But, as had happened before and would happen again, the stars aligned for Queen. An unmarked white label copy of the album found its way onto the desk of the influential TV producer Mike Appleton. He was responsible for the BBC music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test – after Top of the Pops the highest-profile music show on BBC television. He put the record on and listened to the first track, ‘Keep Yourself Alive’, but with no identification on the vinyl and no accompanying press material he had no idea of the record’s identity nor that of the band who had created it. Eager to showcase the song on The Old Grey Whistle Test, Mike commissioned Phil Jenkinson to edit some surreal compilations of old film footage to accompany the song and, consequently, a cartoon from F.D. Roosevelt’s presidential campaign from the 1930s was shown as the song received its first television airplay on 24th July. The following day the BBC received many favourable phone calls about the track, as well as ones from irate Trident and EMI representatives. It was unexpected, but welcome, publicity for Queen.
By the end of summer 1973, Trident had invested £62,000 in Queen (almost three quarters of a million pounds in 2016), but hadn’t much to show for their investment. Their only single had failed to chart and their debut album wouldn’t even enter the charts for eight months, and then only peaking at number 37 on its first brief chart run. To address this and to give the band some more publicity, Trident hired the band a publicist, Tony Brainsby. He had seen them play live and was convinced they had talent. Upon meeting them, he quickly became accustomed to their personalities, especially Freddie’s: ‘Obviously Freddie stuck out the most. He was such a raving poofter, I couldn’t believe my eyes at our first meeting. He was dressed in red velvet skin-tight trousers, had black varnish on his fingernails, long hair and of course all those teeth – he was extremely touchy about his teeth. He was strong-willed, nakedly ambitious but also very charming. In those days Freddie was an inwardly very aggressive and angry man in the sense that he knew he should be a star and wasn’t yet. It’s not a side of him that he allowed too many people to see, but it was definitely all the way through him. He felt that stardom was his by rights and he was extremely frustrated at the time it seemed to be taking for him to reach it. In my view, he was very much the fight in the band.’3
As Brainsby’s relationship with the band grew, he became increasingly intrigued by Freddie: ‘He had many stylish little quirks that would stick in your mind. He’d paint the fingernails of just his right or just his left hand with black nail polish. Or he’d just varnish one little finger. He’d say “Darling!” or “My dears!” every other sentence, and his camp delivery was highly amusing and very endearing. He was great to have around. Never a dull moment. The girls all loved it when he came into the office. At the time, of course, he was living with Mary. To start with, his sex life was a complete mystery to us all; we could never quite fathom it. He certainly never spoke about it.’4
By this point, August 1973, Queen were back in the studio recording their second album. Once more, Roy Thomas Baker would be the producer and he found a band still eager for perfection and desperate for a hit single: ‘Singles are important to us and to have a hit now would help the band. We’ve more to offer than bands like The Sweet, we’re not just pop, because our music covers a wide area,’ Freddie said.5
Freddie composed six of the 11 songs on what was to become Queen II, including the entire second side of the album, which became known as ‘The Black Side’ (instead of having the standard ‘Side 1’ and ‘Side 2’, this album had a ‘Side White’ and a ‘Side Black’, with corresponding themes such as emotional songs on the white side and dark, fantasy themes on the black side – Freddie’s side). The songs Freddie composed included ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’, which would eventually become Queen’s first major hit single.
The recording process allowed them the chance to work on complex tracks utilising layered vocals (which would become a trademark), harmonies and instrumentations. ‘Queen II, by virtue of the band’s incurably experimental tendencies, was a spectacle in the De Mille sense of the word,’ wrote Daniel Ross. ‘Everywhere your ears look, there’s a sound you can’t explain. It is myth, it is opera; it is a contest of bravado and a constant display of dashed-off genius.’6
Freddie’s compositions on the album showcase his burgeoning writing range: from the heavy thrash sound of ‘Ogre Battle’ to the intricate medieval fantasy-based lyrics and harpsichord underscored ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’. The epic composition, ‘The March of the Black Queen’, proved to be a song too complicated to ever be performed live, a pre-‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ if ever there was one, and it hints at Mercury’s operatic influences, gained initially through exposure to the records his parents would play during his childhood.
But for all Queen’s intricacy and complexity in the studio, it hadn’t escaped anybody’s attention that the band had only played four gigs in the year up to that point. The previous year had seen them play just five gigs and the band were in danger of losing the devoted live following that they had built up over a number of years slogging around London, Cornwall and the north of England. Trident, too, were keen for Queen to re-establish their live presence, especially as they would soon have a second album to promote and so, following a BBC Radio 1 special recorded at the Golders Green Hippodrome on 13th September and two smaller gigs in Frankfurt and Luxembourg – Queen’s first foreign concerts – the band embarked on a major UK tour supporting Mott The Hoople. Their support slot was paid for by EMI, the first time the company had paid for a band to have a support slot, and it didn’t come cheap at a reputed £9,000 (£76,000 in 2016), but they knew that the audience on the tour was the perfect audience to be exposed to Queen’s music and Freddie’s flamboyant performances.
The 24-date tour began on 12th November at Leeds Town Hall following two sell-out warm-up gigs at Imperial College London. The second of these shows was reviewed under the title ‘Queen’s Loyal Subjects’, and within the glowing review Freddie’s own performance was highlighted: ‘Their leader Freddie Mercury pranced about the small stage, waving his mic both violently and sensually as they performed numbers from their first album. The funniest moment was undoubtedly the first encore – Freddie’s “Big Spender” was done à la Shirley Bassey, and thus was outrageously camp.’ To conclude, the writer Rosemary Horide observed: ‘If Queen are this good on the tour with Mott The Hoople (which they start next week) Mott had better watch out. Queen could turn out to be a bit more than just a support band.’7
On 21st November, Queen supported Mott The Hoople at Preston Guildhall and in the audience was a 16-year-old Marc Almond: ‘I went on my own as none of my friends really liked or got Queen,’ he remembers. ‘I liked Mott The Hoople but Queen were much more exciting and Freddie was much more alluring. They were going through their Black & White phase. Freddie was a great showman and I was intrigued by the way he used half of his microphone stand like a sword or a phallus. He was skinny and pirouetted and posed a lot like a ballet dancer. As they were the support act they didn’t seem to have a lot of extravagant lights and not even a great sound, just lots of smoke. Yet for all Freddie’s performing skills and showing off, they were a definitive four-piece band: Brian’s guitar with its distinctive sound, Roger’s flamboyant drum playing and harmonies and John Deacon’s solid bass. Freddie was a star but it wasn’t the Freddie show.
‘I was so exhilarated by Queen’s show I didn’t stay long for Mott – besides, I had to get the last bus back to Southport. Queen eclipsed Mott as something different and new. Freddie was the new “Star on the Block”.’8
In December, Queen supported Mott The Hoople for two nights at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. It was a concert attended by the DJ, author and broadcaster Paul Gambaccini who, after witnessing Queen’s performance that night, would echo Rosemary Horide’s comments: ‘I went to the fabled Hammersmith Odeon gig,’ recalls Gambaccini, ‘where they were supporting Mott The Hoople and I thought these guys are not going to be second on the bill for long.’9
Despite all of this, Queen were not