Banned from MTV. Drunken shenanigans. USA-upsetting videos. Band members buggering off…After a stylistic detour with previous album Hot Space, with The Works Queen got back to basics, and returned to their rock roots and to the ‘real Queen’ sound.
“Here’s one for all you heavy metal fans to have a good jerk-off to,” Freddie Mercury said to the audience gathered inside Auckland’s Mount Smart Stadium. On cue, Brian May struck up the riff to Hammer To Fall – and hoped the singer would remember the words to it.
It was April 13, 1985, during the final leg of Queen’s The Works tour, and Mercury was, in his own words, “fucking pissed”. Pop dandies Spandau Ballet were having a day off on their New Zealand tour, and earlier in the day vocalist Tony Hadley had gatecrashed Queen’s sound-check. Mercury spirited him away for “a little drinkie”. One bottle of Stolichnaya vodka and another of vintage port later, and it was show time.
Just before going on stage, Mercury was so inebriated he had to lie on the dressing-room sofa while a couple of aides laced up his boxing boots. When he staggered to his feet, he realised they’d put his tights on back-to-front. “Oh you stupid c**ts,” he hissed, as Queen’s intro music began playing over the PA. The minions frantically removed his footwear and leggings, and Mercury bounded on stage just in time.
Performing drunk was a rare lapse of judgement. Either that, or a cathartic release at the end of a challenging tour. Queen’s eleventh album, The Works, had been aUK No.2 hit, but had flatlined in America; their videos weren’t being shown on MTV; the group had been blacklisted for performing in apartheid South Africa, and were booed in Rio de Janeiro.
The Works delivered four solid gold hits: Radio Ga Ga, I Want To Break Free, It’s AHard Life and Hammer To Fall. But before their show-stopping appearance at Live Aid in the summer of 1985, Queen were in disarray. “By the end of The Works we all needed a break,” May admitted. Drummer Roger Taylor insisted: “We hadn’t broken up, but we didn’t know what was coming next.”
Mercury’s remark about “heavy metal fans” was a glimpse into his present mind-set. He was about to release his debut solo album, Mr Bad Guy, which was filled with the sort of dance music he heard in the clubs around his adopted home cities of New York and Munich.
Mercury was no longer swanning around in a satin jumpsuit, singing about ‘the mighty titan and his troubadours’. Now sporting the short hair and thick moustache on trend in the gay community, he was also smuggling his nouveau influences into Queen.
The group’s 1980 album The Game had dialled down on their usual grandiloquent hard rock, w
