Queen guitarist Brian May shares his memories of his late friend and bandmate Freddie Mercury in a new interview, and reveals that not every idea that the flamboyant frontman had was golden.
“Deep down Freddie was one of the shyest people I’ve ever met,” May tells Queen biographer Mark Blake in the current issue of MOJO magazine, “but he was so full of bluster, you’d forget. Freddie would always be excited, and his excitement would take over. He’d be so full of excitement he could hard speak. “Freddie’s ideas were off the wall and cheeky and different — and we tended to encourage them. Sometimes the idea he brought in was brilliant, and sometimes not brilliant.”
As an example of one of those less-than-brilliant ideas, May recalls an alternate reality where Queen’s 1989 album The Miracle could simply have been called Good, had Mercury got his way.
“He came in one day and announced, ‘I’ve got this amazing idea. You know Michael Jackson has just put out this album called Bad? Well, listen… What do you think about us calling our next album Good?’
“We all looked at each other and said, ‘Well, maybe we should think about it, Freddie’,” the guitarist recalls. “It wasn’t one of his world-shattering ideas, but looking back, maybe we were wrong…”
In the interview, May also confesses that, during Queen’s career, he would be nervous about presenting his song ideas to his bandmates, who were all also songwriters in their own right.
“Every time I brought a new song to the boys I’d be as nervous as hell, thinking, They’re gonna say it’s rubbish, they’re gonna hate it…” he recalls. “I’d always be embarrassed and apologising. That never ever went away.”
Such nerves notwithstanding, May also reiterated that the idea of new Queen music isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
“I think it could happen,” he tells Blake. “Both Roger [Taylor] and I are constantly writing and coming up with ideas and doing things in our studios.
“I could have the beginnings of a Queen song right there in front of me now. It’s just whether the idea reaches maturity or not. It’s whether that seed can grow.”
