Queen Unseen (13 page)

There was no first-class lounge available when transiting through Anchorage, so I sat on a bench in the shadow of the huge bear with ‘cuddly bear’ Phoebe, and Fred squeezed 
between us. Hardly SAS security: a large, camp, ex-Royal Opera House wardrobe ‘mistress’ and a scrawny, bedraggled roadie, but it did deter most of the curious who were pointing at us from a distance. Fred always preferred to remain anonymous, but would never refuse an autograph if asked.

Crystal, Queen’s drum roadie, wore flouncy cream silk shirts and burgundy PVC trousers and was, according to the tour manager, more like a female impersonator than a roadie, with his louche attire and carefully coiffed hair. Crystal was gleefully signing autographs for a ring of young Japanese female fans on the bullet train platform one morning, when the precision-timed doors swished shut, leaving him stranded. We laughed. We always laughed at each other’s misfortune. Japan was the first (and only) place I was asked for my autograph. I was a little embarrassed.

‘You’re joking?’

‘No – but I ruv roo, Latty.’

‘Oh – go on, all right then – and just
how
old are you?’

Always young (but legal) and always in white underwear.

The Rat is a symbol of good luck and fortune in Japan and ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ remains a big hit for me.

On tour, hotels were your temporary home-from-home – but without having to clean up afterwards – which was very handy. Queen stayed at the most exclusive five-star palaces available and, if there was no suitable hotel where we were playing, then they would commute from the nearest ‘civilised’ city. Despite meticulous planning, one, two or even all four guys in Queen would sometimes move out and stay in another or separate hotels – because the toilet paper was the wrong colour, the lift was too full of guests, or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were not visible from the sweeping balcony of their penthouse suite. When staying in hotels during touring or recording, Queen would naturally wish to remain anonymous, so a system of aliases was devised that was also used on luggage tags and room lists:

The crew, who did not use aliases (though it could have been useful at times) were housed in more durable chain establishments, such as Holiday Inn, Marriott and Trust House Forte – from which Queen were banned during the 1979 UK
Crazy
tour due to a range of creative damage in Liverpool, and a particularly raucous tour party in Brighton.

In the mid-1970s, a Holiday Inn hotel was considered a real treat. In the USA, enthralled by all things American, I found that the bed in my room offered a service called ‘Magic Fingers’ which was activated by putting a quarter into the coin slot on the wall. This would cause the bed to tremble gently for a few minutes. It gave me a queasy and mildly disorientated feeling, an effect that could also be produced by spending considerably more than 25 cents on alcohol.

The bathroom had a personal message from the maid: ‘Dear Guest’ told me that the toilet had been sanitised for my protection, and a white cellophane band had been stretched over the seat. Naturally I should try to see if I could piss around it… There were powerful and controllable showers that made washing almost fun, rather than the limp dribble of the handset attached to the H&C taps back home. When you have spent as much time in hotels as I have, you never need buy soap, shower caps, bath foam, sewing kits, shampoo or conditioner ever again.

Days and nights off while on the road could tax the imagination; after being so intensely active, it could be difficult when there was nothing to do for an evening or sometimes a day or two. Unusual behaviour was not unusual at all: hairy-arsed lighting guys walking through reception in ladies’ underwear – the more modest sporting a dress. Drunken riggers scaled the outside of a 30-storey hotel for fun, and 18-stone soundmen would wear
Playboy
rabbit ears or vampire teeth in the restaurant. For reasons of practicality, crew hotels would be close to the show venues. It may have been convenient, but these places were often way out of town or in depressing grey areas next to a busy motorway or industrial park. There was not a lot to do except laze around our rooms watching TV, drinking, smoking, playing cards and having a good moan about the miserable life we had chosen; surely other bands were better to work for?

When the crew were to congregate in a hotel room, it was always advisable to avoid offering your own, as the aftermath could result in damaged accommodation that smelled like a mixture of a stale brewery and somewhere for curing fish. Bored, we devised original ways of amusing ourselves, which were generally at somebody else’s expense. Obtaining a pass key to another room was one way: rearranging the furniture or hiding until the occupant returned with a new ‘friend’, then bursting out and catching them
in flagrante.
This was best accompanied by wastepaper bins full of iced water and a camera. Sachets of ketchup and mustard with the corners cut off were placed under the front 
of a toilet seat and it was hoped the victim would need to sit, and then be rewarded with streaks of sticky red and yellow sauce down the backs of the legs. As back-up, there was always the cling-film-over-the-toilet-bowl prank.

A technical trick that caused mayhem in another Forte hotel was to open up the control panel in a hotel lift and switch the connections around. All the floor numbers outside the lifts were taken off, and also switched around. The result was that if you selected floor eight, for example, when the doors opened the number on the wall indicated three, though you were actually on floor six. Chaos. The manager, on the verge of a breakdown, threatened to throw us all out, although he couldn’t actually prove anything.

The Rotterdam Hilton was regularly the scene of mischief, as we were always ‘lively’ during trips to Holland, due to the quality of illicit merchandise freely available there. After returning from one show, our choices of fun were limited to the expensive nightclub next door – full of businessmen who no doubt thought Barry Manilow was cutting-edge – or the nondescript hotel bar. Not a lot of leisure potential. So, wide awake, bored and with nowhere to go, we resorted to opening the tiny door flaps in the corridors that lead into a room’s wardrobe, where you leave your shoes on painted foot prints for the porter to take away for cleaning. A square metal key was needed to open the flap – we improvised with a large flat-bladed screwdriver. What next? Swap the shoes with other rooms? Could be fun? Why not try and crawl through? More fun?

The space was very tight, and with a few grazes and chaffed ears only myself and Dick ‘Dirt Ball’ Ollet, our 
electronics boffin, were skinny and wiry enough to manage it. Now we had proven that it could be done by getting into our own rooms, the next step was to get into a room where one of the quieter crew members would be sleeping. Dirt Ball crawled in through the targeted hatch like some dishevelled, deranged commando, and once through he very rapidly came back out of the room’s main door, slamming it and instructing us all to beat it – sharpish, and don’t wait for the lift, take the emergency stairway. It was not one of the crew rooms, as it turned out. As he appeared through the wardrobe for his grand entrance, he had woken a man and his wife who were innocently occupying the room. They were obviously in shock – was this a robber? The wife’s lover? Certainly not hotel security…

There is a lot of stereotyping of rock bands’ behaviour in hotels, which usually includes damage and the image of televisions being thrown from windows. Some of it may be true, but it still has to be paid for. Rich rock stars can afford it – road crews generally cannot. Although an innocent party, I personally own a section of fire hose from the Holiday Inn in Toledo, Ohio. My share of the damage bill was $20 I believe. Also in Ohio is Cleveland, a grey industrial city on Lake Erie. The city is often referred to as ‘the mistake on the lake’. Once home to Richfield Coliseum and the powerful stage workers’ union, now home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – and once upon a time to Swingos Celebrity Inn. Swingos was an early themed hotel and a retreat from the industrial Mid-West, where they gave out T-shirts to resident bands, had a dayglo pink fur-covered piano in the bar and tolerated rock ’n’ roll behaviour in the brightly painted, 
gaudy rooms. Fred had the pink suite. True. Swingos was where I invented the ‘Doctor’s Comfort’ cocktail on 22 January 1977. After scouring the corridors late at night with a bottle of Southern Comfort procured from John Deacon’s stage bar, I couldn’t find any cola in the vending machines to mix it with. So I chose Doctor Pepper.

‘This guy’ll drink
anything
,’ my female companion remarked.

But drunk with a glacier of ice from the huge dispensers on every floor it was numbingly effective.

After a final night’s European show in Basel in summer 1977, several of the crew were both numb and financially lighter as a result of the large damage bill presented by a disgruntled tour manager a few days later. Per diems withheld until further notice. The high spirits began after the show in the Sporthalle, when the adrenaline was pumping for an end-of-tour party involving the usual strippers, girls in leather flailing whips by strobe light and some audience participation. Thankfully, the booze was all provided, as the cost of a drink in a club in Switzerland can cause a coronary of the wallet. The revellers were still going strong when they returned to the crew’s hotel and the second floor was trashed, a covering of broken glass filling the corridor. I was (for once) an innocent bystander and resting in room 208 the whole time. I was enjoying sweet dreams, having been smitten all day by a lovely young lady.

We subsequently enjoyed a long-distance love affair, but I knew the writing was on the wall when I discovered her
ex-boyfriend’s
machine gun, pistol and live ammunition in her Zurich flat. Very bad news! Young Swiss men had to do a
year’s military service and every year afterwards return to camp for a few weeks’ refresher, all paid for by the wealthy Swiss authorities. I don’t see the idea catching on in Britain or America somehow. The yellow streak that ran up my back was flashing, indicating it was time to leave. My Swiss miss came to visit me in London a few times but after it became clear that the weapons in her flat might be utilised to deter our relationship, I decided it was best to let it lie.

Back to Basel – where the hotel manager was surveying the damage and taking notes with a staggering and still very drunk stage manager who had assumed the role of responsible representative. They paced the corridor together and counted the broken light fittings:

‘Look! There’s two more there,’ the stage manager pointed.

‘They are not broken!’ exclaimed the hotel manager.

BASH – right hand. SMASH – left hand.

‘They are now!’ he giggled hysterically.

The Swiss, not usually known for their sense of humour, did not laugh with him.

If you ever win the lottery and decide you fancy causing a bit of mayhem in a hotel, can I suggest that, if you do decide to throw the TV from a window, you make sure you have the set switched on and attached to a long extension cable. This way, when it hits the deck it will give off a bigger and better bang, causing lots of sparks and colour, and may fuse a whole floor of the hotel into the bargain. This is not recommended if aiming for the swimming pool.

The video for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was regarded as a seminal
piece of promotion for a new era of the music business, but Queen did not take every video they did so seriously. The music video became a necessity, but also at times an inconvenience. Often Queen videos were produced quite spontaneously, and quite a few were done wherever we happened to be, in the middle of a tour as ‘live performance’ clips. This meant the crew might have to give up days off or free afternoons to prepare the live set-up when we’d rather be off smoking behind the stage.

There was plenty of smoke and pyrotechnics for ‘Tie Your Mother Down’, from the
A
Day at the Races
album. It was shot in February 1977 in Miami the day before the show at The Sportatorium – affectionately known as The Snortatorium, because of the plethora of South American imported substances available. Fred was wearing the oversized, shapeless white boiler suit that he started the current show in, before stripping it off to reveal a skintight white leotard. At his request, I had been sent out to scour London to find a boiler suit that was several sizes too big for him, which I finally located in an army surplus store in Euston. Fortunately, that was my only main contribution to Queen’s stage wardrobe.

We were made to bend over backwards for the sake of visual arts at other venues, including the Forest National in Brussels – twice! Once for ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ in 1979 and years later in ’84 for ‘Hammer To Fall’. ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ was shot in 1980 during an extended sound check at The Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, and ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ at The Convention centre in Dallas in 1978. ‘Save Me’ was shot at Alexandra Palace London on the ’79
Crazy
tour. 

Video and film crews were always seemingly overstaffed, which was possibly a union requirement, but, whenever they entered our domain of the live show stage, they were a pain. There seemed to be little consideration or respect shown for us, the set or the band’s gear, and they would take ages to get anything done. There were very well-spoken girls and boys with clipboards rushing about trying to appear important. A couple of dozen of us could break down the entire show and load it into five 40-foot trucks in around four hours, whereas a huge video crew could take forever to sort out a large van or two. Unlike the video crews, we did not have the luxury of regulation refreshment breaks after a certain amount of hours worked, or get overtime or ‘golden’ time.

That age-old adage ‘the show must go on’ was paramount to us, and it did go on despite any problems or setbacks. We would work till it was right and ready and not stop for a union tea break. We were bigger than that.

As Queen got bigger so did their show, and spare time on the road would be spent working on ideas for the next tour’s show. Queen were always into pioneering lighting rigs, and Fred, especially, would work closely with the lighting designer during rehearsals on the look and dynamics of the show. The basis was always the same: have lots of lights – more than any other band – and make them move. The 1977
Crown
tour was the first Queen lighting rig that moved and the following year brought the Pizza Oven or Italian Flag which, with its vast banks of red, white and green lights on 
a fan-shaped grid, generated enough heat to cook any pizza of your choice. This design was approved by the band in the dressing room after a show in the Deutschland Halle in Berlin, using a pack of cigarettes and a human hand to demonstrate its construction and movement. Notes were possibly made on the back of that cigarette pack. Shades of
Spinal Tap…