I was shaking.
For a few seconds the singer tinkered with the keys, keeping them guessing, teasing them. Then, those four familiar notes - and a huge roar erupted around the stadium. Moments later 70,000 people were singing as one: ‘Mama, just killed a man…’
It was going to be OK. It was going to be more than OK.
20 minutes later, as the band launched into We are the Champions, I was practically weeping with joy.
I was approximately 12 months into my love affair with Queen. Before that I had simply liked all pop music. I mean, everybody watched Top of the Pops. But I read also Smash Hits every week from cover to cover, and listened to Radio 1 as much as humanly possible - before school, after school, occasionally during school, and all weekend. I even had my own chart. Each week I would compile a new top ten, detailing climbers, new entries, chart milestones reached - based of course entirely on my useless opinion and my useless opinion alone. I know, and Top of the Pops still tediously insisted on recognising the - yawn - ‘official’ chart, based on trivial matters like record sales.
I didn’t discriminate a great deal, musically. As luck would have it, one of the first albums I owned was Bowie’s Scary Monsters. But the other was Shakin Stevens’ This Ole House, and I liked one exactly as much as the other. For one holiday I made myself a compilation from songs taped off the radio. I had two particular favourites on it, which I played on my cheap personal stereo all week. One was Love Cats by the Cure; the other was Agadoo. They were both great songs as far as I was concerned.
My idea of a good song was one with a catchy bit and perhaps some words I could make out. My idea of a bad song was a slow one. They, without exception, were boring.
In 1984 everything changed. One week, on Top of the Tops, the video to I Want to Break Free came on. Queen were dressed as dowdy ‘housewives’ and did chores, and I found it - I’m sorry to say - funny almost beyond belief. Look, they’re funny little northern ladies! What sports the lads are! Before the clip was over I’d decided it was a brilliant, brilliant pop song, and as soon as I had the money I bought its parent album, The Works. At first I didn’t like all the songs on it, but because I didn’t own any other albums, I played it over and over again until I’d convinced myself I did.
Two things occur to me when I listen to the album now: first, how odd it is, and second, how bad it is. It’s a strange mish-mash of an album all right. Lumpy throwback rockers sit alongside bizarre electronic experiments and glitzy piano ballads. One song sounds like a Shakin’ Stevens b-side. More famously there’s the plodding Radio Ga Ga, which brazenly criticises the standard of the music played on pop radio, without pause to consider whether it might be part of the problem rather than the solution.
Then there’s Queen’s social conscience moment, the egregious Is This the World We Created. ‘Just look at all those hungry mouths we have to feed. Take a look at all the suffering we breed’, Freddie sings, risibly. You almost admire the sheer chutzpah - decrying the injustices of the world in one moment, signing off the deal to break the international boycott of South Africa with a series of concerts the next. ‘Somewhere a wealthy man is sitting on his throne.’ Well, quite.
For the sake of balance, I should point out it is one of Queen’s worst albums, albeit among keen competition. The Works, I think, marks the point where Queen moved from ‘I’m not sure if that is fucking brilliant or fucking terrible’ to simply ‘Jesus, that is really fucking terrible’. And yet it was the gateway into an obsession that was to last almost 18 months.
It was a time when many of the kids at school were becoming more aware of the unfairnesses in the world; they were wearing badges, writing angry essays, going on demos. There was certainly no shortage of injustices to get agitated about: Mrs Thatcher and miners’ strike, apartheid, the ever present fear that we would be swiftly wiped out by a sudden nuclear attack, QPR’s plastic pitch. I was against all this too, at least in theory.
But I was fatally prone to obsessions and crushes - footballers, classmates, characters in Neighbours, they all became the unwitting object of my attentions. So when I fell for Queen, I fell hard, and precious little could compete for my affection. I read every magazine article, bought every book, read every magazine piece I could find. I recorded a radio documentary by Paul Gambaccini, and listened to it repeatedly. I had a crush on the band. Not the individual members; the band as a whole.
Although actually Roger was my favourite. I often fantasised about meeting him and his French wife, Dominique, and being invited to hang out with them and their lovely family, at their chateau.
From then on every time I had six quid saved up I went to Our Price and bought another tape, and it wasn’t too long before I owned every album the band had made. Admittedly the very early ones, with their heavy, proggy songs about gods and fairy kings, didn’t get too many plays. I wasn’t a natural rock fan by any stretch: I didn’t care for long guitar solos and I liked Dungeons and Dragons not at all. But everything from Sheer Heart Attack (1974, and I didn’t have to look that up) onwards was a treasure box to me. I was a music fan now, and I liked the fit. I was an explorer on the choppy seas of pop, and I was navigating, man.
At one point I seriously considered buying a record by The Cross, Roger’s side project, but some small residual voice of sanity told me: this is a step too far.
Leading up to Live Aid I really was as nervous as I was excited. I was all too aware that the band had appalled most right-thinking people by playing in South Africa (I performed some nimble moral gymnastics and managed to put my abhorrence of apartheid neatly to the back of my mind). And I also knew that some people thought Queen a bit, well, naff. What if the Live Aid audience laughed at them? Of course, I needn’t have worried. On the day Queen’s stadium-friendly anthems went down a storm. And, ludicrous though they undoubtedly were, I guess they did make most of the other acts - especially the likes of Nik Kershaw - seem a bit poxy and small that day.
Back at school on Monday everyone was talking about their performance. “Did you see Queen? They were wicked!” I was more delighted than I dared show. But perhaps something changed that day, as well. Somehow my passion for one of the world’s most famous bands had seemed like a private, personal thing. Now I had to share them with everybody else.
When the single One Vision was announced a few months after Live Aid my obsession was still raging. It hit number one in my chart a couple of weeks before I’d actually heard it. I bought it on the day of release, then counted down the days until the (real) charts came out, fretting about its position. No 7 - pretty good. But then it stayed at number 7 the following week, instead of climbing as it should have done, then fell swiftly. I was devastated, and also a little relieved that I could at least stop worrying about it. But as 1985 became 1986 I turned 15, and in the same way it had suddenly flourished, my love for Queen began to fade.
Unsure of what to listen to next, for a few months I dallied with becoming a rock fan. I bought a Marillion album, played it twice. I tried to listen to Tommy Vance on Radio One, and watched No Limits on BBC2. I found that I wasn’t really enjoying either, and it dawned on me that it was Queen’s pop songs that I’d liked. I quit trying to fool myself, and let myself drift back towards pop, albeit pop in different clothes. By the time Queen’s next record was released in June 1986 I had no interest in hearing it whatsoever. After an all-encompassing, burning, two year obsession, I never listened to another Queen album again. Well, until today.
