Queen guitarist Brian May revealed one of Freddie Mercury’s biggest musical regrets at a recent event to launch the 40th-anniversary boxset of Brian May + Friends: Star Fleet Project.
Speaking on July 17th at Abbey Road Studios, the Queen guitarist said: “Talking about hiring people that will do what you tell them, that’s the mistake that Freddie made, really.”
“You know, he knows it, he said it to me. He got someone to play pretty much the way I played on his solo stuff,” said May to the audience.
May was referring to Mr. Bad Guy, the solo studio album Mercury released in 1985 while Queen were on hiatus. Mercury enlisted the help of guitarists Fred Mandel and Paul Vincent Gunia, bassist Stefan Wissnet and drummer Curt Cress on the album, rather than work with his Queen colleagues.
At his album launch, May revealed that: “Afterwards, he regretted it.” But May was in high-spirits, joking that: “He probably should’ve phoned me!”
“He was kind of looking for them to be what we had been to him, and I think it didn’t quite work out the way he expected,” he explained.
Afterwards, he joked that Mercury was a “cunning old bird”, but they all returned to work together “very much refreshed” after a brief break.
“If you see us doing One Vision and Live Aid after this – you see this incredible energy of us coming back together and enjoying each other’s company again,” said May.
During the same event, May also praised Queen vocalist Adam Lambert and called the singer “a gift from God”
