On June 7, 1986, Queen kicked off their Magic Tour at the Råsunda Stadium in Stockholm, Sweden. Those watching, and indeed those onstage, had no inkling that the 26-date European tour, scheduled in support of the quartet’s twelfth studio album, A Kind of Magic, would be frontman Freddie Mercury‘s final tour with the band.
On July 11 and 12, with INXS, Status Quo and The Alarm in support, the tour stopped off at London’s Wembley Stadium, where one year earlier, the quartet had delivered the most acclaimed and iconic performance of their career at Live Aid. Both nights were filmed, with the July 12 show subsequently released on VHS/DVD as Queen Live at Wembley Stadium.
On July 12, Queen decided to celebrate their homecoming with a party, starting at 11pm, at the Kensington Roof Gardens club at 99 Kensington High Street in west London. Among the 500 invited guests were Yves St Laurent, Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, Cliff Richard, Spandau Ballet, The Who’s John Entwsitle, Fish from Marillion, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, glamour model-turned-pop star Samantha Fox, and various British comedians, actors and TV stars.
“As soon as you got into the lift there were naked women painted green, like a forest,” Samatha Fox later recalled. “They had midgets with little trays of drinks. You just knew it was going to be a brilliant party.”
The highlight of the night for many was a rowdy set by covers band Dicky Hart and The Pacemakers, who, to the untrained eye, looked suspiciously identical to Freddie Mercury, Brian May, John Deacon and Roger Taylor.
“They jammed for about an hour,” Samantha Fox remembered. “It was amazing. [Freddie] pulled me up and asked me what songs I knew. I asked if he knew [Fox’s debut single]Touch Me and he laughed and said, ‘What about Go Johnny Go?’ [Chucks Berry’s Johnny B. Goode] We ended up singing that together. It was amazing to do a duet with Freddie.”
You can see footage from the private party in the archive news clip below.
And you can see footage of ‘Dicky Hart and The Pacemakers’ performing Tutti Frutti with disgraced paedophile pop star Gary Glitter here, and more photos of the party below.
