BRIAN: Hmm – interesting question. I think our parents were very much of that generation, stiff upper lip and stuff. With Freddie it was the fact I think it was the fact that he loved to have control over his life and he made that decision. [He] thought” “I’m not going to dwell on this. I’m going to make music because I love my music. I love my life as it is and I don’t want to be lost in discussions about stuff that I don’t feel good about.” So Freddie really did take hold of the reins of his life in many ways including taking hold of the circumstances which took him away. Fo I think Freddie was exceptional. I don’t know anyone else who deals with knowing that they’re going to die in such an amazingly positive way – that’s Freddie. Freddie wrote this beautiful song, ‘Winter’s Tale’, just months before he actually did go to the next place and he loved the place he was in. He saw its beauty, he saw its hope, he saw the span of her life, he saw little children playing and grandmas and granddads enjoying them. He just had a vision of his life and was comfortable with it and that’s pretty rare. I’m not sure if I’m going to manage the same thing. So yeah, I think Freddie was exceptional. Igenuinely think that there ain’t many made like him.
E&J: And did that atmosphere in the recording studio help you get through not just the final recordings for “Made In Heaven”, but also the work you did afterwards on that album for the next couple of years? Because it must have been a very strange experience – almost must have felt like time travel to a traumatic event going back to those recordings.
BRIAN: Hmm – Interesting question. I think our parents were very much of that generation, stiff upper lip and stuff. With Freddie it was the fact I think it was the fact that he loved to have control over his life and he made that decision. [He] thought” “I’m not going to dwell on this. I’m going to make music because I love my music. I love my life as it is and I don’t want to be lost in discussions about stuff that I don’t feel good about.” So Freddie really did take hold of the reins of his life in many ways including taking hold of the circumstances which took him away. Fo I think Freddie was exceptional. I don’t know anyone else who deals with knowing that they’re going to die in such an amazingly positive way – that’s Freddie. Freddie wrote this beautiful song, ‘Winter’s Tale’, just months before he actually did go to the next place and he loved the place he was in. He saw its beauty, he saw its hope, he saw the span of her life, he saw little children playing and grandmas and granddads enjoying them. He just had a vision of his life and was comfortable with it and that’s pretty rare. I’m not sure if I’m going to manage the same thing. So yeah, I think Freddie was exceptional. Igenuinely think that there ain’t many made like him.
E&J: And did that atmosphere in the recording studio help you get through not just the final recordings for “Made In Heaven”, but also the work you did afterwards on that album for the next couple of years? Because it must have been a very strange experience – almost must have felt like time travel to a traumatic event going back to those recordings.
BRIAN: Yeah, it was a long time before we were able to go back in the studio and look at all those remnants of the last recording sessions. And it was very weird. It, and it was traumatizing in itself I gotta say, because I spent, I think… We each chose things that we wanted to work on, Roger and myself, and I spent hours and days and weeks working on little bits of Freddie vocal, kind of polishing them up and in some cases moving them around, constructing completed vocals out of scraps and listening to Freddie the whole day and the whole night and I’d have moments of thinking: “Oh this is great. This sounds great Freddie. Oh you’re not here”, and it was kind of actually difficult quite difficult and you had to go away from it sometimes and recover and come back and go away and come back, but I felt an immense pride and joy in getting…s queezing – the last drops out of what Freddie had left us to work with. And it was very rewarding, hearing that finished album. I still love that album. I think it’s my favorite Queen album, “Made In Heaven”, because that there are things in there that are so deep and so, so kind of vested in joy, strangely enough, even though they were made in difficult circumstances. There’s, there’s pure gold in there. I love every every minute of that album.
So yes, I suppose sometimes we were thinking about the good times.
I remember eating that’s a big [thing] you know. Eating is a fairly important part of life anyway but there we were in Montreux in Switzerland a sleepy little town most of the time. It’s famous for the Jazz Festival and it’s teeming with life with the Jazz Festival, but the rest of the time it’s like a tiny little village where very little happens. I think there’s other festivals now but in those days that was the case. Now in England Freddie was being pursued by paparazzi. They were putting lenses in his toilet window to see if they could catch him unawares. It was horrendous – a terrible, terribly difficult time for him to live and have any kind of normal life, but in Switzerland they left him alone. Everybody kind of respected he wanted his privacy. We formed a kind of shell around him and we worked in the studio and we drank a little and we ate, and eating was really nice. We would go to some private restaurant somewhere and have some nice, you know, well Swiss food is very nice anyway, but it would be very private and we’d just be like a family and I have to say some of those were the best I can ever remember of Queen. They were so close. We were so connected and so glued together as a unit. It was a great time strangely enough. You wouldn’t expect it to be a great time, but it really was wonderful because we could see how we were creating and fulfilling our potential together.
E&J: So you would have been promoting and then touring “Back to the Light”? Well I remember seeing you in 1996 at the Colston Hall in Bristol and there was an awful lot of “Back to the Light” material there, so you were touring as a solo artist.
I’ve got a two-part question: What was it like to then sort of almost be the the leader of the the tour and the band. as opposed to sort of the guitarist and, you know, one one quarter of that machine, but also was it difficult to promote that to the Press who had so recently been so vile towards Freddie. Did you know there must have been people who wrote things – newspapers who had sent these paparazzi to Freddie’s house to try and find all of you – was it that difficult to then go: “Oh x would like to do an interview about your album and you go: “[ __ ] off”.
BRIAN: Mostly I did the “[ __ ] off” thing, yeah yeah. I didn’t want to be, didn’t want to be going down that road, yeah/ I mean our relationship with journalists has never been good with rare exceptions there’s a couple of great friends I have in the journalistic profession. but mostly we just don’t want to be doing with it and that’s one of the great advantages that I have of doing Instagram because I can use my own words and they can’t be twisted because they’re there. They’re not being translated by some journalist cherry-picking the words that he wants to highlight and make trouble with. So no, I didn’t have much relationship with the Press to be honest and so I probably didn’t do a very good, a good job of promoting. I didn’t care. I just wanted to be out there and be with the fans and do my stuff.
E&J: What was it like being the front man?
BRIAN: Difficult. Very difficult, because I’m trying to be a a singer and a guitarist at the same time, and there’s very few people who can pull that off. Now Jimi Hendrix did but Jimi Hendrix was from a different planet and, you know, the list is pretty short of people who can actually put the full passion into their voice as well as into their guitar, and I found and it took me a while to discover this but I eventually came to the conclusion that I was diluting the passion that I was able to transmit by trying to do two things at once. I preferred to do one thing at a time, so that led me to sometimes giving over the guitar playing to my guitar player in the band. Jamie Moses, and just singing, but eventually it convinced me that actually I was a guitar player and I was better off doing that and letting other people do the singing and that’s the position I would still hold at the moment. I love singing but taking on the job of being a lead singer in a band as well as being the guitarist that I want to be is for me a compromise and I know that i’m not doing my best most of the time. I have me moments, but no it’s not really for me. I’ve absolutely loved, I love playing with Paul Rodgers doing ‘All Right Now’ and ‘Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love. I’ve loved getting back with Adam – Adam lambert – Queen and Adam Lambert, because we, well we haven’t talked about Adam yet, but Adam is able to play just about anything that we throw at him He can do the Queen thing without in any sense emulating Freddie. without being a copyist. He can interpret all those songs in a great way and I don’t need to worry about it anymore. He’s doing the singing. I’m doing the guitar playing, Roger’s doing what he does too and, sadly ,we lost John, which is hard also, but we’re able to kind of be Queen. and I think within what we do would achieve our maximum potential. So I enjoy that.
E&J: So when John decided to step back from Queen, was it a surprise and how difficult was that to cope with?
BRIAN: well there’s another whole encyclopedia there. I think it’s a difficult answer. Okay, the short answer is. it was difficult and it is difficult, because not only did we lose Freddie but because of the way John is and the decisions he’s made, we’ve lost John as well . That’s hard because we were very close family and it hurts, and I constantly, I suppose, ask myself if I could have done better – if I could have made him feel better and able to stay with us. I feel like I didn’t do as well as I could have done because John was obviously going through a very hard time. John took it very hard losing Freddie. We all did but you could see John visibly having a hard time coping, and the few things that we did after Freddie went were incredibly stressful for John. We did that very enjoyable appearance at the Bejart Ballet opening the Bejart ballet in Paris doing ‘The Show Must Go On’ with Elton John. It’s a great thing to do but John, he became so anxious it spoiled his experience and we could see in him that he was close to not being able to and not wanting to be there, and that was the case after that he never wanted to play with us again and he didn’t want to be a part of Queen ongoing as an entity. So he became, from our point of view, a recluse I suppose,and the only way he does communicate is through business things. because he’s still very interested in how the Queen. as a financial entity, is run.
I’ve never been good at that kind of stuff. John is, so if there’s a big decision to be made there’s always a message goes to John and he will come back, but that’s the only time – not physically come back – he will come back and give us an answer and that’s the only time we communicate. And it’s a shame because he’s a wonderful bass player, as you know. Incredible really. Mainly self-taught but just brilliant and an incredible songwriter, as he became – not prolific – count on the fingers of not much more than two hands all his songs, but he had an enormous number of hits, which were enormous: ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ being the biggest Queen track of all time. I think. It’s in spite of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ being the monster it is, and ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ now being a worldwide thing. ‘Another One’ might suggest I think it’s still our biggest seller ever and John wrote it. So yeah, we miss John, but we respect his wish to be private and to be separate from what we’re doing. He doesn’t object to us doing it, but he just doesn’t want to be a part of it.
ANOTHER WORLD
E&J: So the the album that you’re re-releasing now, “Another World” I wanted to ask you about the title first, because is in a sense it[’s] reflecting the new world that you found yourself in after “Made In Heaven” was complete and that artifact was given to everyone which actually got to Number One, which must have been an incredible feeling after all that time working on it but was “Another World” a way of saying: “Okay, I’m in a new place now and i’m going to start exploring it?
BRIAN: It’s all of those things, I think most songwriters would tell you it’s never one thing. Ii’s always a combination of things, which seem to coalesce into a pattern. Yes I was in another world because Queen was was nowhere to be found at that time. I was in another world because I was in another kind of emotional personal crisis – so Another world because I was offered a job to write a song for a movie which is called “Sliding Doors”. friend of mine had written the script and was going to direct it himself and he said: “Write me a song which which sums up the story of “Sliding Doors”. So that’s how I got triggered into writing ‘Another World’ but, of course ‘Another World’, the song is about other stuff as well. It’s impossible to write a song without it being in some way autobiographical. I think somebody might shoot me down for saying that, but I maintain you can’t have a song like have a baby like that without putting yourself into it.
And so ‘Another World’ is the song that I wrote for the film. The guy didn’t use it in the end because he couldn’t. He’d signed away the rights of the music to someone else as part of the film deal. He was hugely apologetic but he said: “Sorry Brian. I love this song but I can’t use it.” I was heartbroken because I think it’s one of my best songs but I thought :“No. this will be a pillar of my own album”, and it’s very much about the way I feel about things. A bit like ‘Back to the Light, it’s that, it’s looking for another world. It’s searching for another one. It’s not like being able to be there easily. It’s like visualizing another world and trying to get there. That’s what it’s about for me. That’s what the whole album is about really.
E&J: So do you think it’s a coincidence or clearly not a coincidence that your two, your first two sort of proper solo albums came after periods of quite intense emotional strain and trauma? Would you say that they were making those albums was it a way of coping those projects to express some of those feelings that you were having?
E&J: Yeah I think something every Queen fan will know but perhaps people coming to these two albums “Back to the Light” and “Another World” may not know of you, the musician .is that you’re when we see footage of you, it’s the big guitar track – it’s the big stadiums – it’s the big chords – but an awful lot of Queen’s most sort of tender songs have been written by you. All the way through the Queen’s story you feel that there are those two sides of you as a songwriter. You know, the big axe wielding riff-monger for want of a better phrase, but also the ballad writer – the sort of more reflective songwriter.
BRIAN: Yeah yeah – it’s all connected. They’re not total opposites. I don’t think,you know, there’s drama in them both. There’s reality. There’s storytelling. There’s melody and melody is big with me and it’s a mystery where melodies actually come from, but somehow they come into your head if you’re lucky and then if you have the the will and the skill to grab hold of them and fashion them into a complete track. then you you’ve harnessed something precious. So something like ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’, yes. it’s a much more tender if you like you’ve used the word tender track,t han the ‘Tie Your Mother Down’ but it has a bigness to it as well. Ii has a passion. It has a journey and, yeah, I think it’s all part of what I am I think. It’s part of what we all are really. I think we all have all this stuff in us. We all have big kind of powerful moments of conviction or anger or desperation or whatever, and then we have the contemplative moments, that[’s] the moments when we want to compromise – the moments when we want to rebuild and it’s all part of life.
So rock music to me, better than any other kind of music, does reflect every kind of life pattern – every every dark feeling, every light feeling is very different from Gershwin I would say and I have great respect for Gershwin. but rock music plums depths which Gershwin would never have gone to, and that’s why I love rock music really I think. I found. I feel so lucky to have been born at a time when it was just being born itself and I grew up at a tender age hearing Little Richard next to Frank Sinatra and thinking: ”Whoa. which of these expresses what I have inside me and again I have endless respect Frank – for Frank Sinatra. Oh my God. what a great singer – an interpreter – but Little Richard bared his soul. He laughed ,he cried,he screamed – and it opened up a whole new Universe of music in my mind. I’m very proud of being part of rock music. It goes to places that nothing else can inside and outside.
E&J: I wondered if we could finish perhaps by asking you for any – you said you have a toolkit to sort of navigate life through – some of the experiences you’ve been through – what are some of the things that you do on a daily basis, or perhaps when you feel things getting too much or you feel yourself going into a dark place. because a lot of your music is about darkness and light. Do you have practical things that you were like: “Okay I can feel it building.’I’m gonna do this, that or the other”?
BRIAN: Yeah – and the best one I’ve discovered in the past five years or so is exercise. I absolutely love my fitness regime and it keeps me going. It keeps me on the straight and narrow. So sometimes I’ll get up and feel very despondent – very lacking in energy – and instead of opening the E-mail box or having breakfast, I get on the bike. My static bike, which is right here actually and I do my interval training. I have a trainer who I zoom with every now and again and I do it. I sweat, and I don’t listen to music. I don’t sort of try and put it in the background. I don’t watch landscapes on TV. I just do it and I monitor my heart rate and I’m into my bodily feelings.
I’m looking at the revs per minute, the heart rate and looking at graphs of what’s happening, and to me it’s good therapy. It’s good for my recovery from the heart attack problem. Without a doubt this is heart rehabilitation, but I find it very good for the mind as well. I find it sets me up and when I finished I feel okay. Even if today is crap and I don’t achieve what I want to achieve, at least I’ve done that. At least I’ve done my fitness, and I’m working towards being able to play at full strength on stage when we go back on tour and I’m doing the best for my body that I can.
So yes, that would be my biggest recommendation to anyone. If you can’t cope with stuff, get into a fitness regime, and I would recommend doing it in the mornings,. Because if you don’t do it in the morning, I find it slips and you think: “I’m going to do it later”, but you don’t. There’s always something comes up. But getting up of a morning, or even if you get up late, just get on the bike. Do this stuff. I do about 45 minutes. It’s not extreme. I’ll bring the heart rate up, bring it down again, bring the heart rate up – and really helps me. Mind and body become functional and I’m ready to face whatever life brings .
E&J: Well, I think that’s a fantastic note to end on.
Brian, we cannot thank you enough for your time today, and for all that you’ve shared. I know that an awful lot of people are gonna find an awful lot of use from some of the things you’ve said and discussed with us today. So, we thank you.
BRIAN: Thank you too – you always take your time to kinda help me to be a vehicle and for me. I really appreciate it.
—
Thank you for reading.