The 1997 song that forced John Deacon out of Queen: “I can’t do this anymore”
When talking about the legacy that Queen has left behind, it’s hard to get around everything that Freddie Mercury did.
He was a gift to rock and roll frontmen all across the world, and even when he was making songs that didn’t always work out, you could never say that he didn’t put every single thing he had into making their songs sound as epic as possible. But even for a band that had one of the greatest singers on the planet, it’s easy for someone like John Deacon to get overshadowed more than a few times.
In all reality, though, Deacon is one of the reasons why they had so many hits back in the day. All of them were gifted songwriters whenever they made their records, but i f they were counting on making a poppy single, it was normally going to come out of Deacon. It’s easy to stop him at ‘Another One Bites the Dust,’ but tunes like ‘You’re My Best Friend’ and ‘I Want To Break Free’ still have that sense of soul that was missing from the straight ahead rock that Brian May was making every time he came up with a riff.
Deacon was an absolute wonder, but don’t ask him to talk too much. Every band of this caliber usually had the one quiet member, and Deacon was more than happy to sit at the back and sing the occasional background vocal instead of soaking in the limelight. He wanted to let the music do the talking for him whenever they made a new record, but that became a lot more difficult when Mercury faced his battle with AIDs.
The entire band were already distraught seeing their bandmate wither away every time he tried to sing, but it wasn’t like Mercury wanted any kind of pity. He wanted to make the best music that he could until he dropped, and even when he was far too ill by most other people’s standards hearing him reach deep inside himself and summon up the strength to sing a song like ‘The Show Must Go On’ is much more than most fans would have been asking for.
When he finally did reveal his diagnosis to the rest of the world and passed away a day later, though, Deacon was the one that seemed to take it the hardest. The band was all about maintaining that sense of brotherhood whenever they performed, and while the Concert for Freddie and Made in Heaven were great ways of paying tribute to the singer, Deacon knew that there was no way that he could carry on for much longer.
He didn’t want to keep bearing the Queen name without its most important member there, and May remembered that the tribute song ‘No One But You’ was one step too far for Deacon, saying, “We did do a couple of things together, in 1996: the recording of ‘No One But You’ – the song I wrote about Freddie when we were putting up the statue to commemorate him in Montreux [Switzerland] – and one show in Paris. It was to open the ballet season with an amazing new work by Maurice Béjart, about Mozart and Queen. We played with John on bass, and Elton John sang with us. At that moment, John just looked at us and said, ‘I can’t do this any more’.”
So that’s exactly what he did. May and Taylor were certainly going to keep the band’s name going in various iterations, but even if they had Deacon’s blessing when they went out with people like Paul Rodgers and Adam Lambert, he was far more content to stay home. He’s not ashamed of what Queen are doing, but he also didn’t want to live that kind of life knowing that Mercury wasn’t there anymore.
In his mind, his bandmate was irreplaceable, but that shouldn’t dissuade anyone from looking at what the band had done since then. They have been more than happy to keep Mercury’s spirit alive whenever they perform, and while it does hurt sometimes to hear May sing ‘Love of My Life’ without Mercury there in the flesh, every show they play feels more like a celebration of the man’s music than anything else.
