![]() ![]() May these days seems to be one of the grand eccentrics of English rock. ![]() I can never have a single day without thinking about Freddie.”įreddie Mercury and Brian May on stage with Queen in the mid 1970s. It doesn’t seem like he left any more, because he’s in everything we do. And we got to the point where it now seems like Freddie is with us. And now I realise that Queen is in me and I am in Queen, and that can’t change. I couldn’t bear the thought of being kept in that place. ![]() And we didn’t get over it for a very long time – I’m not even sure we’re over it now – but there was a two-year period where we were grieving and behaving irrationally, almost denying the existence of Queen. When Mercury died, “we were completely blown out of the water. They assumed that because he was famous, someone, somewhere would come up with a cure. I was making my music, but I thought Queen was over and dead and gone for ever.” He and the other members of Queen – Roger Taylor and John Deacon – had never really considered the possibility they might lose Mercury. I’ll never do that again.’” With Adam Lambert installed as their live singer for nearly a decade now, Queen still triumphantly tour arenas – a 10-night stretch is booked at London’s O2 next year – but back then, May felt like he was “just a very small person again. “I remember driving past all these arenas that we used to play and thinking: ‘That’s gone. ![]() “I was completely convinced it was over,” he says. At 44, May was confronted with the possibility that his career was, more or less, done he accepts that rock history is replete with members of big bands whose solo careers amounted to nothing, and that might well have been his fate. When Mercury died, Queen had been a band for 21 years, which seemed like an awfully long time then, although in the elongated music culture of today it seems much less significant (Coldplay released their first single 23 years ago, for comparison). So what you hear is a desperate grasping at a straw that will lead me back to the light.” At the beginning of it we were starting to lose Freddie in the middle of it we lost him by the end I was getting accustomed to it. On the Back to the Light album you hear me in a very raw state. I was just trying to grapple my way around in the darkness, and music was the only thing I could cling to it was a kind of therapy. I felt like I was losing my kids as well I felt like I was losing everything. The marriage was probably breaking up anyway, but that was the final catalyst and the breakup was very painful and grisly. And my marriage broke up, because I fell in love with another woman. “I lost my dad to cancer around the same time. The whole period of making Back to the Light was one of turmoil, he says. It was Hammersmith Bridge.” He laughs, gently. “I was very close to driving off the bridge several times. “I felt like life was over,” May says of that period. I would drive past all these arenas we used to play, thinking: I’ll never do that again This was when Freddie Mercury, his bandmate in Queen, had become increasingly sicker with Aids-related illnesses, dying in November 1991 of bronchial pneumonia. It is almost as if we have come around in time: May is reissuing Back to the Light, the solo album he made between 19, another tough period for him. Early last summer, he suffered an accident while gardening that tore muscles in his buttocks, and caused a heart attack. But I don’t think I can deal with it any more.” When we speak, May, 74, is engaged, amused and frank, but this is the latest episode in a tough 18 months. That is very wounding: I love London, I grew up here. So we’re feeling like we want to get out. I had to tear up all my old photograph albums, the very first ones I ever had when I was eight years old, to try to save the photographs.” May was born in the outer London suburbs and he’s had a home in London all his life now he has had enough. “It’s what it does to your soul to lose your possessions, to see them swimming about in it. The basement was where he and his wife, the actor Anita Dobson, kept their memorabilia. We are talking a little more than a week after we were meant to, our initial chat having been postponed because the basement of May’s London home was filled with effluent after torrential rain caused the capital to flood and sewers to spew forth their contents. Brian May has been up to his neck in it, and he is fed up. ![]()
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