As rock duos go, few have forged a partnership like Queen’s Brian May and Freddie Mercury. Between May’s mastery of his iconic Red Special guitar and Mercury’s ear for a hit, the pair took Queen to the top of the charts and the rock world.
Usually, May says in a new interview, Mercury’s ideas were inspired. But there was one occasion when the singer’s latest suggestion left his bandmates less than convinced.
“He was very good at coming up with titles,” May tells Planet Rock. “And he would be quite secretive. He’d say, ‘I have this great idea. Do you want to know what it is?’ Generally, the idea would be really good. And we’d go, ‘Oh, yeah, Freddie. Okay, that’s pretty good.’”
But even the most prolific songwriting talents can have an off day.
“This particular day, he said, ‘I’ve got this great idea,’” May recalls. “‘You know Michael Jackson’s album Bad? I had this great idea. Tell me what you think. No one’s ever done this. I think we call our album Good.’
“There was a sort of silence in the room,” the guitarist continues. “[We thought], ‘Well, yeah, maybe,’ but there was this feeling of, ‘Probably no.’”
It was, May concedes, one of the singer’s few duds.
“Most of Freddie’s ideas were excellent.”
The suggestion might have been rejected, but the choice of Bad as a reference was fitting given Queen’s connection to Michael Jackson. Jackson was a huge admirer of the band and, when asked if he was a Queen fan, reportedly replied, “I’m not a Queen fan, I’m a Freddie Mercury fan.” He regularly attended Queen shows at the L.A. Forum, and the two eventually became friends.
By 1983, Mercury and Jackson were collaborating on music, recording three songs together, although only one — “There Must Be More to Life Than This” — would eventually be released.
It wasn’t the only occasion when May and Mercury found themselves on different wavelengths. When it came to one of Queen’s biggest hits, the singer initially resisted the idea of May adding a guitar solo. In that case, though, May ultimately got his way — and Mercury was grateful that he did.
Elsewhere in the interview, May was asked to clarify a key detail about the Red Special. The six-string was famously built by May and his father when the guitarist was a teenager, and it famously incorporated wood from a fireplace.
But exactly whose fireplace was it?
“If we’d have taken our fireplace out, the house would have fallen down,” May jokes. “It was a piece of somebody’s fireplace that my dad had saved. He had a workshop with lots of bits and pieces that he’d saved from all over, thinking it might come in handy. I still have the rest of the fireplace, so I could actually make another neck.”
The Red Special remains central to May’s legacy, and he has recently gifted his old friend Tony Iommi a custom-made left-handed version. Steve Vai, meanwhile, has gone for a more radical tribute and has recalled how difficult the original model was to tame.
