Fact #79329

EYEWITNESS : Queen's Crazy Aftershow party in New Orleans, researched and compiled by Johnny Black

It was the aftershow party to end all aftershow parties. The champagne flowed like water, couples coupled under the tables and the entertainment included strippers, snake charmers, a marching funeral band, dwarves, female impersonators and a wench who smoked cigarettes via a most unlikely orifice. It was October 31, 1978, and Queen were launching their new album, Jazz, with a $200,000 bash in a glitzy New Orleans French Quarter hotel whose guest list included 80 reporters and photographers flown in from around the globe along with no less than 52 EMI company MDs. Guitarist Brian May, however, was distracted by the absence of Peaches, the young lady who had bewitched him four years earlier when Queen first visited the Crescent City as support act to Mott The Hoople…

Freddie Mercury : We just wanted to have a bit of fun. It began with the single (Fat Bottomed Girls). The title obviously suggested one or two promotional possibilities … the title of the album is Jazz, so New Orleans was the obvious place for a party to launch it.

Peter Hince (Head of Crew, Queen) : The band was on an unofficial year out of the United Kingdom. We'd gone to Switzerland, to Montreux, and then France to record Jazz. Then, once the album was finished, the tour of America was the next thing, to be followed by Europe, Japan, and then a live album. It was all planned in advance.

I think it was about the third show of the American tour. The crew and the band travelled separately most of the time. We occasionally might be in the same hotel, or get a ride on their private plane.

It was that tour which really started to break them in America. They'd had a couple of hits and they were playing bigger venues or more dates in the same venues. I think we did two Madison Square Garden gigs, for example.

We did The Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis on the 29th, then it was the Civic Auditorium in New Orleans on Halloween night.

Queen were never really involved with organising the party. It was done by the record company people.

Bob Hart ( Head of Corporate PR, EMI) : The whole thing came out of EMI Music, the MD in charge at the time being Leslie Hill, who would probably now deny all knowledge of it, I think he moved into something more respectable, like Carlton Television.

Leslie called me in and said, 'We're going to stage a party for Queen in New Orleans and I want every MD of an EMI company in the world to attend.'

So I said, "And who will pay for this?"

And he said, "EMI will."

So I sent this good news off to the MDs of every EMI company who were wildly excited until they realised that EMI was paying for it out of their budgets. I think the guy from Iceland had to use up about half his year's budget to pay for the flight and the hotel accommodation.

Queen was one of those acts that Capitol Records, in all its wisdom, as they had previously done with The Beatles, decided had no chance in the United States and passed on. It was, I think, Rupert Perry who passed on them, and so they want to Elektra.

The lion's share of the costs were picked up by EMI, with 52 EMI companies globally, right down to the MD from Nigeria whose suit still had the labels on it because he'd bought it specially.

Bob Gibson (partner, Gibson And Stromberg PR) : Queen's American agent, Howard Rose, called me and asked if I'd be interested in doing something. Our company was called Gibson And Stromberg, but we were given the nickname Guzzle And Snort and it kinda stuck. I was Guzzle for my alcoholic intake and my partner, Gary Stromberg, was Snort.

Queen was on Elektra Records in the US and EMI for the rest of the world. Contracts were coming up, it was time for renegotiation, so the various record executives from both companies were invited and it was really sort of a precursor to negotiations, to have something really interesting and flashy.

Jim Beech was their manager at the time, so the three of us sat down at a place which was notorious for deal-making, The Polo Lounge in Beverley Hills, and they told me it would be in New Orleans, and it would be Halloween, so what did I think and how much would it cost?

We had quite a track record of putting these kinds of events together. I remember saying, 'I have no idea how much it's gonna cost, and I don't wanna hear the word budget. It's gonna be successful and you know what I'm capable of doing.' I was very cocky when I was young.

So they, unconventionally, gave us a sort of carte blanche and we proceeded to research it and suss it out and I made two or three trips to New Orleans with my staff. We decided that the only suitable facility would be the Fairmont Hotel, which had a giant ballroom. So you find a room that will hold a multitude of people, then you do the décor, and The Fairmont had facilities which would allow you to do that.

So we went to talk to the management of The Fairmont and told them what we intended to do. They looked a little surprised but okayed it anyway. I happened to know, at that time, the Swig family, who owned the hotel. One of their siblings was in the music business, working for a label that was started by Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. That meant I had a connection there if I had any problems.

There was a lot of pressure on me and my staff to pull it off, and it was a monumental undertaking which would usually require a dozen people, but there was only four of us. But we had thrown a lot of parties over the years, so we knew the audience and we knew the result we were trying to get. We wanted to create a place where whatever you wanted to do was sanctioned.

Thematically, we decided to play up the Halloween aspect of it. One of the first things was to find a nursery that would rent us trees. The room was very stark and bare, very high ceilings, so we wanted to rent fifty dead trees for a couple of days.

Bob Hart : It had a kind of witchcraft theme. The Fairmont was quite a clean, modern-looking hotel, so they had to bring in loads of stuff to make the ballroom look interesting. It ended up looking like a forest of skeletal trees.

Tony Brainsby (Queen's UK publicist) : Masses of hanging, creepy vines, dry-ice smoke pumping everywhere, and snakes …

Bob Gibson : We held auditions over a period of three or four days, and hired a total of sixty or seventy people, which included the entire Olympia Brass Band, strippers, jugglers, a girl with a huge boa constrictor hanging off her, transvestites … the ones you really weren't sure about … but I wanted the strippers there for the foreign record company people and the media. It was exotic beyond their norm. That was the whole idea. Remember, there's a lot of underground sexual perversion in New Orleans, which seemed to please Freddie.

Bob Hart : During the auditions, I had the joy of meeting a dwarf who walked in clutching a huge stainless steel bowl, and then demonstrated how he could get into the bowl and his assistant would cover him completely in chopped liver. He would then be placed on the banqueting table and as people came to help themselves, he would leap from the bowl completely naked. He was my favourite, but they passed on him.

Bob Gibson : We also had to draw the line at the chicken man whose act was that he bit the heads off live chickens.

Bob Gibson : Once getting the acts was accomplished, I brought in a stage manager and we planned out a programme, giving each act a time slot… we wanted non-stop action, no speeches, no bowing by the group…

Several of the bars on Bourbon Street had to close on the night of the party because we took all of their entertainers. It became such a hot thing amongst the performers on the street that they all wanted to come so they all had the flu that night. Anybody like that who contacted us, we said, 'Sure, come along.' The more characters we had mingling with the crowd, the better it was going to be.

Sylvie Simmons (American correspondent, Sounds) : I remember being flown in to New Orleans, met at the airport and installed in this very grand room at The Fairmont, and the first thing I saw was a big steel bucket with a bottle of champagne in it, decorated with a gorgeous plumed and sequinned eye-mask to wear to the party.

Bob Gibson : We had gigantic buffets, eight or nine big screen televisions, constantly showing Queen promo videos, the dead trees, lots of crepe paper, Halloween artefacts, lighting effects, so the room was totally transformed.

Sylvie Simmons (journalist, Sounds) : I remember walking into the ballroom where there must have been four or five hundred people. The tables were laden with pyramids of food, shrimp, oysters, lobsters, all kind of meats, like a bizarre medieval fantasy banquet for a king. Unfortunately, being vegetarian, I couldn't eat any of it. So my calorie intake had to be liquid.

Mark Mehler : In the ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel, over 400 people have gathered to await Queen and munch on a sumptuous table of hors d'oeuvres, such as Oysters Rockfeller and Shrimp Creole. A Dixieland band plays uninspired jazz jingles, until, shortly before midnight, the Olympia Brass Band comes marching through the hall accompanied by Queen-the mercurial Mercury, the winsome Brian May, the puckish John Deacon, the velvety Roger Taylor.

Lisa Robinson (journalist) : A traditional New Orleans jazz band (The Olympia Brass Band) led Queen into the hotel's Imperial Ballroom. Thirty-two local acts had been hired to entertain. Among them were tap dancers, female impersonators, strippers and go-go dancers…

James Henke of Rolling Stone : … and a naked fat lady who smoked cigarettes in her crotch.

Mark Mehler : Suddenly, like a giant circus orchestrated by a deranged ringmaster, a legion of strippers, vulgar fat-bottomed dancers, snake charmers, drag queens, and bizarrely festooned revellers, begin to strut their stuff before the assembled masses. Freddie Mercury is besieged by hungry autograph seekers, groupies and fame-worshippers.

Sylvie Simmons (journalist, Sounds) : I remember strippers and exotic dancers of all denominations, gorgeous women, handsome men. Something to suit every taste. Some of them were grossly fat, huge black ladies, massive big mommas, 300lb specials, in tiny thongs. And I remember dwarves. It was a bit like being in a weird Fellini movie.

There was endless champagne being poured and an ongoing display of naked flesh that went on well into the next morning.

Joe Smith (Chairman, Elektra Records) : It was definitely a Freddie party. He was testing the limits of what he could get away with, and people were kind of dazed, because there had never been anything quite like it.

Brian May : It was deliberately excessive. Partly for our own enjoyment, partly for friends to enjoy, partly because it's exciting for record company people – and partly for the hell of it.

Brian May : I spent most of the night looking for a girl who hadn't turned up.

Brian May : I remember thinking all is not quite right. I went out searching for Peaches [immortalised in the 1975 Queen song Now I'm Here] I didn't find her, but she found me later on.

Bob Gibson : The Japanese and South American label representatives were astonished at the show and all these naked women, or men or whatever, performing … a lot of whatever, actually. So when we saw that reaction, Jim Beech and I went upstairs and got every one dollar bill in the hotel, cleaned out the safe, and went back into the room with armloads of money, which we distributed to the people watching the show, so they could do the traditional thing of putting money in the g-string.

Peter Hince : As the crew, we had to finish up the load out after the gig, so we didn't get to the party until it was well underway, and we had to leave before the end to drive to Miami, which is a long, long way from New Orleans, to set up for the next gig.

You came into the ballroom and there was this mass of people, and a New Orleans jazz band playing, but there was no stage as such, so all of the performers were mingling with the crowd. It was hard to see what was going on, there was just this melee, and you'd be wading through the crowd and suddenly come across fire eaters, dwarves, midgets, or strippers or women tangled up with snakes, or jugglers, transsexuals, all kinds of extreme acts. Everything was going off at the same time. Fred was autographing naked girls' bums.

Tony Brainsby : I've got a photograph of Freddie signing his name on a stripper's botty as she slightly bends over a table.

Bob Hart : There were lots of dwarves strolling around but not, as legend has it, with trays of cocaine on their heads. That wouldn't have gone down well with all of those EMI executives being there.

Peter Hince : I have no doubt that there were narcotics at the party, but trays of cocaine, that was complete bollocks. The crew would have cleaned them out in ten seconds.

Bob Hart : Roger and Freddie didn't mind the odd bit of nonsense, but Queen wasn't what you'd call a coke band. Brian May could probably tell you the chemical formula for it but I doubt that he'd snort it.

Bob Gibson : Trays of cocaine? I didn't see any but that was very possible. There were a lot of entrepreneurs who came in on the party.

Roger Taylor : It never happened. Well, I never saw it …. Actually, it could have been true.

Tony Brainsby : I don't recall seeing Freddie take coke that night. Mind you, he was discreet that way and, anyway, in those days, rightly or wrongly, doing cocaine wasn't really seen as taking drugs. It was more a trendy thing to do.

Peter Hince : Among the piles and piles of food on the tables, there was this huge mound of meat but when you went to take a slice off, a midget would burst out from underneath it all. Then he'd go back inside and wait for the next person.

Peter Hince : The big thing I remember was all the transvestites. I remember a few of us from the crew sitting around with all these girls going past and it was, 'Hello, darling, come on over here.' So this blonde comes and sits on my lap, and I thought, 'Phew! All right! Here we go, rock'n'roll,' and all that. And she was getting quite affectionate, sticking her tongue in my ear, when one of our guys came up and said, 'It's a bloke! It's a geezer, I tell you.' But they were very convincing.

Bob Gibson : Hookers, I don't know about. It's certainly not unheard of, but it was not my doing. When you get into narcotics and/or sexual favours … I mean, there was a lot of famous groupies that were around who, for a plane ticket, would do anything. We knew them but usually that was a road manager's function.

Queen had a road manager whose functions included ensuring that any good-looking groupies who wanted to get backstage could do so. That was normal.

Bob Hart : That's absolute bullshit. That did not happen. I mean, flying hookers into New Orleans? Gimme a break. If anyone wanted a blowjob they could just stroll down the street.

Peter Hince : There were certainly people at it under the tables. Definitely, all kinds of goings on. I wouldn't think they'd have to fly girls in. They were there already.

Mark Mehler : Freddie begins sucking on his giant overbite nervously, and by 2 a.m., he is mercifully gone.

Mark Mehler : Brian May, who seems to be the true organizer of the night's carnival, is cornered by persistent Japanese newshounds. "It's wonderful," he keeps saying. "It's so nice to be back."

Bob Hart : I think it was Brian, halfway through the party, who said to me that he thought it was all a bit too contrived. I thought that was an interesting comment from a member of Queen.

I think it was a mild disappointment to the band. I don't know quite what they expected, human sacrifice or what, but they felt it was contrived decadence, not real decadence. That was Freddie's complaint. He said, 'This is pretend.'

Mark Mehler : As the evening wears on, epicene men and butch women act out charades of power that would have embarrassed Hemingway. Three obese black women in g-strings do a pathetic bump and grind, and another female participant amuses a small gaggle of onlookers by putting a cigarette in an unlikely place.

Peter Hince : Because we had to leave early, we were told we could take some booze from the party for the bus journey, so we wheeled out all these crates of booze, and started partying on the bus before we set off. Some of these 'girls', shall we say, decided they wanted to come on the bus with us, but we couldn't tell what sex they were. Next thing you know, one of my guys is down on his hands and knees, and sticks his head up one of their skirts. Then he comes out and says, 'This one's definitely a girl, but look at this!' He'd found a backstage pass in her knickers! You don't see that every day.

Mark Mehler : People leave to check out the scene on Bourbon Street and drift back to the party like cigar smoke.

Sylvie Simmons (journalist, Sounds) : Not long before dawn Tony Brainsby and Freddie Mercury and I went out for a walk down Bourbon Street. Freddie was in a great mood, very outgoing. I was pointing out what I considered to be cute boys and Freddie was saying, 'No, they're gay.' Then he waved at them and it turned out they were gay. I don't remember him getting off with any of them though.

Mark Mehler : At 4 a.m., a Queen security guard, haggard and irritable, inquires when it will all be over. "Queen wants the naked disco dancers going to dawn," informs his partner. And it does.

Mark Mehler : The following day, Queen reappears at a press conference at Brennan's, one of the French Quarter's most elegant restaurants. Again, it is Roger Taylor and Brian May who dominate the conversation, as Freddie Mercury seems vaguely preoccupied.

Sylvie Simmons (journalist, Sounds) : The next afternoon there was a press conference in the hotel and everybody from the press was so completely hung over. The band was very quiet and dull. A lot of the press seemed shocked by the party, calling it a waste of money, and decadent and disgraceful.

Bob Gibson : Overall it was a smashing success. Of course we had a couple of great photographer friends who shot a lot of great pictures that went around the world, and the journalists who came wrote accounts that made it sound even better than I remember it.

Bob Hart : You had two record companies, EMI and Elektra, both schmoozing the band and trying to garner a bit of publicity at the same time. It was about amusing, charming and delighting the band so that they knew we would do anything for them but, in the sense that the band wasn't completely convinced, it wasn't entirely successful.

It represents a very different era, when record companies could spend loads of money on a complete nonsense, but it also gives a clue as to why they can't spend that kind of money now. They were being run by lunatics who found themselves at the mercy of the large acts and, in particular, their managers.

Bob Hart : When the pictures appeared in the centre page spread of The Sun, one of them showed a very fetching creature in an off the shoulder dress which revealed one breast. Well, that turned out to be a bloke, which caused huge consternation and that spread was pulled after the first edition because Rupert Murdoch at that time was thought to be particularly sensitive about homosexuality. The editor at the time was Larry Lamb, his deputy was Bernard Shrimsley, and he was a very prudish and peculiar man. I'm pretty sure it was Bernard who pulled it after the first edition. If not, it was Larry. One or the other.

I don't know how they found out but somebody leaked to them the fact that the gorgeous woman in the centre spread was in fact a bloke.