BRIAN MAY KICKS off his clogs, tucks his lengthy legs up on to the seat of his armchair and gazes thoughtfully out of the hotel window at the autumnal afternoon rain. The guy's doing interviews to promote his first solo album but, inevitably, recent painful memories are stirred up as the conversation comes round to the subject of Freddie Mercury's long illness and untimely death. Touchingly, he still talks about Queen's former frontman in the present tense.
"We didn't know actually what was wrong for a very long time," he begins. "We never talked about it and it was a sort of unwritten law that we didn't, because Freddie didn't want to. He just told us that he didn't feel up to doing tours, and that's as far as it went. Gradually, I suppose in the last year and a bit, it became obvious what the problem was, or at least, fairly obvious - we still didn't know for sure. He's a very private person, Freddie.
"And then, eventually, just a few months before, he did sit down and talk to us about it, and from that point on it was openly talked about among us. But we still didn't mention a word to anyone, not even our families, which is very difficult. When your friends look you in the eye and say, 'What's wrong?' and you say, 'Nothing,' it's very hard. So it was a big strain; it did something awful to our brains for a while."
Freddie's insistence on keeping his illness a secret and maintaining a semblance of normality lent a special poignancy to the recording of Queen's last album, 'Innuendo', and in particular, the track that was virtually to become his epitaph, 'The Show Must Go On'.
"That track was strange," recalls May. "I did most of the lyrics for Freddie to sing and you can imagine what that felt like. I did ask him at one point if he was okay about it and he said, 'Yeah, totally okay about it. I will give it my all.' And he did. He sang, I think, some of the best vocals of his life on that track, and most of the tracks on that album are incredible. He really was getting very weak by that time, but he could still summon up that " strength to sing."
As far as May is concerned, the band could not carry on without their uniquely talented frontman. Consequently, the death of Mercury also signalled the demise of Queen. Nevertheless, Brian admits that there are still some unfinished tracks featuring Freddie's vocals which will be completed and released at a later date, and he doesn't rule out the possibility that the remaining members may play together in future for some kind of special one-off situation.
The final grand gesture was the massive Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, at Wembley Stadium last Easter, both to remember Freddie and to raise awareness of the threat of AIDS. It was an event where feelings, as well as emotions, ran high, with protests from gay groups over the involvement of Guns N'Roses, and their allegedly homophobic vocalist Axl Rose.
Brian pauses and considers his words carefully, "The way we feel about it, and did at the time, is that if we put on a concert with lots of people who you know are involved with AIDS charities and with gay issues in general, nobody's going to raise an eyebrow, because it's a normal thing to do. But if we succeeded in putting on a concert with people who are not normally associated with these things making a big noise, and particularly if we can pull in someone like Guns N'Roses, who are normally thought to be the macho end of the spectrum and not concerned with gay issues at all, then we've really achieved something, because the young kids who follow Guns N'Roses and heavy metal will sit up and realise that this concerns them too. Because kids in general are in danger - that was the message of the concert, more than anything, and the fact that Guns N'Roses were in there. I think, was incredibly valuable.
"I'm a big fan of Axl: he's a sort of mouthpiece for honest feelings which he shares with all sorts of other people. The fact that he speaks honestly about being scared of gays, for one thing, is actually very valuable, and the fact that he came out when he did our concert and said, 'I'm doing this because I feel for Freddie and because I feel that this issue involves everybody.'
"Certainly, Axl was able to look privately at his own feelings about all this again and about why he was afraid of gays; now he's much more at home with himself. So there you have a person who's growing up and coming in tune with his own feelings – and he's doing it publicly, which is a pretty dangerous thing to do."
Brian May's debut solo record, 'Back To The Light', originally conceived five years ago as an adjunct to his work with Queen, now marks the launch of his new career. Still there is still a nod to the past with the album's intro and outro: an eerie rendition of the children's carol 'We Will Rock You', which is of course the namesake of one of Queen's biggest hits.
"For me, it tied it together very well, because that's the bewildered child who really runs throughout the whole record, speaking at the beginning and the end, and it did also tie in nicely with 'We Will Rock You',' May explains. "I must have been dimly aware of the carol when I wrote 'We Will Rock You' in the first place, but for some reason -it came back to me over the last few years. When you're singing bedtime stories to your kids, all sorts of things go through your head, and you relive your own childhood and begin to be more aware of that little child inside you who never grew up. So a lot of my writing and feeling is concerned with that."
Two tracks, 'Driven By You' and 'Too Much Love Will Kill You', are already hit singles. The promotion of the first was assisted by its use on Ford TV ads, although May admits that initially he wasn't very excited at the prospect of writing an ad jingle. But after he had halved their slogan, 'Everything we do is driven by you' to 'Driven by you', Brian "nipped off to the toilet with my little tape machine and wrote it!"
With 'Too Much Love', the difficulty wasn't in the inspiration for the song; May wrote it six years ago in Los Angeles and it was recorded by Queen for possible inclusion on 'The Miracle'. "It is a difficult song to sing," he explains. It's very exposed and very rangey, and I sang it till I bled. I sang it every day for ages. For months, I would go in and use that as my warm-up thing, until I got to the point where I thought I was ready to put it down.
"And on 'Resurrection', which is the highest point and the loudest stuff on the album, I really went for it - that was the extreme that I pushed myself to. It's amazing what you can do when you try. When I started off, I couldn't get close to those notes; I wanted to get that top D but I was four or five semitones away from that. But if you do it every day, which I did, you get there."
As he faces these new challenges, May himself admits that it's "time to grow up". But, poised on the brink of a new solo career, is it hard to leave behind the comfortable security of a major band like Queen?
"I don't know about 'comfortable', "he answers with a smile. "It's had its own bed of thorns, but it has been a protective environment in some ways - I'm very aware of that. When you go out and you haven't got that name of Queen behind you, people treat you very different. But if it hadn't been for the fact that it was so dreadful to lose Freddie, I would say probably it was good for us to have to try something different. I know Roger will do a solo album soon and John... I don't know, he's very mysterious."
Brian himself gets mysterious regarding touring, but he will admit that he is looking at taking a band out to a distant country and if shows there work out well, he hopes to do some dates in Europe and America in the New Year.
"I would love to be out there playing," he says enthusiastically. "I really miss it. When we did the MTV Awards a couple of days ago, we were right in the midst of all that stuff going on and it really hurts that you can't play. It would have been great for the four of us to nip up there and do a song, like everyone else did. We were up there presenting an award to Guns N'Roses and we received an award for the 'Bohemian Rhapsody' thing in Wayne's World, which was good... But it just would have been great to kick off our clothes and go up and swim about.