Brian May: ‘A lot of the woke stuff is very punitive. My generation has been vilified’ – iNews

Rocknroll was born when we were kids, says Brian May. We were the luckiest people on the planet. The Queen guitarist is chatting on Zoom but we are having technical issues, so all I can see is a black screen with the word Brian on it.

Somewhere behind those five white letters, from which emanates a gentle, thoughtful voice, is the glam-rock being whose towering curls form an iconic hairdo, an astrophysicist whose guitar riffs can shift tectonic plates, and who, in the white heat of the solo on We Will Rock You, sounds like he is setting fire to ice.

The 74-year-old has been thinking about the minor heart attack he suffered in the early months of 2020. It came as a shock to May, who cycles, has a low-fat diet and doesnt smoke.

He had stents fitted to deal with blockages in three arteries but, he tells me: The conclusion we came to was that it could have been due to an early Covid infection because we were in Japan and Korea just ahead of the wave. Queen were touring East Asia with the singer Adam Lambert in January that year, and May had a cough all through the trip.

More than two years later, the band will finally be back on stage, and the guitarist is focused on being fully fit when the tour resumes in Belfast in May.

Before then, there is the reissue of his 1998 album Another World, the second of two solo works that May released in the 90s, after the death of Freddie Mercury in 1991.

Both stand the test of time, yet the genesis of Another World was unusual. The ethereal title track was written for the film Sliding Doors but not used; the thrash metal Cyborg was created for a video game; and Business, which could have been a classic Queen rocker, was composed as a theme tune for the 1993 BBC comedy-drama Frank Stubbs Promotes, starring Timothy Spall as a down-on-his-luck promoter.

Given the traumatic sequence of loss at the time May had lost his father and his marriage, as well as his friend and frontman Mercury, which led to his 1992 debut, Back to the Light did the bleakness of his lyrics for Spall, I got nothing and no one in my life, have a personal meaning?

I have this theory that anyone who writes songs or poetry or paints cannot avoid being autobiographical, he says. Im a depressive. I dont wallow in it, but I have that in me, and sometimes it will take over, and thats how I will feel: Ive got nothing dont tell me Im a successful rock star, dont tell me Ive got money. Ive got a great relationship, Ive got great kids. Something inside me is telling me that Im failing and there is no hope. Its not logical.

May has been happily remarried, to former EastEnders star Anita Dobson, since 2000, yet one of the reasons the songs on Another World still feel relevant, he says, is that the same battles are going on and Im hoping I will still win them and hoping people who listen to it relate to that and will be able to win their battles.

There is a hint of a different kind of battle on China Belle, a hard rocker with a seeming subtext to its lyrics: You take her as you find her but you never can quit. I wonder if its about heroin. No, he insists. Ive never tried heroin I think relationships are my drug. I have a kind of addictive personality, but its not to substances. I never have been that kind of an animal. Thank God. That on top of everything else would have killed me long ago.

I mention an article Id read about the infamously debauched launch party for the Queen album Jazz in New Orleans in 1978, which reportedly involved the finest Bolivian cocaine offered from trays carried on the heads of dwarfs, nude waiters, snake charmers, and guests offered their choice of oral satisfaction in the bathrooms.

The piece suggested that May, not Mercury, had been the ringmaster is that true? No, I think the opposite, really. I was on the fringes. I enjoyed it, but generally my head was in another place. I spent at least half of that party in a car looking for the girl I hoped would arrive. The old addictive romantic in me was much more taken up by that than by what was going on in the party.

He looks back on that whole era of rock hedonism with a measure of humour and forgiveness, because life was different in those days, everything was different. I always tried to be a decent person, and consider peoples feelings.

I lived the life of a rock star, but not truly to excess. And there is a lot of confusion in there, because I got married shortly before we first started touring and thats not a great idea so I resisted getting sexually involved on tour, and for a long time, didnt, but then gradually, I think some of the walls came down. But for me, the music was always it.

The painful end of the bands glory years was explored in the recent BBC documentary Freddie Mercury: The Final Act. It told the story of the singers final years with Aids alongside accounts of others who lost loved ones when the disease took hold in the 80s.

Was Mays close involvement with the film a response to criticism that the 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody which May and Queen drummer Roger Taylor nursed to the screen over 12 years had brushed over Mercurys sexuality and illness? I think thats bollocks, he says of the criticism.

The rumour persisted after the departure of Sacha Baron Cohen, who had been lined up to play Mercury, long before the Oscar-winning Rami Malek took over the role. Taylor recently opined, having watched his previous films, that Baron Cohen would have been utter shit as the singer.

Is there anger there? Its a shame because we got on very well for a while. And he did bring some energy to the project for which I will always be grateful but we parted in an unfortunate way. We said, We would like to part company as good friends and thanks for what youve done. His publicist then told the world that he had walked out on us. It ended up with him slagging off the film, and saying that he had quit because of there not being enough gay sex in it.

I dont think we skirted around anything, May notes. I think its all there. We didnt over-glamorise Freddie. And the boys who played us were so magnificent. They got inside our skins.

I dont think the film would have been a billion-dollar smash if all youre looking at had been sexual detail. It wasnt necessary. Im very proud of the film.

A sequel may be on the cards. There is a story we would like to tell because the end of the film is Live Aid, and of course thats not the end of the Queen story by any means, May confirms. But it needs to have a coherent story, and it needs to be entertaining, because Freddie would be the first to say: Dont put out anything thats boring.

Being part of a rock band that expanded the possibilities of sexual identity at a time when it was difficult to talk about such things publicly, does he have a view of the polarising topic of sex and gender in todays society?

I have to be honest, Im very old school, he says. And I have difficulty with a lot of the woke stuff because I think its very punitive theres a lack of empathy, a lack of perspective, a lack of compassion. And I find a lot of it damaging.

My generation has been vilified. Were viewed as having made the wrong decisions, and right now as having an unacceptable vocabulary. But changing peoples vocabulary does not change the way they behave.

As someone who likes to speak his mind, he says, he is constantly asking himself whether he is going to be misinterpreted, which he says has already happened. Somebody got the idea that I wouldnt have wanted a transsexual in the band, which is rubbish, because we didnt care.

I actually said: Did you not notice the fact that Fred wasnt exactly straight. He wasnt exactly English. He wasnt exactly white. Do you think it made a hairs breadth of difference to us? No. We were all musicians, young people with dreams. And thats all that mattered. We had a vision in music. And I think that innocence, sadly, has been lost.

What troubles him most about the present moment, though, is the way that truth has no value any more starting with Donald Trump and continuing with Vladimir Putin. Its not entirely new, he notes.

Weve been told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We all protested and said: Tony Blair, do not invade Iraq. And he did, saying: Im justified. And there was no justification. So were not whiter than white. But the scale on which the violence is happening now, and the scale at which lies are being told is just colossal and desperately sad.

The fact that you can actually lie, bare-faced, and say, No, this isnt happening while somebodys being tortured to death that absolutely kills me.

Another World is released on 22 April

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Brian May: 'A lot of the woke stuff is very punitive. My generation has been vilified' - iNews