When I first received the invitation, in the post, I misread it. How could the British Embassy, of all people, miss out the definite article ‘the’? But then I remembered - it was July 1986, and Freddie Mercury’s Queen were due in town, any moment, as one of the first big western bands to play in what was still Communist Hungary. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II would arrive only 7 years later, in 1993. I met her too, but that’s a different story.
My friend Victoria was invited as well, and we trooped up Rose Hill that evening in good time, not sure what to expect. Neither of us were full-blooded Queen fans, to be honest, but we liked the music, and British bands were rare visitors to Hungary in those days. It was a year after they played at the famous Live Aid concert at Wembley stadium, in July 1985, which I watched on TV. The only other British musician I remember visiting Budapest was Billy Bragg in the autumn of 1988. Hungarian readers can find an excellent article by András Stumpf on Queen’s visit to Hungary here.
Mikhail Gorbachev had been in power in the Soviet Union for just over a year, by then, and you could already feel change in the air in Hungary. There was a lightness, a good humour, an optimism which has rarely been felt since. Perhaps only this spring.
Freddie Mercury was in a filthy mood, as I remember, that evening at the British embassy residence. We had better luck with the guitarist, Brian May, a gentle giant of a man with a great mop of hair, who we spoke to all evening. What about? I wish I could remember. I guess he asked about Hungary. I’d been in Budapest just 5 months then, at the tender age of 26, and only one month earlier had been named correspondent by the BBC, much to my surprise, and that of the Hungarian authorities. I was still pretty green behind the ears.
Three days after the embassy event, we had complementary tickets to the Queen concert in Népstadion - the People’s Stadium. The concert was brilliant, from the performance of the Hungarian folk song Tavaszi Szél - Spring Wind (now a Tisza Party anthem) - to Radio Ga-Ga - which meant a lot to me as a radio reporter. The concert was beautifully filmed on 35mm with no less than 17 cameras.
Our seats were complementary, but would have cost 250 forints each, which as I remember was the equivalent of about £4 at that time - the price of 4 decent bottles of cheap red wine.
You can watch the whole remarkable film here. And yes, that’s a red star in the middle of the white Danube at 01:02.
If you watch nothing else, I suggest ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, from 59:33, with close-ups of Freddie M. on keyboards, and Brian May walking to front stage, for a blistering guitar solo at 1:01:09.
Mama, just killed a man
Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead
Mama, life had just begun
But now I've gone and thrown it all away
Mama, ooh, didn't mean to make you cry
If I'm not back again this time tomorrow
Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality
Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see
I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy (Ooh, poor boy)
Because I'm easy come, easy go, little high, little low
Any way the wind blows (Ooh, the wind blows)
Doesn't really matter to me, to me
Those lyrics (1975) have inspired much speculation. There’s no evidence that Mercury had a real-life murderer or victim in mind. Most interpretations suggest they concern himself, and his own sexuality, abandoning his heterosexual past as Farrokh Bulsara, and coming out as a gay man. Some other characters in the song shed some light on this:
Scaramouche — the boastful, cowardly clown of Italian commedia dell’arte.
Figaro — an operatic reference to Mozart or Rossini and the comic-opera tradition.
Galileo — possibly part of an elaborate joke reference to Brian May, who was an astronomer/astrophysicist.
Beelzebub — a name for the Devil.
Bismillah — Arabic for “in the name of God.”
In this interpretation, the narrator’s private confession becomes a gigantic cosmic courtroom, with God, the Devil and a chorus fighting over his soul:
“We will not let you go…”
The brilliant yellow jacket Freddie Mercury wore for the latter part of the concert that night was supposedly inspired by the uniform of a 19th century cavalry officer.
The day after the concert, I was flying back to England, and bumped into the band by accident in the departure lounge of Ferihegy 1 airport. The band were thirsty, but this was still Communism, and you couldn’t pay with ‘hard currency,’ only with Hungarian forints. So I had the honour of buying the whole band a round. Like an idiot, I didn’t get them to sign the bill, or any other piece of paper, nor thought of taking a photograph with them on my little Olympus trip camera. There were so many surprises in life in Hungary in those days. Drinking wine with Queen one night, or orange juice with them one morning, didn’t seem anything much to write home about.
So there’s no picture of me with the band. In that deliciously innocent pre-selfie age, it didn’t even cross my mind to ask. It seems light years away from today’s celebrity journalism.
In July this year the British embassy held a memorial event - 40 years after the original concert. Denis O’Regan was there too, the legendary British rock photographer, who accompanied the band on that Magic Tour of 1986. Some of his pictures - to be released in a book later this year - were on display. The life-size wax figure of Freddie Mercury was on loan from the Budapest Madame Tussaud’s exhibition. The juxtaposition of King Charles and the most famous member of Queen, is particularly irreverent!
The Magic Tour was the last time Queen toured together, due to Freddie Mercury’s declining health. 10 days after the Budapest gig, they played at Knebworth park in the UK, to a crowd of 120,000. Mercury died in November 1991, aged 45.
You write well always, Nick, but this is just priceless. What a story, and so elegantly told, with very typical Thorpe-esque understatement. Thanks - noting if you have a moment over the bank holiday weekend to watch BBC2 on Wham! in China 1985. Like you, I have a full recording of their ground-breaking concert, and figure briefly in this new documentary telling the full story of that visit. Good music, up there in its way with Queen. "The" Wham?
This was wonderful to read. Thank you!