#Bono made a lot of cash from selling freddys

[davidthephoneguy]

Mila's info page (1/3) [Dsaf au] I'll post the other character ones later when I finish them.

[natromanxoff]

Smash Hits (March 26 - April 8, 1986): 73/?

Credits to Michael Kane.

QUEEN

Were they wrong to play in Sun City? Did they cash in on Live Aid with their single “One Vision”? At last their gracious majesties reply to their critics — and a right old tongue-lashing they give them, too. William Shaw plays Devil’s Advocate…

Roger Taylor is hopping mad. "People like Paul Weller never stop to think. They see things in such simplistic terms — in such puerile terms," he seethes, his voice raised. "And I get really angry when arseholes like Daryl Hall…” he gropes for the word, "hair-dos like Daryl Hall start going on about it when they haven't got a clue!"

Yes, Roger Taylor is definitely a bit hot under the collar. And what's made him so angry is this: Queen have been coming in for quite a bit of stick recently from fellow pop stars over a place called "Sun City", which is a huge concert venue in South Africa. Last year a bunch of stars like Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Daryl Hall and Bob Dylan got together to declare in song that they "ain't gonna play Sun City", to show how much they all detested the system of apartheid there by which blacks are segregated from whites.And a few stars — like Paul Weller and Daryl Hall — began openly criticising those groups which had played in Sun City. And one of the most famous groups who had appeared there was Queen.

"In a way I do regret playing," Roger admits now. "In some ways I would defend what we did. I mean, basically we play music to people — lots of them preferably — and I think a lot of crap is talked over here about things that people don't really know about."

Brian May goes a bit further: "Those criticisms are absolutely and definitely not justified. We're totally against apartheid and all it stands for, but I feel that by going there we did a lot of bridge building. We actually met musicians of both colours. They all welcomed us with open arms. The only criticism we got was from outside South Africa."

But the upshot of all this is that Queen have bowed to pressure and announced that they won't play there again. "We've come into line now, like everyone else," says Brian with a touch of bitterness in his voice about the whole affair.

He's sitting in this very plush recording studio in West London with assorted instruments scattered around the place. It's there that Queen have been putting the very last touches to their new LP which is a spin-off from a soundtrack which they wrote for a new film called Highlander (starring Sean Connery). According to Brian, the plot is about this bloke "who discovers he's immortal somewhere around the 15th century and eventually ends up in New York in the 20th century where the various immortals who've been born around the world come together for a show down…"

The new single, "A Kind Of Magic", taken from the film, is noticeably short of the "searing axe work" that used to be Queen's trade mark in earlier days. And the same goes for practically all their recent singles. Is Brian disappointed that no-one seems too want so many flashy guitar "solos" these days?

"Yeah," he answers forlornly. "It's frustrating in a way, but I've come to regard it as a fact of life. Even though I have the opportunity to do what I want with the group, the things that I want to do aren't necessarily the things that sell in huge quantities but there's nothing I can do about it. Mind you," he says, perking up, "there's some very heavy stuff in the film. It's a very heavy film, Highlander."

While he's talking, John Deacon is sitting still twiddling away behind this mammoth mixing desk. Freddie is conspicuously absent.

"He's really shy," explains Roger. "He feels that he's not very good at doing interviews."

What? The man who bounds furiously around stage wearing practically nothing apart from a moustache in front of millions of people is shy?

"On stage he's not," answers Brian. "But it takes him a long time to get on with anyone he doesn't know. He hates doing interviews and he hates the way they come out. People have such a strong idea of what they think he's like that it doesn't matter what he says to them, he usually gets misquoted."

Live Aid was definitely the highpoint of last year — Queen came out of it extremely well indeed. Were they surprised at the reaction?

"Yeah, I suppose so," says Brian. "Actually, it's only by a narrow squeak that we got involved in it because our first reaction was ‘Oh God! Not another one.’ We'd been involved in quite a few and we were a bit disillusioned as to how the whole business works…"

“But Geldof's whole thing was magnificent,” continues Roger. "He did it out of the purest motives. I cannot believe arseholes like Johnathan King can denigrate something that's done real good when he's done no good to mankind except litter the planet with dreadful records! How dare he? How worthless parasitic specks like him can have a go at something that's so good I don't know!"

But their huge success was tainted a bit by the fact that some people thought that the single "One Vision" was an attempt to "cash in" on the event — especially when a press release from the Queen office announced that the song was "inspired" by the event. They got a bit of a stick for that too.

The whole thing, says Roger, was an embarrassing error: "I was absolutely devastated when I saw that in the press. It was a terrible mistake and I was really annoyed about it. Some public relations person got the wrong end of the stick. I went absolutely bananas when I read that."

"We do a lot of stuff for charities," explains Brian, "but ‘One Vision' was a way of getting back to what we're doing, and if we didn't run ourselves as a business, we wouldn't be around for the next Live Aid. We're not in the full-time business of charity at all. We're in the business of making music, which is a good enough end in itself.”

[It’s A Kind Of Magic lyrics]