct reference to the painting's characters as detailed in Dadd's poem, such as Queen Mab, Waggoner Will, the Tatterdemalion, and others.

Apparently whenever Queen had spare time, Mercury would drag them to the London's Tate Gallery, where the painting was, and still is today.

The complex arrangements are based around a backing track of piano, bass guitar and drums, but also included harpsichord, multiple vocal overdubs and overdubbed guitar parts. The lyrics follow the claustrophobic atmosphere of the painting, and each of the scenes are described. The use of the word "Quaere" has no reference to Mercury's sexuality, according to Taylor. The band never performed this song live.