Guitarist Brian May says Queen’s record-smashing musical “We Will Rock You” is something Freddie Mercury would have loved. It’s just one of the many ways, the guitarist adds, that the late frontman remains a part of their lives.
Mercury died of AIDS complications, but not before establishing his own solo career. May and fellow co-founding member Roger Taylor have also been active away from the Queen franchise. May says they likely would have continued on in this way, even had Mercury lived. He’s just as certain, too, that Queen would still be making original albums.
“I think life would have been a little bit similar to the way it is now,” May tells www.celebrityradio.co.uk in the attached video. “We always came and went out of the mothership, as it were. Queen was our great vehicle, but as time went on, we certainly would go out and do other things, and then come back. I think it still would have been that way. I’m sure we still would have been making Queen albums. It was always such a stimulating experience to work together, and bounce ideas off of each other. I do miss that.”
In Mercury’s absence, Queen has toured with Bad Company’s Paul Rodgers and Adam Lambert of American Idol fame. But it’s the musical “We Will Rock You” that has most consistently galvanized fans over the past decade. The show has become the longest running musical ever at the Dominion Theatre located in London’s West End — besting “Grease.”
“Freddie is so much in our lives, it’s incredible,” May adds, “and in every aspect, in particular with the musical, which Freddie would have loved, I’m sure.”
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I was fourteen back in 1980 and I got three cassette tapes for Christmas and one was Queen’s “The Game” and I’ve been listening to them ever since but to carry on any further with Queen and a replacement really doesn’t hold any interest for me. You reach a point where there is no other. The reason people loved Queen was the music but also Freddie Mercury was the missing link. There are so many bands out there where one or two individuals are key to the success of the band and the other members are just hired hands and yet they continue successfully but when key members are gone and the band continues onward with the same name then the fans take notice in a sometimes negative way. I’d like Brian May and Roger Taylor to go on with a new singer but let’s have a new name. Adam Lambert no matter how well he sings isn’t Queen. I liked Paul Rodgers long before he got with Queen and he didn’t really fit the songs. Now those three as a blues rock Bad Company style outfit would be fitting, that I would like to see. The big thing is that when something changes in a band teeh magic changes too. Freddie wrote at least half of the better songs on each album. It would be like the Beatles without Paul or John writing songs. The magic was gone when Don Felder was ousted from The Eagles, when Steve Perry no longer sang for Journey, when Lou Gramm left Foreigner, Black Sabbath without OZZY, ELO Part 2 w/o Jeff Lynne, CCRevisted w/o John Fogerty, Van Halen w/o DLR…….those are still capable bands and sound great but that becomes a different kind of magic.
I had that last Queen with Paul Rodgers cd and I have to say everything about Queen was missing and it was mostly an uninspired effort. If it had been a great blues rock record that didn’t sound like Queen that would be different but when you buy this record with the Queen name you anticipate it sounding a little like a Queen record but it didn’t, it was more like a Brian May solo record.