by A near-death experience makes some people more focused, serene, blessed with new perspectives and thankful for second chances. Brian Mays brush with mortality, though, seems to have lit a fire. If hes going to hang around on this earthly plane, its time to start demanding improvements.
I think it would have been impossible for anyone to make worse decisions than Boris, says Queens totemic guitarist a gentle giant who ranks among the most successful musicians in history, with up to 300 million album sales and many of musics most air-punching anthems to his name over 50 years at the very peak of British bombast rock. Speaking in hushed tones from a red-curtained Zoom screen, like an online fortune teller going rogue, hes characteristically calm and collected but his chest still recovering from heart surgery last year is pumping ire.
At every point he did too little, too late, he says. Hundreds, if not thousands of our relatives died because of bad advice and because of the bad decisions that Boris made with Hancock and those other people. If hed taken the precautions of shutting down the borders a year earlier, we wouldnt have been in the situation we were. And the fact that hes willing to trade lives quite openly for economic gain, I find horrific completely unacceptable. Its like Winston Churchill going out in his garden and seeing the planes overhead and the bodies and going the bombs are dropping! The bombs are dropping! Should we hide? No, actually lets think of the economic consequences of hiding
In one almost tantric opening address, May lets a year of pent-up frustrations flood out. He berates the governments incompetent pandemic response, the media for putting pressure on the government to do less than they were actually doing that cost lives, Im convinced, Trump (its easier to promulgate lies than truth these days) and social media groupthink: having a point of view and expressing it has become impossible. If you dont go along with the herd view you get vilified and drummed out of business. I find it very, very unhealthy. Before his steam runs out, he turns his sights on his long-term bugbear of badger cullers, but he saves his most withering barbs for flat-Earthers and moon landing deniers. I dont really want people spreading misinformation, especially if my kids are getting hold of it, or my grandchildren, he argues. It was all done in a Hollywood studio? Bulls***.
May has had plenty of recuperation time over the past year to let such concerns stew to boiling point. Last May, after a bout of lockdown gardening, he suffered a heart attack requiring urgent surgery. It was very odd. I sat down and suddenly had this tightness in the chest and a bit of a pain and the arms felt weird. I was a bit short of breath and I thought, Isnt this a heart attack? Its the weirdest feeling. I was very lucky because it wasnt a long enough episode to affect my organs or my brain critically. The day after I was in Harefield [Hospital, just outside London] having three stents put in. I came under intense pressure to have the multiple bypass surgery when youre lying there in bed wondering if youre going to die tomorrow its the most bizarre thing, its like people coming in and trying to sell you encyclopaedias.
As a result, hes become a health and exercise addict, undergoing cardiac rehab training: Its become a joy, because it really does something for your head as well as your body. In his downtime, he also found himself reflecting on his life and career, drawn particularly to his 1992 debut solo album Back to the Light when he discovered the record wasnt available online for him to add to his regular lockdown Instagram stories.
I thought, Its time to do something about this, he says, because Im well proud of those albums that I made sticking out from the big edifice of Queen, at the time when Queen was looking like it was crumbling because Freddie [Mercury] was dying. It was a very, very tough time. So I thought, Let’s get them out.
Though a suitably dramatic, bombastic and Queen-like adjunct to the bands 1991 album Innuendo, Back to the Light re-released this week as the first in a luxuriant reissue series entitled Brian May Gold was a deeply personal album for May, written at arguably the lowest point in his life. After hed had two decades of overwhelming fame and success with Queen, losing Mercury to Aids in 1991 compounded the loss of his father to cancer that same year. And just as his band was falling apart, so was his first marriage.
I was mostly very, very depressed and despondent, losing too much at one time, he says of his mindset while making the album. Losing Freddie, apparently losing the group, losing my marriage [May had separated from his first wife Christine Mullen in 1988], apparently losing my children, losing my dad, it was a big catalogue of loss. The stuff with my kids was the worst, feeling that I was losing them. Divorces normally get very messy and very resentful and a lot of times I was fighting to be able to see my kids. That to me was a club I didnt want to be in and I couldnt handle it Something really caved in in my brain. I didnt know what depression was in those days; I hadnt really given it a name and Id never sought professional help. I just wallowed around in it and tried to solve it in my own ways. I ended up nearly driving off Hammersmith Bridge a lot of times. I couldnt cope.
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Besides his new relationship with EastEnders actress Anita Dobson, whom hed go on to marry in 2000, it was music that kept May afloat. Writing Back to the Light in the billiard room that I had done in the country was a therapeutic process, producing a record steeped in loneliness, loss, pain and confusion. Too Much Love Will Kill You a morbidly wry sentiment when Mercury sang it on an archive version included on Queens 1995 final album Made in Heaven read like a cry for help from the pinnacle of rocks Mount Olympus: Im just the shadow of the man I used to be/ And it seems like theres no way out of this for me. Across the record, May worked through his issues, from the rows and flying pans of break-up blues Love Token to Im Scared, in which he primal screams a brutal torrent of fears and insecurities about death, suicide, divorce, failure, imposter syndrome, his appearance and, somewhat randomly, Steven Berkoff.
Im looking for everything thats in there, May explains, trying to clean out all the dirt and all the fear and looking at it and kind of laughing at it, but actually facing it. It was me trying to be honest because I thought that was the way through, [to] share your feelings.
Brian May: I wasnt uncomfortable with fame but I took a while to adapt to it
Theres plenty of homesickness and alienation on the album too. Was he uncomfortable in the cocoon of fame? I wasnt uncomfortable [but] I suppose I took a while to adapt and I fiercely protected what I regarded was my real self. I didnt want to become starry, I didn’t want to become a standard rock star and I still dont. Part of me is very much nested in science, astronomy, astrophysics [May juggled advanced astrophysics studies with music during Queens early years, and finally completed his long-delayed PhD in 2007]. Part of me is very much caught up in the welfare and rights of animals. I have this huge passion for stereoscopy, so Im not really the standard rock star anyway, but I love it.
In which case, he must have been an awkward presence at Queens legendarily excessive parties. I was kind of on the fence. I enjoyed myself, I liked to party, but Id got married just before all this happened, so I was constantly trying to tread the line and be a decent husband. It wasnt easy, and I didnt dive into all that stuff, like probably most people did I dont enjoy the feeling of the room spinning. I also didnt take the drugs but that goes back a long way with me, its a kind of a commitment to myself. I wanted to keep myself clear, I wanted to know what was real. I’ve always been inspired by the music and I wanted it to stay that way. I didnt want to look back in a few years time and it all be a jumble and I wouldn’t have known what was the music and what was the drug.
The most touching song on the record is Nothing but Blue, a tribute to Mercury written the day before he died. Did May have a premonition? Yes. We knew it was close and yet we denied it in ourselves. We thought no, Freddie cant go, it cant happen, something has to rescue Freddie, hes Freddie after all. How could he be allowed to slip away from us? Its about what I thought I was going to feel when he was gone. What I actually did feel is another long story. I think both Roger and I will tell you that we over-grieved for a very long time. And by over-grieving, I mean we kind of denied that the past existed almost. We wouldnt talk about Queen, and that went on for a while.
Roger and I grieved for Freddie for a long time
Releasing a solo album became a key part of Mays recovery process. I regarded myself as a musician I think I’d resisted that, I thought maybe I was a scientist just having a little fling with music, but around that time I thought, Actually, this is what I do. And I thought, Well, I dont have Freddie any more, I dont have Queen any more, because we agreed we wouldnt do it any more after Freddie left, or after anybody left. So I thought, Well, I have to go out and do it myself. This is a door, I have to walk through it. I will be the frontman, I will sing my own stuff I will kind of deny that Queen is important to me.
In the coming years, May would seek professional help at the Cottonwood clinic in Arizona, where he underwent a 12-step programme. Thats when I actually did find out what depression was and I discovered that there was a way of treating it, he recalls. It was fundamentally an addiction clinic, but depression is treated as a kind of addictive behaviour there. I spent some weeks with a number of addicts, many of whom became lifelong friends. It changed my life.
Through treatment May rediscovered his spirituality and gained strength from the Serenity Prayer the famous text written in 1951, best known in the iteration, God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference Thats the most powerful piece of prose in the world to me it covers just about everything that can knock you over. Afterwards, May began to come to terms with his legacy. The truth is, I cant disentangle, theres always going to be Queen in me, he admits. I helped to build it, I was one of the four architects. In a sense, Im always in Queen. It seemed only natural, then, for he and Queen drummer Roger Taylor (bassist John Deacon declined to join the reunion) to tour Queens ever-popular repertoire again, first with Free and Bad Company singer Paul Rodgers from 2004 until 2009, then with American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert.
Adam Lambert performing with May at a benefit concert in 2020
Dozens of people were ringing me up or emailing me saying, You’ve got to hear this guy, youve got to get Queen back together, hes got to be your singer, May says. Then the programme actually asked us to come along and sing with the two finalists, Adam and the other guy. I think we did Champions and the chemistry was evident.
Adams basically got everything an extraordinary voice, an incredible range, hes a natural performer, hes suitably camp, which seems to be a requirement for our lead singer, hes got a great sense of humour. Hes never tried to replace Freddie and hes never tried to imitate Freddie. He just interprets the songs the way he feels them, so its not a museum piece, its an organic thing thats still alive. We still have Freddie in a sense, we have little points in the show where Freddie appears its a nice balance. Theres even a point where Adam can interact with Freddie in a strange way.
May claims that the most recent Queen + Adam Lambert tour, truncated by Covid, was the biggest and most successful he has ever played, and certainly the bands currency refuses to wane. Even after shifting 25 million copies to become the UKs best-selling album of all time, their 1981 Greatest Hits compilation was to be found battling Olivia Rodrigo for the UK No 1 spot just last month, while recent news stories reported that Queen were making £100,000 a day from their 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. Does he even notice that sort of small change any more?
These people dont get their figures right, May grins. Bohemian Rhapsody made a billion dollars but a tiny, tiny fraction of that comes to us. Its just the way the film industry works. We make some money out of it but not a massive amount. A lot of my money goes out towards saving animals, thats just the way I am, Im trying to do some good in the world Im conscious that Im not particularly good at handling money, never was, but on the other hand money was never my prime thing. I was supremely happy living in a bedsit and eating cod in a bag.
One very rich guy putting himself into space what is it really for?
As an astrophysicist with a reported nine-figure net worth, youd assume May would be a proud ticket holder for the Musk mission to Mars and itching to join the billionaire space race. Youd assume wrong. I love space exploration, he says. Im a member of the New Horizons team that sent a grand piano-sized object to fly by Pluto, and I interact with a lot of the Nasa missions. When it comes to one very rich guy putting himself into space actually not into space, only about 60 miles high I ask myself, What is it really for? Is it blazing a trail? Not really, because men have been to the moon. Is it some kind of vanity, and if it is could the money have been better spent elsewhere? I saw this cartoon where somebody said, Weve got two billionaires competing to see who can get into space first. Wouldnt it be nice if they competed on how quickly they could solve world hunger instead?
Its kind of like being shot out of a gun and being weightless for a while. Its not a lot different from the vomit comet, which is used to train the astronauts. I dont think I want to do it. If someone offered me a ticket to sit up there in the International Space Station and look down on the earth for a couple of weeks Id probably say yes, because thats real space: what an incredible thing. Id like to find a window that looks outwards and just contemplate the universe from that situation. I think were all incredibly inconsiderate to each other and our loss is huge because we dont take care of the planet, we dont take care of each other and we do not take care of the other species that were supposed to be sharing the planet with.
Does he ever look at Professor Brian Cox making the leap from musician to celebrity scientist and think, That should be me? May laughs. Hes amazing, incredible guy, Ive worked with him. My group was more successful than his, but hes a way, way better scientist than I am.
Brian May: I think anti-vax people are fruitcakes
Everybody and his conspiracist uncle on Facebook, of course, is a search engine scientist these days. May shakes his head at the mention of Ian Brown and Eric Clapton refusing to play shows with Covid restrictions and questioning the safety of the vaccines. I love Eric Clapton, hes my hero, but he has very different views from me in many ways. He’s a person who thinks its OK to shoot animals for fun, so we have our disagreements, but I would never stop respecting the man. Anti-vax people, Im sorry, I think theyre fruitcakes. Theres plenty of evidence to show that vaccination helps. On the whole theyve been very safe. Theres always going to be some side effect in any drug you take, but to go around saying vaccines are a plot to kill you, Im sorry, that goes in the fruitcake jar for me.
Mays lockdown revelations have been far more personal than virological. He feels much healthier than he did before his heart attack, but little changed from the man who made Back to the Light: a scuttled, non-standard rock star determined not to go under.
I went back and immersed myself in what Id done in 1992 and I found that I was still that person, he confesses. Some of the problems are always inside yourself and they dont necessarily go away. Your dreams, your expectations, your passions largely stay constant in your life. Thats why I still relate so much to this album. I thought, This still speaks for my heart, I dont want to change a note, I would like it out there because Id like people to know how I feel. Especially at this time, when were all looking to try to get back to the light in some way after this horrific time that all humans have been through in the last couple of years.
He may not be Zooming from a window seat on the ISS, but his new perspective couldnt be broader. The light is there, if humanity ever decides to bask in it.
The remastered reissue of Back to the Light is out now
