Just Waiting for Freddie Mercury

Memories of meeting Queen at Wembley, 1986

Let me transport you back to July 1986 when I was features editor on the UK magazine, Just Seventeen. I was chaperone to two young readers who had won the magazine’s competition to see Queen’s sold-out concert at Wembley Stadium on 11 July and meet the band afterwards.

Queen were on the final stretch of their European Magic tour¹. On-stage they were epic. They had wowed the crowds at Live Aid the year before and had reminded the world that they were one of the best live bands ever.

Backstage things were fraught, as you will see below. We didn’t know then that Freddie Mercury’s last live performance with the band would be at Knebworth Park, the following month.

Freddie Mercury and Brian May, on-stage at Wembley. Screenshot.

The Queen competition

Below is the charity competition that ran in the 30 April 1986 issue of Just Seventeen.

It strikes me now as strange to suggest teenage girls “take part in a 24-hour famine” to help provide clean drinking water in Ethiopia and for a chance to meet their favourite band. I vaguely recall an office discussion about the ethics of it, but it wasn’t our idea and it was for a good cause.

What can I say? A year on from the massively successful Live Aid charity concerts that Bob Geldof had organised for Ethiopian famine relief, it didn’t seem so odd at the time.

Just Seventeen, 30 April 1986 issue

Meeting Queen at Wembley: extract from my diary

Saturday 12 July 1986

Spent all day yesterday looking after the Queen competition winners. Busiest day in ages.

Met them at 1pm at Kings Cross and took a cab with them to the Tara Hotel in Kensington. So many facilities you wouldn’t believe it. The girls, Estelle and Helen, were well-impressed.

I started reading the book True to Life², a collection of essays and poems by teenagers, while I waited in the lobby for them to change and eat. Good stuff. Wouldn’t mind getting permission to reprint a couple of things from it.

Trek to Wembley. Traffic too bad for a cab so we got the tube.

We had passes for the special enclosure and backstage passes.

I spent most of the concert concerned that we wouldn’t find Debbie, the PR who organised the whole World Vision publicity campaign and set up the prizes. She thought seats would be numbered, but not so.

I’d spoken to her on the phone during the week and pictured her with long dark hair and dark eyes. I felt she would be noticeable.

I left a message with the doormen to say where I was.

Late afternoon, I went to get a drink and while I was at the bar, I noticed a woman dressed all in white. Trousers and jacket with padded, studded sleeves, carrying an evening bag. Compared to everyone else she looked overdressed. Long dark hair, brown eyes. White high heels. Flamboyant.

“It’s her,” I thought, and at that moment, two guys accidentally pushed into her and made her spill her drink. I caught her eye for a second.

“No,” I thought. “All these people, why should it be her?” The white high heels decided me against. She’d told me she’s got a severely dodgy back and I couldn’t see her risking tottering about. I didn’t say anything.

After INXS, The Alarm and Status Quo had all been on (not a bad line-up, but apart from a couple of INXS numbers and Strength by The Alarm, I wasn’t fussed with the music), I thought I’d better find her. I didn’t want to leave it till after the concert.

I checked with the security guard on the other door. “I’m supposed to be meeting someone here and I don’t know what she looks like,” I said.

“Well, you’ve no chance,” he said, shrugging at the crowds.

I told him her name. “You haven’t heard from her, have you?”

“Yes!” he lit up. “Follow me.”

Back to the stadium we went.

“Debbie!” he shouted, and the woman in white turned around.

“It’s you!” I said in amazement. Hundreds of people crammed into that enclosure and my intuition had been right.

I sat with her for a bit, hearing about how she got into PR via art, psychology and the music business. She must be 40-odd I guess. She was living with a member of the Crazy World Of Arthur Brown when they had their number one hit with Fire. I remember that well enough. I was seven, visiting nana and grandad in Rockferry and getting shouted in from playing “May I?” with the kids in the street (two squashed tomatoes and a lamppost) to watch Top of the Pops.

“Oh dear,” I thought. “Nana won’t like this weird person, Arthur Brown, with his head on fire.”

So if Debbie was in, say, her early twenties then, she’ll be, yeah, about 40 now.

I like her a lot. She can’t half talk. When we re-joined the girls, she talked to me all through the concert, which was OK for her because she’s seen Queen loads of times. But for me it was a first and they were good, no doubt about it.

She told me that Brian and Freddie don’t speak to each other.

She also told me that there had been problems regarding the competition. Initially, she’d asked Freddie to be the sponsor and he’d been very slow off the mark, so she asked Brian and he was really good and organised. When Freddie found out, he threw a wobbler and said he didn’t want anything to do with it.

Uh-oh, I thought. I got the impression it was Freddie the girls were most dying to meet.

After the concert, we made our way backstage and only managed to get into Queen’s area by the skin of our teeth. By this time, we were all cold and hungry and there wasn’t much food laid on. We were cramped with other people in a small marquee incorporating Queen’s vans.

The manager, Jim Beach, introduced us to Brian May. I took a photo of the girls with him using Ian’s proper camera. I’m praying to God I got the focusing right, because I couldn’t really tell.

Phew! It was in focus.

Everyone was in a hurry. Seems like all the band except Freddie (who definitely is gay) are family men and, having been on tour a good while, they were anxious to see their wives and kids. They seemed really down to earth, actually, all of them. Really steady blokes.

Freddie was still stashed away in his caravan, and despite several pleas to other members of the band and Jim Beach, he didn’t materialise, either to meet the girls or have a photo with the rest of the band. The only person who got in to see him was Ange from EastEnders (actress, Anita Dobson).

They passed their programmes in and got Freddie’s autograph, but after a final appeal, we were told “it was impossible” to see him.

It was disappointing. Band politics have obviously got in the way. This morning I thought of a couple of things we could have done. Emphasise that the girls wanted to meet Freddie, instead of putting the emphasis on the group photo; get them to write a note to pass in with their programme saying who they were and that they really wanted to meet him…

Bit late now though.

So we went. By now we were being herded out by burly bouncers anyway, who were telling everyone to go home.

Estelle had gone off Freddie quite a bit by now and felt he really must be a prima donna. I felt bad because they’d won a competition to meet Queen and it hadn’t quite happened. Three out of four isn’t good enough.

Debbie called for a cab from the front office. By now it was turned midnight and pouring down outside. And we had to wait ages. Debbie’s back was playing up, I was tired and we were all starving.

Finally, our cab driver appeared from the wrong direction, saying he’d been looking for ages.

“I told the controller we’re by the office,” said Debbie. “I told him to tell you that.”

“Yeah,” said the guy. “I go to F. F for offices.”

Estelle, Helen and I in the back seat looked at each other and nearly giggled, but were too tired.

He dropped the girls off, then Debbie, then brought me home, via a roundabout route.

Exhausted, I threw up³ (having felt fine all day, would you believe) and collapsed into bed. It was 2.30am.

Woke early, had some Frosties and now I’m going back to sleep.

The write-up

Here’s my short column about the concert which appeared in the 30 July 1986 issue of Just Seventeen.

They came to London and met QUEEN

Back in our April 30 issue we told you about a sponsored 24-hour fast organised by World Vision to raise money for water facilities in Africa. We also ran a competition, and the person entering via Just Seventeen who raised the most money would be sponsored by Queen, who would make a private donation to the charity. Plus they’d win a weekend for two in London to see Queen’s Wembley concert on July 11 and meet them afterwards.

Well, after the figures had been totted up, Estelle Rumbold, 16, from Royston near Cambridge came out tops, having raised £275. A big Queen fan, she was chuffed to hear she’d won the competition and elected to bring her cousin Helen with her.

They arrived on the afternoon of the concert and were escorted by Features Ed Wendy Varley to their swish hotel, the Tara in Kensington. A quick change and it was off to Wembley Stadium. The concert started late afternoon with INXS, The Alarm and Status Quo as support bands. Estelle and Helen’s verdict on Queen’s performance was that they were ‘brilliant’.

Afterwards the girls went backstage to meet the band – or at least to meet Brian May, John Deacon and Roger Taylor. Unfortunately, Freddie wasn’t in a sociable mood and didn’t emerge from his Portakabin all night, so they had to console themselves with his autograph and a brief glimpse of him through the doorway, wearing a yellow towelling robe. Just about the only person allowed into his hideout was Anita Dobson (Angie from EastEnders).

It had turned midnight when they arrived back at the hotel, but there was plenty more in store for them the next day. A guide from the London Tourist Board escorted them to Madame Tussaud’s and the Tower of London. In the evening after a meal at an Italian restaurant, they went to see the musical 42^nd Street, where real VIP treatment was laid on and afterwards they had a chance to meet the star of the show, Frankie Vaughan (crooner and clubland entertainer).

On Sunday morning Wendy saw the girls off at King’s Cross. “Thanks, it’s been brilliant,” they agreed.

Who Wants To Live Forever?

Watching clips of Freddie’s performance from the Wembley concert now, I am in awe. What a voice. What a presence. Here he is singing Who Wants to Live Forever?

Freddie Mercury died aged 45 on 24 November 1991 of AIDS-related causes. He’d been diagnosed with AIDS in 1987 and shown symptoms earlier⁴, but didn’t publicly announce it until the day before he died:

“Following the enormous conjecture in the press over the last two weeks, I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV positive and have AIDS. I felt it correct to keep this information private to date to protect the privacy of those around me. However, the time has come now for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth and I hope that everyone will join with me, my doctors and all those worldwide in the fight against this terrible disease. My privacy has always been very special to me and I am famous for my lack of interviews. Please understand this policy will continue.”

It’s only as I’m researching and writing this piece, nearly forty years on, that I wonder. With so much ignorance and misinformation around AIDS back in 1986, did Freddie have his own reasons for wanting to be alone?

Maybe I’ve been wrong to assume all these years that he was being a prima donna claiming it was “impossible” to meet his young fans. 1986 me assumed he was being aloof. 2024 me considers what was known or not know about AIDS at the time – how it was transmitted and who was affected – and thinks he was probably just exercising caution.

I worried at the time I hadn’t done my job well enough, that I’d let the Just Seventeen readers down by not being persuasive enough. But I can see now it had nothing to do with me.

How AIDS was covered in the news in 1986

AIDS was hitting the news in 1986, and it was something we were discussing in the magazine.

The April 30 1986 issue of Just Seventeen flagged an upcoming TV film drama on the subject:

AIDS – Is it a subject for TV viewing?

Every time you pick up a newspaper, there’s something written about AIDS. If it’s in the gutter tabloid press, then it’s always – Shock! Horror! Another victim of “the Gay Plague”.

But we now know that this fatal disease is not confined to homosexuals, so calling it “the Gay Plague” is not only offensive, it’s basically incorrect. There are so many myths surrounding AIDS. Even the medical experts are desperately short of facts about it.

What we can be certain about, however, is the effect AIDS has on the sufferers.

An Early Frost (ITV) 10.30pm Saturday is a movie, starring Aidan Quinn (of Desperately Seeking Susan fame), who plays an AIDS victim coming to terms with his gradual death. At first his parents are horrified and disgusted that their son is gay. They see his impending death as some sort of divine retribution for his sins. Similarly, his friends desert him, frightened to be associated with him, and frightened that they might catch the disease.

Fifty million people saw it when it was first screened in America and it was widely praised. The strength is in its approach – unlike the tabloid press, it isn’t hysterical. Instead, An Early Frost is quiet and touching, investigating the victim’s inner torment and final acceptance.

In Britain the government has recently started an advertising campaign throughout all the Press in an attempt to educate the population about the risks of contracting AIDS through permissive sexual contact or injecting drugs.

We at Just Seventeen want to know what you think of the coverage of AIDS, especially on TV? Do you feel it is clear and consistent? And what do you think of fictional dramatization like An Early Frost? Does it help or hinder this ever-increasing problem?

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Following Freddie Mercury’s death in 1991, the remaining members of the band founded The Mercury Phoenix Trust to raise money for HIV/AIDS research. Since then, according to the Trust’s home page:

“The MPT has reached millions in the fight against HIV/AIDS worldwide, providing £18M to over 1.8K projects in 57 countries (and counting!).”

They say:

“Freddie was taken from us too young, but there is still time to make a difference and change the destinies of millions around the world.”

© Wendy Varley 2024

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Thanks to everyone who read, liked, commented and/or shared my piece last week about the importance of memoir. There were some wonderful recommendations in the comments. Thanks to Ann Kennedy Smith for giving it a mention in her own newsletter this week.

What do you remember about your favourite bands? Did you ever meet them? Has your opinion of them changed over time? In this online era, do youngsters miss out by no longer having teenage magazines, like Just Seventeen?

Thanks everyone for reading, and do please click the heart button, comment and/or share, to help people find my writing.

Thank you for reading!

Till next time!

1. The Magic tour coincided with Queen’s album, A Kind of Magic, released in 1986, which included the tracks A Kind of Magic, One Vision, and Who Wants To Live Forever?

2. Published by Virago books, 1986, a collaboration between Virago and Just Seventeen.

3. I was pregnant and had persistent sickness during the summer of 1986. Just a couple of weeks earlier I’d been interviewing Tom Cruise in Hamburg, desperately trying to keep the nausea at bay.

4. Review by Diane Anderson-Minshall in Advocate of the book Somebody To Love: The Life, Death and Legacy of Freddie Mercury, by Matt Richards and Mark Langthorne.