The singer Brian May said was one in a billion: “Never heard a voice like him”
The concept of having a fantastic frontman wasn’t lost on Brian May when Queen hit the big leagues.
The band had lucked out giving Freddie Mercury the microphone every single time he got onstage, but besides being one of the greatest vocalists in the world, Mercury was going to give everyone the show that they deserved whenever they came out onstage and held court for a few hours. They were doing everything within their power to keep the audience as engaged as possible, but May understood when someone else was giving them a run for their money whenever they started making their classics.
Because it’s not like there wasn’t some stiff competition when Queen began. The biggest names at the time were people like David Bowie and Mott the Hoople, neither of which was lacking in the glam department, and even when the glam movement faded, the dawn of MTV brought even more stars who were mugging for the camera every single time they made one of their videos. Then again, there’s a difference between what those acts did and what Queen was doing half the time they played.
Half of the biggest stars on MTV may have been camera-ready, but Mercury would have been a star even if no one was filming what he was doing. There wasn’t a single stage that he couldn’t own every single time he performed, but even if you could teach a clinic on how to control a crowd by watching him, the fact that he died so young only left a gaping hole in rock and roll history.
There was no way of possibly replacing Mercury, even if someone had trained for decades at a time, but there did seem to be a little bit of gas left in the tank when May and Roger Taylor started working with other singers. It was understood that no one could have replaced Mercury properly, but Paul Rodgers’s stint with the band was at least fun for what it was when they made The Cosmos Rocks in the 2000s.
But even if Mercury was inspired by Rodgers in many respects, Adam Lambert was always the one who fit the bill much better when he stepped into those unfillable shoes. He had been singing those songs all his life, and even if he had more of a glamorous aesthetic to every single thing he sang, May could look past all of the window dressing and see that he was one of the greatest singers he had ever seen.
Despite Mercury being a landmark in rock and roll history, May said that Lambert was the kind of singer that only came around once every generation, if that, saying, “I’ve heard a billion voices in my life, and I’ve never heard a voice like Adam’s. And so often, I’ve found myself wishing that Freddie and Adam could have gotten together, because they would have had the greatest time.” And that’s not just subtle lip service, either.
A lot of what Lambert is doing onstage is clearly indebted to what Mercury had done, so when he started working with them, it wasn’t like some kid trying his best singing with some dinosaur act. The fact that he came from American Idol may have ruffled some feathers at the time, but you can tell whenever he’s singing with the band that he doesn’t want to mess up a single note when he’s singing one of those tunes.
Whether they make an album or not remains to be seen, but it’s not like Lambert is a lesser version of what Mercury was by any stretch. He’s doing his own thing whenever he gets onstage, and even if Queen were never going to be the same, May could rest easy knowing that the shows were in good hands with Lambert out front.
