SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
20 May 2017
Watch tomorrow’s cover star Brian May talk exclusively about life with Queen, his new book “Queen in 3D” and his fondest memories of Freddie Mercury.
- Pick up your copy of The Sunday Times tomorrow 21 May for major article on the book.
A brief interview with Brian May about the new Queen In 3-D book.
https://www.facebook.com/SundayTimesMagazine/
BRIAN MAY:I’m here to talk about The Sunday Times Magazine, because they are featuring my book this weekend – “Queen In 3-D” which is about two and a half years in the making.
Course my head is full of election stuff at the moment. It’s hard to put that to one side. I’m desperate to get that horrible fox-hunting woman out of 10 Downing Street.
But here is the book. What’s in the book? Well – all kinds of stuff. Forty years of Queen on the road. I’m gonna pick a few pictures just to speak about and to give you an idea what’s in the book.
Opening the book at page 88. we have a very nice picture of Freddie – and I didn’t even know I had this over the years. The picture was taken in 1976 and this is kinda early days for us. It’s about “A Night At The Opera” time when it’s beginning to break through, and this is a typical pose of Freddie if you like, except that he’s not posing. It’s an intimate moment, which I’ve captured here. He’s preparing to go on stage and in those days we were very glam and there was a lot of makeup applied, especially to Freddie’s face.
Here’s the OWL. Here’s your stereoscope, and this is what you do. Place it over here and look here. The feeling of being there is very powerful.
Not every picture in the book is stereo. There’s some private pictures which are mono, which I just had to include because they’re so evocative.
This is a great page. It’s a favourite of mine. It’s 1977. We’re on tour in the winter in the USA. It was always winter. It was always snow, and we are freezing to death sort of posing as rock stars outside our private plane, but, you know, having a great time also. And you can see Freddie kind of all huddled up here.
Not every picture in the book is stereo. There’s some private pictures which are mono, which I just had to include because they’re so evocative.
This is a great page. It’s a favourite of mine. It’s 1977. We’re on tour in the winter in the USA. It was always winter. It was always snow, and we are freezing to death sort of posing as rock stars outside our private plane, but, you know, having a great time also. And you can see Freddie kind of all huddled up here (chuckles) in his jacket, which wasn’t really up to the occasion.
Freddie was always fun. He was always lateral thinking and on stage and on tour there were really very few changes(?), because the aims were very clear, so we got on very well on tour – not so much in the studio. There were a lot of kind of disputes in the studio, mainly musical, but on tour it’s very clear. We have a certain preparation time, we go on stage, we entertain for 2 hours solid and we give them everything we have – and it’s fun.
This is another touring snapshot, if you like. This time we’re on tour in Europe, and it’s a nice three-dimensional picture of Freddie but the 4th dimension is that he’s taking a picture of me at the same time. Freddie loved his cameras. He loved his Polaroid thing because it was instant. He could take pictures of all his mates and immediately give them all away. Freddie was a very generous person, and again, you can enjoy it like this in 2-D in the book and you can flick through and read the anecdotes, but with this – with your OWL – you can zoom in in 3-D and you can see him, and, my God, it’s like you could touch him. And there he is snapping away at me. So here’s Freddie, and he liked his instant photography and we liked seeing him do it.”
Brian shows a page from book – Freddie taking a photo of him in fact photographing each other.