BOOK REVIEW:

“Is This the Real Life: The Untold Story of Queen”

by Mark Blake

I met Freddie Mercury and Brian May on their first American tour.  We had lunch.  I asked Freddie why he named the band Queen.  Doing a full body curl, he touched his pinky to his lower lip and said, “Oh I don’t know…it was just the most awful name we could think of.”

Mark Blake’s Is This the Real Life/The Untold Story of Queen, is the best book yet on the epochal band which charted new paths in glam rock.   Blake details young Farrokh Bulsara’s birth in Zanzibar to Indian-born civil servants, his odyssey which eventually landed him in London at Isleworth Polytcchnic–one of those English trade schools which served as a training ground for musicians.

In the book Freddie explains the name.  “The concept of Queen is to be regal and majestic.  We want to be dandy.  We want to shock and be outrageous.”

Freddie was always outrageous and always wanted to be a rock star. He eventually hooked up with John Deacon, Roger Taylor and Brian May, all of whom had been knocking around from band to band.  Blake details how May built his own guitar, “the Red Special,” with his father’s help.  Other players who tried to play the guitar were stymied by its unorthodox stringing and control.

“The guitar’s body was moulded from oak and blockboard; the neck was made from an eighteenth-century mahogany fireplace…(two woodworm holes were plugged with matchsticks); the fret markers…were fashioned from mother-of-pearl buttons scavenged from Ruth May’s sewing box and sanded by hand, while the tremelo arm was made from a piece of steel originally used to hold up the saddle of a bike, and recalled Brian, ‘capped by my mum’s knitting needle.’  Two valve springs from a 1928 Panther motorcycle were then used to blaance the strings’ tension.”

May still uses the guitar today.

May was one thesis away from achieving his doctorate in astronomy when the band got an offer from tiny Trident and began recording their first album in fits and starts when the studio was available, usually after midnight.  Blake faithfully chronicles Queen’s siege of the charts and their forays into the United States.  Queen’s achievements were notable.  “We Will Rock You” (written by John Deacon)  and “We Are the Champions” (Mercury) are staples of every stadium in the world.  Queen played to the largest outdoor audience ever, 250,000 in Brazil.  Their return to greatness at Live Aid galvanized a new audience.

Those were the days.  “On Halloween night, 31 October 1978, Queen celebrated the release of their seventh album, Jazz, in New Orleans. At midnight a Dixieland brass band marched into the ballroom…where over three hundred guests were already gorging on oysters, shrimp creole and champagne served by liveried waiters…  Queen’s publicist had been ordered to trawl the bars and clubs around Bourbon St in the city’s French Quarter with an instruction to round up ‘every available freak’ and invite them to the party.”

Their forays into Japan and Brazil required 100 tons of equipment, a DC 8 and a three figure road crew.  Queen, and all those bands, some still active, that toured with enormous retinues and tons of equipment–Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, ELO–are unthinkable in today’s down-sized world.

Blake scrupulously follows the various members’ lives, especially Freddie’s tangled relationships with men and women, his forays into opera and ballet, and the long decline in his health, an open secret in the music community.

Blake captures Freddie’s multi-faceted personality.  He was loyal, generous, sarcastic, cruel, indifferent, passionate, he was all these things.  He provides invaluable insight into the making of their music and the creative process.

BOTTOM LINE:  Four and a half stars.