Brian May discussed the monetary and personal reasons Freddie Mercury shelved the Queen song “Too Much Love Will Kill You” from The Miracle.
May told Variety, “It was part of the running order until we got into a big dispute about publishing. See, I had originally written it with other people away from the band. You can write a book about it, as I wrote it for a solo album, Freddie loved it. And when I brought it to the band, they all loved it too. But, suddenly, particularly Freddie, he didn’t want to receive one-sixteenth of the publishing. Which I can understand, so we reached a stalemate and shelved the song. In the box, we have restored its vinyl to the way it would have been.
It is, however, only now where I realize what might have been going on inside his head. At that point in time, we didn’t know that he was being threatened. Probably, he did. It could be associated with Freddie talking about too much love killing him. Songs assume different meanings to different people at different times.”
Memories are what we all carry of the deceased and Brian May is no different. From celebrating the Silver and Platinum Jubilee with the longest living monarch to being in a position where you have to narrate stories of the journey, things have come a long way.
It wasn’t long ago when the 96-year-old Queen Elizabeth celebrated her platinum jubilee. She was even featured in the video and made it look like it was a piece of cake for her to perform on camera.
Brian May recalls the experience and takes us on a trip down memory lane where he shares his experience with Gold Radio. The journey was easy as Brian has performed with The Queen previously.
It was definitely partly my idea. I don’t know quite what the BBC had in their minds before we started speaking, but somebody has to decide what we’re going to play in the beginning. We’re opening the show, what are we going to play?
And I had this idea that it would be nice to open with ‘We Will Rock You’ because it’s so recognizable. And I thought well, it would be nice if the military bands played that ’cause it would suit the snare…
So, we talked, and we thought, ‘Okay, we’ll put me some someplace up there, because we realized we were going to be on this huge, kind of wedding cake, that Queen Victoria [monument] sits on… And I can make an entrance when the guitar solo comes, so it all started to fall into place in my head.
And then, of course, you have to send this to the BBC and see if they approve, and they did. But I kind of went a bit further because it’d be nice to have the marching bands. But wouldn’t it be nice if the Queen could actually kind of start the whole thing off by tapping something? I decided that you could start on the corgis, and then you would pan around.
And then you go to see the Queen signing some documents with a pencil and going [taps ‘We Will Rock You’ beat]. So, I don’t know what they thought of it, because I didn’t hear back from the BBC. They said, ‘No, no, we can’t tell you what we’re thinking. But we’ll take all this into consideration.’ And it wasn’t until the night before the show that they finally said, ‘Okay, we did get the Queen.’ ‘Oh, wow.’ Up to then, we’ve been kind of in the dark…
But it was good news, and she performed it so well, for with the spoon everything. And Paddington Bear was also an excellent performer. I never would have thought about Paddington Bear, I gotta say, an extra stroke of genius.
It didn’t take time for the two to get comfortable with each other and The Queen was ready to do any move that the performance required. Brian was astonished at how the longest living monarch was ready to dive right in to the experience.
What do you make out of Brian May’s experience? Chime in.
