Queen keyboardist Spike Edney looks back on his 35 years with the band, from playing Trivial Pursuit with Freddie Mercury to discovering Adam Lambert on AmericanIdol
When you’re 12 years old and it’s your first concert, it’s all an onslaught to the senses. My biggest disappointment was you couldn’t hear a single note of music because of the screaming. You knew what song they were doing by whoever was still at the mic and they way they shook their heads. Body language told you what the song was. They did, like, seven songs. There were other acts on the bill. It wasn’t like today’s concerts where you get two and a half hours and everything is high definition.
Tell me about joining Queen. They were always a four-piece up until the 1982 tour. They used two keyboardists at various points on that one. How did you enter the picture for the next tour? He said to me, “Do you have a passport?” I said I did. He said, “Are you available to go to on a world tour?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “OK, on Monday, you fly out to Munich and start rehearsals.” I said, “What? That’s ludicrous! What happens if they don’t like me?” He said, “Then on Tuesday, you’ll fly back.” And here we are 35 years later.
The people who really knew him were the three guys in the band, Jim Beach, and Mary Austin. They were the ones that were the closest to him and were with him for the transition from a pop star to a megastar. What was he like? He could be a diva. He was very funny and he could be quite guarded. He was also quite shy. He unleashed his inner rock star on stage and offstage he preferred the quiet life. This is the one that I knew.
Do you find that people don’t quite believe you were there because you can’t really see you on camera?There’s a nanosecond where you see me walking from the keyboards at the back to the piano at the front. I sat there and played on the whole of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and not one single camera shot. But look and see how many camera shots there are of Roger Taylor. There aren’t any.That was the result of the back of Live Aid.
That was a concert to be proud of. I was very pleased about it. I went on so well. A bit like Live Aid, the actual atmosphere was non-competitive in terms of showing respect for the other artists. That’s what happened at the Freddie tribute too. There was a lot of respect. You could perceive it as that, but I didn’t just do Queen. I did a lot of other things as well. It was part of life of being a hired gun. Even though I could say, “Alright, the Brian May tours were playing to smaller audiences,” it was still a blast. We got to play some great material. It was just a different setup. Also, I met some mates in the band. It was going like out with a bunch of mates that Brian was fronting.
I’ve seen Marc Martel on YouTube and he sounds just like Freddie, but you don’t want an impersonator. How was the show in the Ukraine? That was the first real gig you did with him. It must have been nerve-racking. I look out and I see teenagers weeping with joy when “Fat Bottomed Girls” comes on. And then there’s old people that are proud to say, “I saw them in 1975” or whatever. They’re all singing along with the same gusto. It’s crossing genres and generations, which is pretty much what they always did. Queen were never fashionable, so they’re never really unfashionable.
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