The album that saw Brian May put his “life back together”
When Bryan Singer and Dexter Fletcher’s award-winning biopic Bohemian Rhapsody arrived in 2018, it garnered a new generation of fans for the classic rock band Queen. The Oscar-winning movie also proved that Freddie Mercury’s legacy is as bold and influential as ever almost three decades after his death. It seems that the music Queen created in just a couple of decades in the late 20th century will live on forever.
Central to Queen’s appeal as a recording act was their ability to create progressive rock music that was equally accessible. The layered epic ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was unlike anything fans had heard in the past, and thanks to Mercury’s alluring vocal command, it also had the masses repeating “Scaramouche” and “Galileo” at Queen’s packed-out arena concerts. This difficult combination of originality and chart-worthy accessibility was perfected in the 1960s by The Beatles.
Following their initial chapter of heavy glam-rock through the mid-1970s, Queen gradually embraced a more conventional pop-centric sound infused with disco and funk styles. Funky hits like John Deacon’s danceable 1980 songwriting contribution ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ and 1984’s ‘I Want to Break Free’ buoyed Queen to new heights of popularity. Despite the commercial success of the early ’80s, the band’s creative orientation had become less coherent, leading to tension between the members.
In 1981, while recording on Hot Space, Mercury began to work with his new assistant, Paul Prenter. The controversial assistant had a huge influence on the singer and encouraged him to further embrace contemporary trends for financial gain. This further alienated Mercury’s bandmates, contributing to a fractured decade for Queen. While the band maintained a steady presence in the charts with The Works and A Kind of Magic, their influence as a leading rock band had begun to falter.
With solo side projects providing some much-needed breathing space in the ’80s, Queen toured less frequently. However, the band was revitalised by their historical performance at Live Aid in 1985, which drummer Roger Taylor described as a “shot in the arm”. “Queen were absolutely the best band of the day,” organiser Bob Geldof said of the show. “They just went and smashed one hit after another … it was the perfect stage for Freddie: the whole world.”
Queen’s high from Live Aid would see them persevere through the late 1980s with two further albums. However, in 1987, tragedy struck when Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS. He decided to keep the tragic news to himself for two years before telling his bandmates. As his health declined, he recorded one final album with Queen, 1991’s Innuendo. Nine months after the album’s release, Mercury confirmed to the public that he had been suffering from AIDS. He died just one day later, on November 24th, 1991.
In the wake of Mercury’s death, the surviving members of Queen took some time to regroup and return to music. Their frontman had been the life and soul of the band and the energy that kept them going. Eventually, Brian May, Deacon and Taylor patched together some remnant studio material into the final studio album, Made In Heaven. But before that, May battled combatted his grief by completing his solo album, Back to the Light.
Although it finally arrived in 1992, the material on Back to the Light dates back to 1988. “In the beginning, it was part-time because, at the time, Queen was incredibly busy,” May told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. “It was very time-consuming just being in Queen.” The project was laboured for some time while Queen put Innuendo together, which featured two songs that May initially wote for Back to the Light: ‘Headlong’ and ‘I Can’t Live with You’.
Continuing, May revealed that, although tragedy inspired him to complete the album as a “kind of therapy,” various personal grievances had initially stalled the project. “It also took a long time because I was trying to put my life back together,” he said. “I really had a very bad spot personally because of various things that happened five years ago.” Ostensibly, the various factors inhibiting May’s progress on Back to the Light included a 1988 divorce from his first wife, Christine Mullen, and the revelation of Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis, which followed a year later.
