A Queen television special recently aired on ABC, and Brian May discussed knowing Freddie Mercury suffering a terrible death from AIDS was coming, and how it took time for Queen to eventually move on, first with Paul Rodgers in the mid-2000’s, followed by Adam Lambert in the 2010’s. Bassist John Deacon has not been present for any post-1997 Queen performances.
Brian May said (via Express), “I missed Freddie dreadfully. I knew it was coming but it was still awful.”
“We talked about it, (we said) if anyone goes we should just stop – and we did stop for a very long time. We didn’t have a desire to go on without Freddie. It was a grieving process, like we don’t want to talk about Queen, we don’t want to be Queen, we’ve done that. We want to be ourselves now.”
A beautiful video of Brian May singing Love of My Life shows the crowd singing along and then Freddie appears of the big screen to complete the song.
Freddie had revealed the band talked about what would happen if someone left, long before his AIDS diagnosis and eventual death: “Through everything, we will just carry on. It’s a survival instinct the whole group has. I mean if I just left they would replace me… Not easy to replace me, huh?”
