FEMALE FIRST
Brian May teases unheard recordings featuring David Bowie & Queen
18 June 2017
Brian May teases unheard recordings featuring David Bowie and Queen. Brian has hinted that there are still some tracks featuring David Bowie and Queen that haven’t been released yet.
The 69-year-old guitarist has recalled how the late ‘Golden Years’ hitmaker and his bandmate, the late Freddie Mercury, “locked horns” during the recording of ‘Under Pressure’, the biggest hit from 1982 LP ‘Hot Space’, but now he tries to focus only on the “wonderful” memories he has of that time, and revealed there is still music that hasn’t “come to light” yet.
He said: “It wasn’t easy because we were all precocious boys and David was very… forceful, yes. Freddie and David locked horns, without a doubt. But those are the things that happen in a studio, that’s when the sparks fly and that’s why it turned out so great. [They locked horns] in subtle ways, like who would arrive last at the studio. So it was sort of wonderful and terrible. But in my mind, I remember the wonderful now, more than the terrible. And not all of what we did in those sessions has ever come to light, so there’s a thought…”
After Freddie died in 1991, Queen were advised to hire George Michael as a replacement frontman, but despite the late ‘Careless Whisper’ hitmaker’s powerful duet with them on ‘Somebody To Love’ at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness in 1992, Brian insists it would “never have worked” with the singer.
He told Mojo magazine: “George was fantastic [at the gig]. I remember hearing his voice sizzling out on our monitors, and it was very close to the way Freddie sounded. A lot of people said we should have taken George on as singer for the band after that, but it never would have worked. George was headed in a very different direction.”
The ‘We Will Rock You’ hitmaker was distraught when George passed away in December at the age of just 53. He said: “I never thought we’d be losing George so soon. It was such a shock, and so very sad. He was a great guy.”