Brian May says he "overreacted" to Freddie Mercury's death and "denied the existence of Queen"
27 April 2022, 14:22
Brian May interview: New album, his hero Buddy Holly and a guitar solo!
Freddie Mercury's death in 1991 put an end to one of the biggest rock bands of all time.
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Brian May has opened up about his feelings in the immediate aftermath of Freddie Mercury's death.
Speaking at a Q&A hosted at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich on Saturday (April 22), the guitarist suggested that he and Queen drummer Roger Taylor were hit incredibly hard by Freddie's passing.
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"Me and Roger both, I think, completely overreacted to Freddie’s death, if it’s possible to say that," the Daily Express quotes him as saying.
"In other words, we went so far away along the path of trying to forget that we over-grieved and we sort of denied the existence of Queen for a while. I certainly know I did."
Brian had been asked by producer Simon Lupton if working on Queen's posthumous 1995 album Made in Heaven had helped him process his grief and record his second solo album Another World.
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May said: "To come back and finally face it and put that final Queen album together, Made In Heaven, was a wonderful and terrible thing to do.
"Wonderful, because you’re saving all these final scraps which we'd created together in those last moments when we were with Freddie.
"Terrible, because you’re listening to his voice the whole day, polishing it, doing little things to it to optimise it, but he's not there."
He added: "At the end of the day you can't say, 'Freddie, is that okay?'.
"That was hard, it was quite painful for a long time. It was a long labour of love; about a year and a half Roger and I were doing this."
Brian's reissue of Another World was released this month complete with a disc full of bonus tracks, and followed last year's similar reissue of his 1992 solo debut Back to the Light.
