Kings of Queen
Brian May and Roger Taylor speak candidly about the band’s powerful chemistry and Freddie Mercury’s final days
There has never been a band quite like Queen. Drawing from hard rock and heavy metal, prog-rock and glam, their styles eventually extended vaudeville and disco, gospel and rockabilly. A motley group of college graduates, they were one of the unlikeliest aggregates to reach stadium-level megastardom.
Yet Freddie Mercury, Brian May, John Deacon and Roger Taylor were one of the greatest powerhouses in music history. With certified worldwide sales over 100 million, Queen racked up eighteen number one albums and eighteen number one singles. (Notably, the band is the only group in which every member has composed more than one chart-topping single.) Their Greatest Hits album is the best-selling record in U.K. history—yes, bigger than any Beatles album—with Greatest Hits II not far behind. Queen’s set at Live Aid has been called the greatest performance in rock history, and in 2009, “We Are the Champions” was voted the world’s favorite song in a global music poll.
Guitarist May and drummer Taylor have occasionally reunited under the Queen name following Mercury’s death of AIDS-related causes in 1991, first with Bad Company’s Paul Rodgers as lead vocalist, and more recently, with former American Idol contestant Adam Lambert out front. Despite obvious concerns that no one could fill Mercury’s (sparkly platform) shoes, each configuration of the band has filled arenas and even stadiums around the world. Bassist John Deacon retired in 1997; “He supports our endeavors,” says Taylor, while May adds “he still keeps an eye on the purse strings, because he was always the one who was good at that, but we don’t hear from him—it’s a shame, because he was a damn good bass player.”
A few years back, I met with May and Taylor over lunch in the garden of Taylor’s 13th-century estate, a former priory southwest of London. The occasion was the release of their last studio album, The Cosmos Rocks, and some of our conversation appeared in a Rolling Stone news story about the record. The rest was intended as background for a comprehensive Queen essay by another writer, which finally appeared a few months ago. But most of our interview, which included some of their most candid comments about Freddie Mercury’s final days, has never been published.
With last month’s release of a new collection, Queen Forever (including three newly-completed songs, one of them a long-rumored duet with Michael Jackson), and the success of their ongoing worldwide tour with Lambert, it seemed like a good time to revisit this expansive discussion. What stands out, aside from May and Taylor’s ongoing affection for their incomparable frontman, is the open spirit with which Queen — alternately hilarious and pompous, badass and sentimental — approached music-making.
“We had never really had a method, actually,” says May, “never really had a stock modus operandi. There have been so many different processes over the years. And it’s all exploratory—sometimes you have to throw your hands up and say, No, that didn’t work.”
Alan Light: Is there a defining essence to the Queen sound?
Brian May: I suppose Roger and I historically, and Freddie and John, were always going for the ultimate in any direction. We were known for being excessive at times, but it’s like pushing the passion to the limit in every direction you can. As loud as you can, as fast as you can, as slow as you can—in tune with people’s emotions, which really do stretch.
Roger Taylor: And it’s a strange thing, but something ignites, usually live. If it’s all sounding right, something ignites, some kind of chemistry.
May: You give what you would like to receive. Roger and I used to go to Who concerts, and you would get that feeling of reckless danger, anger, passion. And that’s what we seek. Pete Townshend, in full flight, is a dangerous experience.
What is the definitive Queen song? Most people would probably say “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but is that the one for you?
Taylor: We always thoughts of ourselves as being eclectic, so that is a good answer, because it’s got so many moods in it. And it was a big hit, so that would probably be the best answer for me. But we have a lot of stuff that wasn’t a big, global hit that is also very much of our essence.
May: There’s a song called “Millionaire Waltz,” on A Day at the Races, which actually would sum up most of what we were about. But it’s something that’s very seldom played, I think it was almost like the successor to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It’s so incredibly complex that it doesn’t program on radio, I suppose. But, boy, there’s some stuff in there. It’s a favorite of mine—it’s so extreme!
Brian, you’re one of the few musicians who is identifiable just from the tone of his instrument. Was that an ambition, or just something that happens?
May: I don’t think I really strive for it. I have a guitar which is homemade, I made it with my dad, so that has a certain tone and sound to it. But having worked with all sorts of people from Hank Marvin to Steve Vai to whoever, I realize that most of it is in people’s fingers.
I have this theory that a lot of what you do on a guitar is calculated, but a huge percentage of it is just instinctively happening because of the way you are and how much force you put in, how your hands are reacting to your brain. It’s unconscious. I like to hear all the gut and all the warmth, all the things that a human voice has, the articulation, the vowel sounds, the stress, the passion, the highs and lows, that’s what I try to put into the guitar.
Is that also where the harmonies and layers and stacking of guitars comes from?
May: That comes from an ancient dream, really, which we shared in the early days. We had this vision in our heads of something very heavy at the bassline but above it, all sorts of beautiful guitar harmonies and voice harmonies. I learned a lot from strange people like Mantovani and the Temperance Seven. Every record I listened to, I would wonder how they put the stuff together—the Everly Brothers harmonies, the Crickets, the Motown things—and it always fascinated me how the harmonies created emotions. The first time I heard “Love Me Do,” it’s the simplest thing in the world, the harmonies that they chose were those hard fifths and fourths. And I took my hat off immediately and thought, Yeah, I know where they come from, they understand how these things work. We learned from everyone. It must be hard for kids now because they tend to listen to a single dimension, where we were exposed to everything.
Taylor: Because now you listen to a radio station that only plays one kind of music. We only had one radio station, which had to play all kinds of music. Doris Day, I grew up with her!
May: I did a tribute to Doris Day when she got an award. She wrote me a lovely letter back. She’s an absolute hero—God, there will never be anyone with better pitch. Peggy Lee is pretty cool, but Doris Day, she gets my vote. There’s such a rich heritage, if your ears are open.
You’ve spoken about the ways success and fame really fucked everybody up.
May: I think I was referring to the Munich period, where we all came close to disaster. We went there and made a pretty good record the first time, with “Crazy Little Thing” and “Another One Bites the Dust.” And then we went back the second time, and for some reason we got so into the social life, we got a long way from the music. And I think we all skirted with extreme danger at that time, and didn’t do ourselves any good. I don’t know if we were sort of making up for lost time, but that’s when marriages started to crumble. We hadn’t been newsworthy until that point, and suddenly our lives were really interesting and pretty difficult to lead.
Taylor: Rock bands were never newsworthy. In the 60s and 70s, rock bands weren’t in the newspapers, because they weren’t considered mainstream, they wouldn’t sell papers. This has become a horrible thing that built during the 80s and crescendoed during the 90s, and it’s just awful.
The later Queen albums, like The Miracle and Innuendo, largely seem to be about making peace, closing circles.
May: We were aware of that, because we knew that we were going to lose Freddie at some point. So it was us trying to find the end before we got there, and it sort of united us, galvanized us. I think part of us disbelieved that we were going to lose Freddie, but there was that sword hanging over… and it was said to a certain extent. At the very end, Freddie was saying, Just write me more lyrics, guys—I want to sing, I want to sing everything I can before I go, and then you guys can finish it off.
Sometimes he wasn’t able to vocalize, and in a sense—this is going to sound very strange, but I think Roger and I kind of vocalized for him, in writing some of the lyrics. Because he was almost beyond the point where he could put it into words. So things like “The Show Must Go On,” in my case, or “Days of Our Lives,” in Roger’s case, were things that we gave to Freddie as a way of him working through stuff with us.
You say it was a unifying time? Because obviously many different emotions and responses could come up.
Taylor: Yeah, I‘m actually glad that we did realize what was happening, and we didn’t waste the time. Because that’s the last thing he would want to do. He knew time was limited, and his reserves were very limited, so we made the absolute best use of him that we could. We were determined to stick close to the end. There was a lot of unstated emotion, about it sort of being finalizing.
May: There was a lot of joy, strangely enough, because Freddie was in a lot of pain, and he was being pursued by the press and stuff outside, so his life was pretty hard. But inside the studio, there was a sort of blanket around us, and he could be happy and enjoy what he liked doing best. We had a lot of laughs, and a huge amount of fun because it was a safe place for him. Sometimes it would only last a couple of hours a day, because he would get very tired. But during that couple of hours, boy, would he give a lot. When he couldn’t stand up, he used to prop himself up against a desk, at the mic here, down a vodka…
Taylor: Have a big Stoli!
May: And do a blinding vocal. He just loved it, he absolutely loved it—I’ll sing it till I fucking bleed! I remember doing the demo for “The Show Must Go On,” with the guide vocal, some of it in falsetto because I couldn’t reach the top notes, and I said, Fred, I don’t know if this is going to be possible to sing. And he went, I’ll fucking do it, darling, vodka down, and went in and killed it, completely lacerated that vocal. He was in a very poor state physically by that time, really hardly able to walk, but he could still bring that passion into the vocal.
When Freddie was sick, but not speaking about the disease, was that hard for the rest of you?
Taylor: He actually announced it before he died. But basically he was being hounded by our beautiful, glorious, worse-than-shit press. He couldn’t even get groceries, they’d photograph him—they would be like a pack of vultures.
May: They stuck a lens through his toilet window one time.
Taylor: And he just wanted to be left alone. He didn’t want to be an object of pity, and he didn’t want any intrusive comment. He just wanted to be private in his final days. And we respected that, I think that’s fair enough.
May: I remember the first time he told us. He said, “I’m going to talk about this only once. I’m going to tell you what’s happening, and after this, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I don’t want anybody buying our records out of sympathy. This is the way it is, and that’s it, and now we go on and we make music, that’s what we do.”
What do you think is the biggest misconception about Queen?
Taylor: I think people thought we were sort of right wing or something, which we certainly are not. I think they got the wrong idea from the videos, that we were some kind of neo-fascist band. I heard a lot of that.
May: It’s hard to be ironic in music, that’s one thing I’ve learned over the years. Right from the beginning, “Keep Yourself Alive” was meant to be ironic—like, if keeping yourself alive is all there is to life, maybe there isn’t much point. But it was taken as, “Hey, keep yourself alive!” And “Radio Ga Ga,” which Roger is talking about, we used the old Fritz Lang film Metropolis in the video, where they’re all being martial, all doing the same thing, and the words are about things getting too structured and people losing their individuality. But unfortunately, not everybody gets it.
Taylor: It’s about video taking over from radio! It was actually titled “Radio Ca Ca,” and we say that on the record, if you listen. My son, who is half-French, came up with that title, when he was about two.
May: There are definitely people who didn’t get Freddie, who didn’t understand that he was very tongue-in-cheek, and the first person to take the piss out of himself. I think Freddie was misunderstood by a lot of people—but on the other hand, he was very well understood by millions of people. I think there are people who hate us because they think we take ourselves seriously, to sum it up. When in fact we don’t—some of the time we take what we’re saying seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Because it’s about entertaining, and the hugeness and the grandeur that we got from our idols, and that we wanted to give back.
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