In the latest episode of How Do You Cope with Elis James and John Robins...Brian May discusses lasting impacts of COVID, processing the loss of Freddie Mercury and his favourite period with Queen

LISTEN: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0c5tl0p

In today’s episode of BBC Radio 5 Live’s How Do You Cope podcast, Elis and John are joined by legendary guitarist Brian May.Brian talks openly to Elis and John about losing Freddie Mercury, and how the grief that followed impacted himself and other members of Queen.He also talks about one of his favourite periods with Queen, in which the band spent time in Switzerland to record their final album (a short while before Freddie passed away).Elsewhere, Brian reveals he is experiencing some long-lasting impacts from a recent bout of COVID.See below for a selection of key quotes from the episode.

Listen to the episode here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0c5tl0p

Some standout Brian May quotes from today’s episode:On the long-lasting impact he has felt from COVID:“I have a strange persisting condition – I think it’s from the Covid – I get these kind of ‘brown outs’. Generally I’m ok, I’m not tired all the time, but I’ll get to a sudden point in the day where something inside my head goes, ‘You have to sleep now. You don’t care about any of this. Go to sleep.’ It’s an almost irresistible call and I just go out like a light. It’s really weird. I just hope it doesn’t happen in the middle of a gig! I’ll
have to say, ‘hang on half an hour, I’ll have a nap guys and then we’ll do Champions’. But I feel good. I don’t know if it’s changed me.”
Brian talks about losing his Dad, as well as bandmate Freddie Mercury:
“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. Losing Freddie was like losing a brother, but yes it had the glare of public knowledge to go along with it.”
“We were kind of dragged into a perpetual wheel of having to look at the loss of Freddie in a public way. That’s why I tend to hide away on the anniversary of his death. People do a lot of, 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, or the day we first got together, but the day of losing him will never be something I can put straight in my head. There was just nothing good about it.”
He talks about the immediate grieving process, including states of denial, that he and Roger went through after losing Freddie:
“I think Roger and I both went through a kind of normal grieving process, but accentuated by the fact it has to be public. We sort of went into denial. Like, ‘yeah well, we did Queen, but we do something else now’. Roger and I plunged into our solo work and didn’t want to talk about queen. That seems almost nonsensical because we spent half of our lives constructing Queen. But we didn’t want to know at that time. It was a grieving thing. We just overcompensated. It went on for a long time.”
“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”. That was a vast overreaction. I didn’t need to do that, why would I do that? Because I couldn’t cope with looking at it.”
He recalls working on Mercury’s vocals for Made In Heaven, after he had died:
“It was very weird. It was traumatising in itself. I spent hours and days and weeks working on little bits of Freddie’s vocals. Listening to Freddie the whole day and the whole night. I’d have moments thinking, ‘this is great...this sounds great...Fre...oh you’re not here’. It was quite difficult. You’d have to go away from it sometimes and recover and come back. But I felt this immense pride and joy in squeezing the last drops out of what Freddie left us.”
“I still love that album. I think it’s my favourite Queen album. There are things in there that are so deep. There’s pure gold in there. I love every minute of that album.”
Brian talks about recording Queen’s final album in Montreux, and the sense of respite it provided Freddie and the band:
“In England, Freddie was being pursued by Paparrazzi. They were putting lenses in his toilet window to see if they could catch him unaware. It was horrendous. A terribly difficult time for him to live and have any kind of normal life. But in Switzerland, they left him alone. Everyone respected his privacy.”
“We formed a shell around him. We worked in the studio. We drank a little and we ate. We’d go to private restaurants and we’d be like a family. Some of those times were the best I can remember. We were so glued together as a unit. It was a great time, strangely enough. You wouldn’t have expected it to be a great time but it really was wonderful. We could see how we were creating and fulfilling our potential together.”
On John Deacon stepping back from Queen:
“The short answer is it was difficult and it is difficult. 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 a very close family. It hurts. 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. John was going through a very hard time – he took it very hard losing Freddie. You could see John visibly having a hard time coping. The few things we did after Freddie were incredibly stressful for John...”
“...he didn’t want to be a part of Queen ongoing as an entity.”
“He became, from our point of view, a recluse I suppose. The only way he does communicate is through business things because he’s still interested in how Queen, as a financial entity, is run. If there’s a big decision to be made, a message goes to John and he will come back. That’s the only time we communicate. It’s a shame because he’s a wonderful bass player and incredible song writer.”
“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 doesn’t want to be a part of it.”