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QUEEN + ADAM LAMBERT: BY ROYAL APPOINTMENT Words: NICK HASTED, Classic Rock Magazine #206 – On Sale Now.
You can’t replace Freddie Mercury. But on the eve of a tour, the royal family’s Brian May and Roger Taylor and crown prince AdamLambert explain why they’re keeping the band’s legacy alive.
“My songs are like Bic razors,” Freddie Mercury declared in Queen’s early days. “For fun, for modern consumption. You listen to it, like it, discard it. Disposable pop.” But 23 years after his death, his band’s latest album is called Queen Forever. And that band’s two remaining members, guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor, concede that for them the title is true.
“I understand people who say: ‘There is no Queen without Freddie. Just leave it be,” Taylor admits, “because that’s what we felt, following his death. All three of us said: ‘Right, that’s the end of the band.’ But the band just didn’t seem to die.”
May now believes that trying to lay Queen to rest with its singer was doomed from the start. “Even though both Roger and I were adamant it was over, it never went away.”
(Thanks to Sian Llewellyn)
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EXTRACT:
You can’t replace Freddie Mercury. But on the eve of a sold-out tour.
the royal family’s Brian May and Roger Taylor and crown prince
Adam Lambert explain why they’re keeping the bands legacy alive.
Words : Nick Hasted Portraits: Ross Halfin
Queen
REBORN
“My songs are like Bic razors,” Freddie Mercury declared in Queen’s early days. “For fun, for modern consumption You listen to it, like it, discard it. Disposable pop.” But 23 years after his death, his band’s latest album is called Queen Forever. And that band’s two remaining members, guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor, concede that for them the title is true.
“I understand people who say: ‘There is no Queen without Freddie. Just leave it be,’” Taylor admits, “because that’s what we felt, following his death. All three of us said: ‘Right, that’s the end of the band.’ But the band just didn’t seem to die.”
May now believes that trying to lay Queen to rest with its singer was doomed from the start. “Even though both Roger and I were adamant it was over, it never went away.”
The Queen machine has been cranked into its highest gear for almost a decade during the past 12 months. Queen Forever reworks three forgotten Mercury vocal tracks, alongside a collection of mostly neglected ballads, intended to reactivate interest in their catalogue’s deep backwaters. Queen were added to Classic Rock’s Roll Of Honour as Band Of The Year; after triumphant tours of the USA, Far East and Australia with new singer Adam Lambert. In the US especially a relative wasteland for Queen since the 80s, Lambert’s flamboyant performances and solo stadium since contesting American Iol in 2009 (when he first performed with Queen) has helped raise them to new heights.
May and Taylor still have regular Queen band meetings. When they and Lambert speak to CR they are in the peculiar position of preparing to go back out on the road for Queen + Adam Lambert’s first full European tour, while curating their late singer’s legacy in Queen Forever. It’s an odd afterlife which began with 1995’s posthumously finished album with Mercury, Made In Heaven, continued with four tours and 2008’s now virtually disowned album with vocalist Paul Rodgers, The Cosmos Rocks, and shows no signs of ever stopping. Queen’s classic songs keep gaining new leases of life. But as May and Taylor admit, they don’t expect anything they do now to equal their music with Mercury.
Brian May, sleepy after a trip to Paris, calls Classic Rock on the phone, as does Lambert. Taylor meets us in his home studio, a stone’s throw from the pub and golf club of a sleepy Surrey village. His mansion and the South Downs can both be glimpsed through the trees. Tracksuit-casual, his hair and beard white, Queen’s drummer is the most bluntly forthright about their future in 2015. And he can’t raise much enthusiasm for Queen Forever, for a start.
“I was very pleased we had three new tracks to put on it, which we laboured long and hard over”, he says. “As well as the Michael Jackson track There Must Be More To Life Than This, there is another song Freddie did with him called State of Shock [later recorded with the Jacksons and Mick Jagger], with a massive rock sound. But we could only have one track with Michael, which is a great shame. Let Me In Your Heart Again is absolutely typical mid-period Queen, And it was Brian’s idea to revisit Love Kills, which I feel works. But apert from that it is a rather odd mixture of our slower stuff. I didn’t want the double-album version they’ve put out. Its an awful lot for people to take in, and it’s bloody miserable! I wouldn’t call it an album either. It’s a compilation with three new tracks. It’s more of a record company confection. It’s not a full-blooded Queen album.”
“I can understand Roger’s reticence,” May laughs. “He’s not really a ballad writer, so this album’s not really representative of Roger Taylor. It actually wasn’t our idea. If it had been down to me it would have been an EP of these new songs, but we’d already promised the record company some kind of compilation.
May still had strong feelings, hearing Mercury’s voice again on the rediscovered tapes. “There’s always a moment.” he says. “Particularly with Let Me In Your Heart Again. When I put the original tape on, it was so astonishingly real, like it had been recorded that morning, I got quite emotional about the way….. [CONTINUES]
“After Freddie we said: ‘That’s the end.’
But Queen just didn’t seem to die.”