How Brian May nearly derailed Queen’s future with one New York show
When breaking America, a lot of artists will want to start as they mean to go on. Except, if the first time Queen went Stateside was anything to go by, they would have always been destined to fail.
Picture the scene: the year was 1974, and although the success of Queen and Queen II was hardly storming out of the gate, it was fair to say that the band were steadily building momentum. Having struck up somewhat of a partnership with Mott the Hoople the previous year, supporting them on their UK tour, the natural next step was to head to the big leagues of the States.
But disaster seemed to ensue almost as soon as they began. Only six shows into the tour, while playing at the Uris Theatre in New York on May 11th, guitarist Brian May collapsed on stage and had to be wheeled away to the hospital. Was it exhaustion, anxiety, or jet lag? No, far worse than any of that: gangrene.
Needless to say, it was a pretty dramatic turn of events, with the future stratospheric guitarist struck down with a plague-like illness the second he entered America – maybe it was an omen. The irony of the whole situation was that May had contracted the disease in an effort to keep healthy, as his sickness stemmed from an infected needle that was used when he was getting vaccinations to travel to Australia to tour earlier in the year.
So, with May in hospital with hepatitis that had developed into gangrene, which almost in turn cost him his arm, Queen were well and truly on the rocks before they even really got the chance to get going. Ever the supportive bandmates, however, rather than worrying about the potential of their one-armed guitarist, they used the time they would have spent on the rest of the Mott the Hoople tour to come up with their next album.
Although having endured a near-miss brush with death, it turned out that May also had his own musical horizons to contend with. While literally still lying in his hospital bed, he received an offer to leave Queen and join the band Sparks – an audacious move if ever there was one. But the committed man declined, mainly because, in his haze of drugs and infection, he’d had an idea.
May later claimed that one night, he had a dream about a great flood, which subsequently inspired him to write the biggest portion of ‘The Prophet’s Song’ from his bedside. It didn’t end up appearing on the record that the rest of the band were working on, which materialised into Sheer Heart Attack, but when it eventually made its way onto A Night at the Opera, it was well worth the wait.
Queen went on to have a peppered relationship with the States over the years. Their success never boomed quite as much as it did on home shores, eventually culminating in the decision for them to stop touring there, albeit much later down the line. Yet perhaps, when you think about it, May’s gangrenous dalliance with death was really trying to warn them of something.
Of course, this is all said with tongue firmly in cheek. They never intended for their first stint in America to go so pear-shaped, but with May having very nearly derailed the entirety of Queen with one night in New York, it was just as well they saw his talents shining too much to keep him, rather than casting him off as a curse.
