Brian May says working on Freddie Mercury’s vocals after his death was “difficult” and “traumatising”

Queen‘s Brian May has called the experience of working on Made In Heaven after the death of frontman Freddie Mercury a “difficult” and “traumatising” experience.

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The guitarist told Elis James and John Robins of BBC Radio 5 Live’s How Do You Cope, “It was very weird. It was traumatising in itself.

I spent hours and days and weeks working on little bits of Freddie’s vocals. Listening to Freddie the whole day and the whole night. I’d have moments thinking, ‘This is great…this sounds great Fre… Oh, you’re not here.’”

Adding that, while he felt immense pride and joy at being able to take what Mercury had left behind to create Made In Heaven, “It was quite difficult. You’d have to go away from it sometimes and recover and come back.”

The final product, however, ended up May’s favourite album from Queen.

Elsewhere in the conversation, May discussed how he and drummer Roger Taylor dealt with the aftermath of Mercury’s death in 1991 following his battle with AIDS.

“I think Roger and I both went through a kind of normal grieving process,” May explained, explaining, “but [it was] accentuated by the fact it has to be public. We sort of went into denial. Like, ‘Yeah well, we did Queen, but we do something else now’.”

He continued: “Roger and I plunged into our solo work and didn’t want to talk about Queen. That seems almost nonsensical because we spent half of our lives constructing Queen. But we didn’t want to know at that time. It was a grieving thing. We just overcompensated. It went on for a long time.”

In other Brian May news, the guitarist recently released a brand new video for On My Way Up, a track from his 1998 solo album, Another World. The video marked the release of the new deluxe edition of the album in the guitarist’s Gold Series, and includes a 15-track rarities collection titled Another Disc.