Queen onstage in 1975. Image: Queen Productions Ltd
“In our Queen shows for a very long time I’ve been doing ‘Love of My Life’. And in the end, Freddie comes in and joins me as on video. It was just quite simply done, but it’s a way of involving Freddie, and I think we can basically take that a lot further.
“It wouldn’t be just playing old footage or whatever. it would be creating Queen as if we were creating it today. I’m very taken with the idea that we can be the original Queen again.”
Taylor reveals he left a trip to an ABBA Voyage show with mixed feelings. “I had a good time. I enjoyed it,” he says. “I didn’t find the actual projections that convincing. I do think technology now has come so much further since the ABBA show started, I think a lot more can be done.”
May also revealed that it’s tinkering with past work that has led to his vision of the future for the band.
“It’s just one of the ideas in my head, and I suppose it is fuelled by working on the reissues, as we’ve completely reconstructed Queen I, and we’ve been working on Queen II,” he said. “It’s just about ready to be re-released, and it’s great to re-experience that joy of creation that we had in those days. It’s immensely complex. Queen II is more complex than ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.”
Read the full interview with Brian May and Roger Taylor in this week’s Big Issue, on sale from vendors now. If you can’t reach your local vendor, support them by purchasing a Vendor Support Kit, which equips them to sell in the cold and wet weather.
Brian May and Talia Dean’s Christmas single Praise Your Name is out now
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