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News Feature/Copyright © 1991, 2006 by Jim
O’Donnell
LONDON, Nov. 30, 1991—The words dropping from his lips slowly and softly, like fresh roses
dropping on an open grave, Queen guitarist Brian May this evening gave his first interview since the death of his lead-singer,
Freddie Mercury, six days ago. The 45-year-old Mercury died at his home in London on November 24 of bronchopneumonia resulting
from AIDS.
"I was numb the first night after it happened," said a grief-stricken May. "We all met and talked and I
couldn't even cry. Then the next day I fell to pieces completely; couldn't do anything; crying.
"It has come and gone
ever since," said the top-flight guitarist who has referred to Queen as a "family" in many interviews over the years. "There
has been a part of me that was expecting it, and then there's a part of me that still gets completely knocked to pieces.
"It's
a big thing. It's like all your adult life is over. It's irrational, but it feels that way, losing your best mate. It's just
a major, major hurt."
Certainly, Freddie Mercury was a major, major force in a major, major rock group. With bandmates
May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon, the rhapsodically bohemian lead-singer propelled Queen to worldwide record sales of over
80 million during the band's 20-year career.
In the studio, the group's trademark was meticulous production work on
richly varied material that ranged from hard rock to soft ballads.
The lyrics ran the spectrum from Late Punk to Early
Kubla Khan. Queen's song, "Bohemian Rhapsody," was voted the Best Song of the last 25 Years by the British Phonographic Industry,
and the 1975 video of the tune is considered a pioneering work.
On the road, the group often proffered its sound and
fury to audiences that were the size of some small countries. Queen's touring technology consistently made pre-existing in-concert
communication seem about as modern as carrier pigeon. One of the band's numbers, "We Are the Champions," has become a stadium
anthem around the world. Like Dilsey in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Queen proved durable and lasted.
Given
such an extraordinary track record, one would have expected that the Queen singer's last days would have been graced with
the most royal of red-carpet treatment. But because of escalating rumors about his health, Freddie Mercury's last days were
anything but regal.
"The last three weeks of his life, when he was in his house," says 44-year-old Brian May, "were
made a total misery because there was always conjecture going on. The press was outside his house 24 hours a day. So he was
literally kind of hounded toward his death. And I think if he'd made his announcement earlier that he had AIDS, all of that
would have happened much earlier.
"There was certainly a feeling in this country, prior to this," continues May, "that
if you weren't gay and you weren't promiscuous and you weren't some other things, then why worry? But it's amongst us. The
plague is amongst all of us. There's no hiding away now.
"It was a great decision to admit to having AIDS," says May
of his friend and singer who, on the day before he died, revealed he was suffering from the disease.
"Freddie has
given us such an incredible weapon by announcing it himself, rather than posthumously. It would have been so easy to write
'pneumonia' on the death certificate or be vague about it. But in actually saying he had AIDS, it has already started to make
a huge difference in this country.
"The AIDS testing centers have seen a massive rise in the amount of people who
want to be tested. Also, the Terrence Higgins Trust has been completely swamped with donations. The trust is the biggest organization
in this country that provides for people who are suffering from AIDS who don't have proper care. And Freddie has donated a
large part of his will to them.
"So the fact that he said it so clearly," says May, “has increased awareness in
this country by a huge amount. He'd achieved all that he could achieve in his music. The time was right for the announcement.
I think he made a wonderful, dignified exit—something to be proud of."
May's declaration of openness as a weapon
in the war against AIDS is backed up by Dr. Patrick Dixon, director of AIDS Care Education and Training in England. Dr. Dixon
believes that young people will take the disease more seriously not when they hear about statistics, but when they see its
effects on real people.
Besides promoting AIDS awareness and subsequent prevention, May, the father of three, suggests
that Mercury's example will also help open up sexual discussion on all levels: "I have a feeling," he says, "that Freddie's
life and death will be even more pivotal than seems apparent at the moment. In this country, the fact that he was loved so
much by men and women, quite openly, in public and in private—it's easier to talk about all this because of him.
"I
find myself much more able to talk about the whole business of people's attitudes to sexuality quite freely," says May, who
has a B.Sc. Degree in physics and is a serious student of astronomy. "My lady friend, Anita, put it very succinctly. She said,
'I think it's time for us all to come out of our closets.' You know?
"We all have various problems with our sexuality,"
the guitarist continues. "I think the time has come to stop being ashamed of anything like that, you know, and stop looking
at people and trying to make out how they're different, and in some ways should be ashamed of how they feel.
"For me,
I've had plenty of problems with my heterosexuality, and Freddie had problems with his homosexuality, and he dealt with them
incredibly well, in a way that I'm very proud of. So I don't find it hard to talk about that stuff anymore. I just think we're
all what we are and there's no reason to be ashamed of any of it. We just face it the best way we can."
Asked how long
Mercury had AIDS, May answered: "That's something even I don't know the truth about. But I know it was a long time. The guys
he was living with—they definitely were keeping it a secret for five years or so. It was his fondest wish that we should
go on absolutely as if nothing had happened."
The veteran Queen guitarist explained why Mercury had waited until the
eve of his death to disclose his condition: "I think that by not talking about it—even though that was hard for all of
us—we were able to carry on and do what we do without interference.
"If it had been announced," says May, "then
there would have been all this association with AIDS, and there'd have been kind of a sympathy vote. And you'd say: 'Well,
why are people buying the records? Is it out of pity?' All that sort of stuff. What he gave us was to be able to carry on
with music for music's sake, normally, as a full, healthy, functioning unit. Which is wonderful, really. I think maybe the
last five years would have been a lot different, otherwise.
"It has been very hard for us," continues May. "All these
things about 'Doesn't Freddie want to tour?' and all that sort of stuff. I mean, everybody obviously now understands what
was going on, you know, particularly with regard to America.
"We decided to postpone doing America until things took
the upswing. Then when signs came that there were no upswings, we couldn't do it, and I wasn't able to say that at the time,
but I can say it now. You know it wasn't that Freddie didn't want to tour. He couldn't. And I think everyone
can fully understand that now. But this has been going on a long time."
The gentle-voiced May went to great lengths
to cut through his grief and cut down the Mercury image shot across the world recently as an over-indulgent, super-pretentious,
self-centered prince of pomp.
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According
to the fellow who played guitar beside Mercury and circled the globe with him for two decades, the singer was a generous,
hard-working man of immense talent.
"The Freddie I know," says Brian May, "was not a promiscuous
man and he was not overcome by drugs and he was not as difficult as many people portrayed him. He was actually very generous
to anyone who came close to him.
“He was generous in respect of giving credit and sharing responsibility
and accolades. He was generous enough with us in a way that many lead-singers are not. You know, the lead-singer gets kind
of thrust into the limelight. But Freddie was always very careful to share it with us.
"He sang, literally,
as long as he could stand. He sang till he dropped, like he said he would. He worked on the last two albums, at least, under
great difficulty."
In delineating Mercury's two-decade role in Queen, May established that, to him, the man
who sang "We Are the Champions" was a "Champ" in every way: "He was very inspiring, totally inspiring.
He was the classic focal point for a group. Music came from different places between the four of us. But on stage he was the
perfect channel through which we flowed towards the audience and back again. He was an incredible link.
"Even
in the stadium gigs that we were doing towards the end, he could get right to the back and make people throughout the place
feel as if he could communicate directly with them. He had an amazing gift for it. He was a total one-off and totally irreplaceable."
When it came to direct communication, Queen played for over six million people in 28 countries, and its fans are among
the most loyal in the world. For them, there isn't enough confetti in the city of New York to give their boys a morning shower.
In terms of Queen's future, May was reminded that Robert Plant had once said that Led Zeppelin didn't exist from the
moment their drummer John Bonham had died. "I always thought that inside," said May. "I had the words rehearsed
inside me to say that. Because we had always agreed—we'd talked about it many times—that if something happened
to one of us, we always said that's the end if one of us goes.
"My feeling is that obviously we could never
go out and be Queen, under that name, in the same way, without Freddie. It's unthinkable. And yet the fans are saying, you
know, 'We would like something. We expect something. We don't want to lose you.' So we're thinking very carefully about what
we actually can do. It's just going to take a little while to sort out.
"There's quite a lot of stuff on tape,"
continues May, whose gentlemanly air belies a musician whose heat-packing guitar solos are holy terrors. "We were halfway
through the next album. I'm not quite sure how many tracks, finishable, we have. It has to be three or four, at least.
"And then there are many other bits and pieces we'd just started. So we have to make a decision on what we'll
do with all that stuff. There are many, many, probably dozens of scraps of things that we've started. So we'll have to try
and figure out what to do with it all. I'm concerned that there will be no dilution in the quality of Queen's work."
One Queen project appears firm, however, and that's a tribute concert. "One of the things I would definitely
like to do is the memorial gig for Freddie, which I think would be great," says May. "I'm not quite sure what form
it would take.
“A lot of people have already told me that they would love to appear, you know, singers all
over the world have said they would love to come and sing a song for him. Which I think would be just the way he would enjoy
it: the biggest that's ever been done—the biggest and the best. That would please him.
"I'm absolutely
sure that what Freddie wanted was for us all to bounce on. There's no doubt about that. I think it would be counter-productive
to just sit back and mope."
The ringlet-haired guitarist's words sink to a near-whisper as he remembers the
friend he lost less than a week ago: "There's a flood of great memories in my mind and they're blocked up with grief
at the moment. Every time I see his face, it's forming his wicked, kind of impish smile, and that actually makes me feel much
closer to tears than some of the other stuff.
"You know, when you think of the good bits, that's when you
get really affected and you can't speak and a lump comes to your throat. I can just see him kind of laughing."
The only time May's voice perks up during the interview is when the subject turns to the British Bone Marrow Donor Appeal.
The organization helps children dying of leukemia or related diseases and May has helped raise millions for the cause. The
appeal has already saved the lives of many children.
"I'm thrilled with how that's going," purrs the man who
can make a guitar purr. "That's the biggest reward you could have."
Not surprisingly, Mercury's last
words to May sang of outrageous wit. The guitarist's first solo studio album is due out in May, and his first solo single
was recently released in England. When Mercury's condition began to deteriorate, May began to feel uncomfortable about turning
out product while his bandmate of 20 years was confined to bed.
Explains May: "I was a little upset about
the timing of my record. It had taken me all of these years to get something together. Then it was already about
to hit the shops in England, my solo record, when he was just about to go.
“And I started to feel worried
because I felt like it was a tasteless thing to have a record out while this was happening to him. I didn't want to go out
and be grinning on a stage and performing when he was slipping away. I felt really bad about it.
"Well,"
continues May with a sigh, "the last quote from Freddie that came to me was actually through our manager. I'd seen Freddie
the previous day, but hadn't realized how close it all was.
“And our manager was there the next day, and
he said to Freddie: 'Look, Brian's a bit worried and he feels like it might hurt your feelings or it might not be the best
time to have all this stuff happening.'
“And Freddie said: 'Don't be stupid, darling, it's the best publicity
you could have.' So right to the end he was able to maintain his sense of humor, even knowing that he was probably not going
to last the weekend."
The anguished Queen guitarist made it a point to express his appreciation for the support
of the band's legions of fans during a difficult time in his life. "Everybody has been wonderful," said May from
behind the soft, manor-house eyes. "More and more, the message is coming home, from all around the world, how dearly
loved was Freddie Mercury."
***
CD: Freddie Mercury, Lover
of Life, Singer of Songs. EMI, 2006.
Book: Peter Freestone, with David Evans, Freddie Mercury. Omnibus
Press, 2001.
Websites: http://www.queenzone.com, http://www.brianmay.com,
http://www.mr-mercury.co.uk, http://www.freddie.ru, http://www.queenonline.com, http://www.brianmayinterview.com
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