Why did Freddie Mercury try to stop Brian May’s finest moment with Queen?
Was Freddie Mercury a tyrannical leader? It’s a difficult one to weigh up, but one thing is certain: few people could dominate a room quite like him; even Donald Trump doesn’t have anywhere near as much personality.
Before anyone jumps down my neck, this is not an attempt to fashion the frontman after some sort of fascist overlord. But at least in the most basic sense, you have to allow yourself to see the comparison. For Mercury, it was all about having the power at his fingertips – the nuclear codes, if you will – to blow Queen into a worldwide explosion of success.
But at the same time, often what was just as important was not the times when the monarch would run riot on his reign, but when the others would stand up to be counted. For better or worse, on many occasions, the short end of that stick would fall to Brian May. Yet in providing reckoning to Mercury’s vision, he would give way to the band’s finest gems.
Take the example of a song like ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ as the classic case. It may be one of Queen’s most famous, if also cheesiest, works, but the reality is that it may never have been this way if May hadn’t stamped out Mercury’s original dream. In the frontman’s mind, it was to be something like Elton John’s piano paraphernalia, a rehashed ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’.
Yet the guitarist was having none of it. He knew that his instrument would create a blistering addition to the proceedings and was hellbent on his challenge to the leadership in this respect. And the reason you knew he was right all along? Even Mercury had to give up the battle, conceding that a guitar solo would, in fact, be the making of an iconic track.
When later speaking about his right-hand man’s first view, May explained: “[He heard] powerhouse piano, powerhouse vocal, and that’s it. I played lots of rhythm guitar on it, and Freddie still said, ‘No, no, no, no — it’s a piano song!’” It’s well seeing that a firm trait of a master is stubbornness – he had it by the bucketload.
In this sense, the retreat into accepting May’s course of action was less of a moment of great credit than it was a sly admission of the truth. The guitarist knew what he was doing on this one. “Well, it does need a solo. I need you to take over the vocal,” May recalled Mercury saying, and so he set to work.
Perhaps to prove a point, or just the fact that he’s one of the greatest guitar players of all time, May then created the electrifying solo of ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, seemingly with such ease that it was child’s play. With that emphatic slide of the strings, he was the clear winner, and all Mercury could do was sit back and revel.
Indeed, it was quite the fitting anecdote to go behind the sentiment of a song like ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, with a leader on top of the world, somewhat being put in his place. Of course, Mercury was a far better person than a tyrant, but it sometimes did nevertheless take the others bringing him down a peg or two to stop him from becoming the ruling king of Queen.
