Queen Unseen by Peter Hince Read Free Book Online Page B

fare to sustain a hard-working crew: steaks, shepherds pie, spaghetti bolognese, chilli con carne and so on. They did, however, cater for the growing band of vegetarians – omelettes! The caterers also supplied Queen’s dressing-room requirements, and Dave x 3 + 1 attempted to vary the basic menu by using local products and specialities from the regions of Europe we visited. The American contingent of the crew had continually nagged them to get turkey to celebrate their traditional Thanksgiving dinner, though the stage manager vainly tried to convince them that in Boston the traditional holiday food was the finest fresh lobster. He had to settle for Thousand on a Raft – known in haute cuisine circles as beans on toast. Local produce was supplemented by all the vital garnishes transported from England: Marmite, HP sauce, Worcester sauce, marmalade and English mustard.
    Replete on our masters’ dressing-room leftovers, we would amble around the venue as the show was dismantled and the building rearranged for its next engagement. Walking into an empty arena at this point was a prosaic experience. A vast space, that only an hour or two earlier had transfixed a gathering of thousands with a glittering spectacle, was now a cacophony of folded metal chairs being stacked, industrial cleaning machines humming, rasping forklift trucks manoeuvring, lighting trusses and chains striking abrasive contact and a multitude of voices straining to shout and bark instructions and insults above the din. Smoke and pyrotechnic dust still hung in the air and mixed with pungent cleaning fluids, emissions from the forklifts and squashed, abandoned popcorn – it all left a sickly, sweet rasp in the throat. Tomorrow was another day and the cold concrete cocoon would house the hopes and dreams of another section of the community and their particular passions. Meanwhile, tonight, the victorious gladiators had left the coliseum and the magical genie was safely back in the bottle – ready to be unleashed again tomorrow.
    The uniformed Hispanic and Asian immigrant cleaners who mopped the floors and cleaned toilets in the US arenas, with their fluorescent yellow buckets on wheels, didn’t care who Freddie Mercury or any rock act was as they tried tokeep America sanitary. They just wanted to be at home with their families and the better life America and her dream had given them. The good life.
    Hang on a moment – what was I doing with my own life? True, it was a good life : travelling the world with lashings of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll thrown in, but I could have been doing something worthwhile: working for charity in the third world, medical research, campaigning about global warming and pollution. These are things I have thought about since – but certainly not at the time – I was having too much fun. And just how did I get here? Where did it all start? In a supermarket in Fulham, south west London. Not stacking shelves, but amps and speaker cabinets.
    An old cinema had previously stood on the site of the supermarket and, after it closed in the early 1970s, ‘super group’ Emerson Lake and Palmer commandeered the building for their vast cache of equipment, renaming it Manticore. Apart from housing ELP’s equipment and offices, it was hired out to the major bands of the time for office, recording and rehearsal purposes. The cinema seats had been ripped out, and a stained, threadbare carpeted slope led to the proscenium stage, which was big enough to handle large touring rock shows of that era. Despite being insulated by swathes of parachute silk hung from the balcony over the old stalls area, Manticore was a cold, dank miserable place in early November ’73 when I first encountered Queen. I was working for Mott The Hoople, a great rock band, who had just returned from a successful tour in America, and I was impressed by all the US branded paraphernalia that Richie and Phil, Mott’s