Brian May Dishes on Unheard Queen Recordings, Mercury Biopic, Asteroids

Queen
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Brian May is one busy rock god. He’s still helping guide the upcoming Freddie Mercury biopic, and he’s also compiling a new Queen rarities LP (which will feature collaborative tracks between Mercury and…Michael Jackson). May dropped some details in a very entertaining interview with Rolling Stone.

“There’s something coming,” May says of the Queen album, “but I’m not really quite sure what it is yet. (…) We were looking at putting together a compilation of the more unusual and yet memorable Queen tracks. Things that weren’t singles that have become or stayed popular through the years. That’s the way it started and then we unearthed a few tapes of Freddie singing and us in the studio that we never finished off.

“Roger (Taylor) and I have both been working on (new backing) tracks in our spare time,” he continues. “A couple of them have Michael Jackson on as well, which adds another layer of interest. Freddie and Michael singing together and experimenting in the ’80s.”

Let’s let that sink in for a second. (As if the Bowie-Mercury duet on “Under Pressure” wasn’t enough collaborative star power.) The tracks will include “at least one dancey (one)” and “at least one ballady one.” (I really want to hear the “dancey” one.)

“Michael used to come see us a lot,” May adds. “He was a big big fan, especially of Freddie, and Freddie and Michael got on real real well. Michael was very impressed with our lighting rig, I remember. I can’t remember which tour it was. We had pods of lights that moved above the stage that had pilots in them. He said, ‘I’m stealing that,’ and sure enough on the ‘Victory’ tour they had something very similar. But Michael really was very fond of Freddie and sort (of) idolized him. Michael really felt he wanted to be a rock star.”

Meanwhile, May is also quick to reiterate his recent comments about Sacha Baron Cohen’s amicable exit from the Mercury biopic. Despite the tabloid-style controversy, May says the two parties split because Cohen’s high profile would be “distracting” from the story.

“We’re still in touch, and we’re still good friends,” he says. “We just came to the conclusions that it wasn’t going to work with Sacha in the leading role. He’s brilliant. But we felt that having Sacha in there would be so distracting because he’s such a powerful persona and the characters he makes tend to stand out in a way that wouldn’t be suitable for the film. Freddie has to be, in this movie, completely believable. You have to not question for an instant that you’re watching Freddie, and that couldn’t have happened with Sacha.”

But I think the real reason you’re reading this story is to know more about the “asteroids” teaser in the headline. Right? Well, at the end of the otherwise fairly normal interview, May switches gears to a foreboding tone: “Tell everyone to watch out for comet Ison,” he warns, “which we might be able to see by the end of the year.”

“I think it’s highly likely (that an asteroid will hit the planet),” he says. “It’s more than possible and we don’t have enough scouts out there looking for them. So that’s another one of my little crusades. I’m funding a project that’s going to increase the amount of surveillance we do on dark objects that might be heading towards us. A few months ago, we were all looking at this object that came between us and the moon, and while we were all watching that, something hit Russia, which was completely unseen and unexpected. It ought to be a wake-up call. That was a pretty big object. If it had been a little bit bigger and a little bit later, you would have seen a city disappear.”

So…to summarize, you’ll get to hear some collaborative tracks between Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson — unless we all get wiped out by an asteroid first.

(Gulp.)

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