Brian May says he and Roger Taylor ‘overreacted’ and ‘over-grieved’ to Freddie Mercury’s death

27 April 2022, 15:46

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By Mayer Nissim

Queen guitarist Brian May talks about the immediate aftermath of Freddie Mercury's death.

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When Freddie Mercury died in November 1991, it put an end to one of the biggest rock bands of all time.

Queen had dominated the 1970s and 1980s, and released their 14th studio album Innnuendo just month's before Mercury's passing.

Now guitarist Brian May has opened up about the grief felt after Freddie's death, and how putting together the posthumous album Made in Heaven helped him move on and record his second solo album Another World.

"Yeah, it did help I think," Brian told producer Simon Lupton at a Q&A hosted at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich on Saturday (April 22).

"It was something I had to go through. Me and Roger both, I think, completely overreacted to Freddie’s death, if it’s possible to say that."

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"In other words, we went so far away along the path of trying to forget that we over-grieved and we sort of denied the existence of Queen for a while. I certainly know I did."

According to the Daily Express, he added: "So to come back and finally face it and put that final Queen album together, Made In Heaven, was a wonderful and terrible thing to do.

"Wonderful, because you’re saving all these final scraps which we'd created together in those last moments when we were with Freddie.

Freddie Mercury - Made In Heaven (Official Video Remastered)

"Terrible, because you’re listening to his voice the whole day, polishing it, doing little things to it to optimise it, but he's not there.

"At the end of the day you can't say, 'Freddie, is that okay?'. That was hard, it was quite painful for a long time. It was a long labour of love; about a year and a half Roger and I were doing this.