THERAPY
E&J: So what stage did you seek therapy?
BRIAN: Not until much later and I was a very obstinate boy. I didn’t get any professional help and the first thing that most therapists will tell you is the person has to put up their hand and say: “I need help”. I never did that. I should have done that probably much earlier. No, I didn’t do it until way way later, in fact after the second album. S this is jumping way ahead and…
E&J: Really?
BRIAN: Yeah – so it probably would have been a good idea. When I eventually did hold up my hand and say: “I need help” and I went to a wonderful place in Arizona called Cottonwood, to Tucson, it radically changed my life. It gave me a new starting point and taught me to understand what was going on inside me.
EJ: I think it’s often useful for people listening to this, without wanting to sort of venture into your very personal experience of it, but what was – what does going into therapy mean? It can feel quite a distant proposition if you’ve not experienced it so I wondered if you could give a sort of a broad strokes description of what the sort of things you were asked to do as someone who had not asked for help for so long?
BRIAN: Well I think they’re all different. I think I was lucky. I found a facility which really suited me. The first thing I did actually before I’d done that, I went into a hospital ward. I think they called it a Psychiatric Ward or something. No, they didn’t even call it that. I was just in a bed being given some kind of medicine and that was it and it was disastrous for me. It’s the worst thing I ever did. It was like sort of admitting that I was a failure and I was disconnected from life. So that didn’t work at all. That was in England in London. No, what I did when I went to this Cottonwood place – ‘I’m kind of advertising it now- it was a mixture of treatments really – a mixture of one to one therapy with various kind of therapists, and they’re all different. Some are Freudian, some are experiential or whatever they call it, some will explore your past, some will sort of do trauma treatment on you or whatever. So that’s the one-to-one thing. There’s also a kind of routine / regime, so you do get up every morning and you sit round in circles and and speak to each other about how you feel. How you feel being that the biggest thing. How do you feel? Can you define how you feel? – you know I feel thankful, grateful, blessed – that’s a good one. Or I feel despondent, hopeless angry – whatever you feel – so that’s a big part of it as well. This kind of discussion that goes on which is led by a professional.
But strangely enough, the most powerful part of it all I think was what they call the milieu, which is the fact that you’re in a facility with people who, like yourself, have kind of thrown in the towel and said: “Look I can’t deal with my life. I have to go and sort it out before I can do anything”. That’s a big deal because it means leaving your work. It means leaving your home – leaving your kids – all the things that you think are precious. You have to leave your keys for your car at the door and you’re in there just trying to deal with sorting yourself out. So you have this great bond with all these other people who’ve done the same thing and you see THEM, you see THEIR process, and you talk to them and you try to help THEM and this business of trying to help other people is incredibly powerful. As soon as you’re seeing the world through THEIR eyes, you’re kind of diminishing your own problems and it’s making life clearer.
So there’s a whole lot of stuff that happened when I was in there for those few weeks and what the culmination was, was what they call the “family therapy” in which members of your family come in and you have confrontations with them, because mostly all our problems are connected with family. So I had my family come in – my kids came in which was amazing and we … you do a very formal kind of family therapy in which you prepare confrontations and you have positive confrontations and negative confrontations. So I’m probably giving you too much detail now. But supposing you have a problem with your father and you say: “Look. every time you make me feel small, like when you say this I feel angry upset betrayed”, whatever, and you do it in a formal situation where you’re face to face and you have a mediator, and you’re not allowed to get into discussion. You just listen to each other. So you do that kind of negative confrontation stuff, and then you do positive confrontations, which you’ve also prepared. So you say: “Dad, when you do – when you make me feel important like when you say you’re proud of me or you help me with my education, I feel thankful, proud, blessed”, all that sort of stuff. Now it sounds very simple and very formal, but it’s incredibly powerful. What happens then is all the people who are there with you in your therapy group can give you input – what they see – and then the moderator will give his input and in the end what happens is you … well it’s a very emotional thing, because you’ve heard each other probably for the first time for real. And you go: “Okay, I hear you. I will try and do this and this for you. I will try and do this and this for me. I would like you to do this”, and most people end up with a big hug, thinking: “Okay, we can start again”.
I don’t know if you’re going to use all this material, but it was enormously powerful for me. I didn’t have my – this is a fictitious interaction I’m relating, because my Dad was gone by that time – but it was a great thing for me and I’m eternally grateful for those people in Cottonwood who found my spirituality – who found my belief in myself. Who gave me my kind of self-respect back and made me able to deal with the issues that I had. The issues which made it impossible for me to to hold my head up and see a future.
E&J: So what coping mechanisms did it give you and how did you change your behaviour after you came out of Cottonwood?
BRIAN: It’s too difficult to explain I think. It does give you a toolkit in a way. It does give you ways of dealing with things. One of the great tools that I still have is this book ,which as you can see is still by my side, and if you can see what it says, it says: “The language of letting go” by Melody Beattie. And this is a book which I can’t help feeling is kind of inspired divinely in some way, because what happens is every day you get a little passage to read which deals with the problems that you might be having in life, which in this book are kind of referenced to something called co-dependency. I can’t really explain what that is in the time we have here, but it’s astonishing. I open this book most days and I look for the the date which would be February sometime here, and I read what this amazing, inspired woman has to say, and it always helps. And letting go is a big part of it. Ii starts off with things like “The Serenity Prayer“. Now the “The Serenity Prayer” to me is one of the most important pieces of texts in the world EVER, in any language, because it gives you the beginning of the tools to cope with life.
Shall I quote it to you? Probably you guys probably know, right – You know what it is?
E&J: Yeah please.
BRIAN: I will give it to you as best I can. It’s – you can address it to God and if you don’t believe in God it doesn’t matter. You can address it to a higher power or whatever. And it says:
“God [or whoever),
grant me the grace to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things that I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.’”
And it sounds a very small piece of text but, my God, the power of that is IMMEMSE. You can go into almost every horrendous problem in your mind and that will help you. It will help you sort out what to expend your energy on and what not to, so it’ll stop you spending days / months / years trying to change something which you will never change and direct your energies towards things which you can change and will empower you. So, yeah. “The Serenity Prayer” is something amazing and this book is something amazing. I would unashamedly advertise it.
I’ve never met Melody Beattie and i’ve never really got into any of her other works, but that book is something great, and I had it all the way through the Cottonwood sessions and all my lovely friends that I got to know – all the addicts and depressives and self-abusers – whatever, they all wrote in my book before I left as we all do – aswe all did at the time. And I carry that with me. And in times when I think I’m losing my grip, it will give me just a glimmer of light and I think:,“Okay, I can get through today and tomorrow might be better”. I’m not depressed all the time.
E&J: [Laughter] Well one of my another favorite singer of mine is a American musician called Will Oldham and a lot of his music is very dark and quite, quite bleak, and an interviewer once said to him: “Are you depressed”, and his answer which I thought was fantastic was: “Not today”, and I just think that’s a great way of approaching it.
I should say my Mum’s a therapist and there’s been a copy of “The Language of Letting Go”, on her bookshelf for as long as I can remember in my life but it sounds like those sessions that you described to sort of give a very brief summary of what I understand co-dependency to be, it’s when you’re in a relationship with someone that is both a relationship set in the here and now, but is also a relationship that’s tuning into past patterns of behavior that you’ve learned from relationships with other people – perhaps your parents – perhaps friends. And it sounds like that those confrontations you were having were a way of actually speaking in the here and now about the stuff that’s perhaps from your history, without allowing those sort of deep rooted trigger points to fire off and come out sideways as they often do in relationships. So you might have an argument about who’s done the washing up and it’s not actually about the washing up it’s about how you were made to feel and how it reminded you of a past feeling state.
BRIAN: Absolutely.
E&J: You were saying it sounds sort of simple but it’s important that it is simple because then it can’t get too complicated, if you see what I mean.
BRIAN: Yeah and I was dealing with definable traumas, I suppose. You know I was in a situation where I was losing almost everything that I loved and there was a reality to it. I sort of had a reason to be depressed if you know what I mean. So I had to look at that and kind of get it in proportion. So there’s always elements. There’s an element of your genetic makeup which makes you vulnerable to getting depressed or not. There’s an element of chemicals, know, if your diet isn’t right or your lifestyle isn’t right. That can contribute, as you know. I‘m sure your Mum knows ,and there can be actual events.
So I had – you know, a lot of people have told me that you can deal with one traumatic event like losing a parent or something, but if that is compiled with other traumatic events at the same time, you can get a kind of cumulative effect and eventually you fall down. I think that’s what happened to me, so I needed this restorative kind of structure to get me to get up and get back on the horse.
LOSS
E&J: So you mentioned that you lost your father the same year that Freddie died. Is that right? Was it the same year?
BRIAN: I think it was yeah.
E&J: So how were you able or perhaps unable to deal with what was on the one hand an incredibly public loss, which you almost had to become the sort of face of that grieving process, and on the other hand dealing with a very different loss but none less traumatic. You must have felt like there, you were sort of being torn into by two two types of grief?
BRIAN: Yeah we’re getting heavily into this aren’t we? Yean, it was very hard – hard to get perspectives. It was obviously massively important for me to lose my Dad and very difficult to come to terms with, but it was a private thing, yeah, and losing Freddie was like losing a brother, but, yes, it had the glare of public knowledge to go along with it and everybody was obviously reinforcing because Freddie was so visible to everyone and so well loved by everyone. So we were kind of dragged into a kind of perpetual wheel, which still goes on, of kind of having to look at the loss of Freddie in a public way and that’s not easy. That’s why I tend to hide away on the anniversary of his death. People do a lot of kind of I would almost say sort of celebrating on the day of Freddie’s death, but I don’t want to and I don’t feel I can. I’ll celebrate his birthday. I’ll celebrate the day that we first got together whatever… but the day of losing him will never be something I can put straight in my head. It was just – there was just nothing good about it. You know what I’m saying. There’s no sort of coming to terms because I didn’t want it. None of us wanted it and it happened and you have to just get used to that.
E&J: I think iI’s easy for people to forget just how young you were when Freddie passed away and how in terms of the band you were four musicians at the absolute height of your powers, in the prime of life, and “Back to the Light” came out in ’92 and I know you released a single, I think almost around the week of Freddie’s death with his blessing, which, I remember you saying, was you found was a very kind act on his part, but with a solo album about to come out, with your career completely sort of turned upside down by his passing, what were you sort of thinking the future held or what did the future look like to you at that point.
BRIAN: You ask difficult questions, don’t you? [Laughter]
E&J: l’ll ask you what your favorite colour is in a minute. Yeah that’ll be good.
BRIAN: I think Roger and I both went through a kind of normal grieving process but accentuated by the fact that we had to be public, so we sort of went into denial and it’s like: “Yeah well, we did Queen but we do something else now”, and both Roger and I plunged into our solo work and didn’t want to talk about Queen. Now that seems almost kind of nonsensical because we’d spent half of our lives constructing Queen and building that legacy of what it was, but we didn’t want to know at that time. And it was a grieving thing. We just over compensated, but it went on for a long time. I would say a couple of years I went so far as to adapt John Lennon’s “God” song in my solo stage act to say I don’t believe in Queen anymore.
Now that was a vast overreaction. I didn’t need to do that. Why did I do that? – because I couldn’t cope with with looking at it and I had to kind of tell myself I was going to be fine and things would be different now. And I was out there as a solo artist and Queen was just history. It wasn’t true and Queen, this edifice, that we built I had every right to be proud of and I am proud of it now and it is part of me and it always will be. There’s no denying that.
THE THEN FUTURE – PAUL RODGERS
So how did I see the future? I was confused and certainly, as a regards Queen, I thought the door had closed. I remember driving by an arena in any city you care to name – those places where we played our wonderful big shows on all those tours we did, like Madison Square Garden, like The Forum in LA, like The O2 Arena is now – and thinking: “I used to do that. I’ll never do that again. That was my former life. We won’t be doing that anymore”. And it was quite definite. I thought you know: “We’ll never replace Freddie. Why should we even try? That’s over.” And it wasn’t until MUCH later when we’d done our “Made In Heaven”, made our final album without Freddie but using so much of his input, and we went through all the solo stuff and we came to a point where suddenly there was Paul Rodgers saying: “Oh you know we could do a couple of things”, and Roger went: “Yeah” [Chuckles]. and I went: “Yeah” [Chuckles], and we started to sort of light the embers again. And Paul was no way a Freddie replacement, of course, because Paul Rodgers is a Blues artist of enormous stature – very different from Freddie – very much not camp. Very much not the conventional idea of someone who’s a flamboyant showman, although we did get him in a couple of outfits with shiny things on them mainly thanks to his Misses [laughs] but, you know, we we embarked on doing stuff with Paul Rodgers – Queen and Paul Rodgers – and it was great. It was therapy for us. It got us out there and people loved it. People were so happy to see us out there doing anything. That’s 97% of the people. The other 3% went: “Whoah, whoah, whoah, you should stop. You shouldn’t be playing without Freddie”. You know: “Queen should be over. You’ve got no…” All that kind of stuff went on, but those people just kind of disappeared and fine, I can respect that they didn’t want to deal with it. But the people who came with us stayed with us and we were able to be Queen in a sense for quite a while until that relationship with Paul Rogders came to its natural end.
FREDDIE’S SITUATION
E&J: From what I’ve read, when Freddie told you the situation he was in, that he was HIV positive and had AIDS, that he told you the situation then he said that I just want to make as much music as possible now and that’s, you know, that’s the last we’ll speak of it, and quite often you and Roger, you saying “we never heard him complain” and it didn’t seem that you that you discussed it very much once he told you the situation he was in Is that, do you think that’s a legacy of being post-war kids and a stiff upper lip. So you think, would you [have] wanted to talk about it with him?