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Brian talks to the Oxford Union
 (May Day 2001)

May Day! - Interview with Brian May

      We are ushered into a small classy room, in the middle of which sits legendary Queen guitarist and animal rights campaigner Brian May. He's resplendent in a bright blue suit, behind which a Foo Fighters t-shirt is occasionally visible. The superb follicles that once inspired him to remark "I feel like a prisoner of my own hair" flow as freely as ever. And it's Brian May, man. Brian f**king May. We Will Rock You. Bohemian Rhapsody. Seven Seas of Rye. Briiaaaaaaaaan Maaaaaaaay. But it's not like that. All of the questions about that line of that song, Freddie's favourite joke, and who did the most coke off who's knob at which party will have to go on hold. Because the guy often seen as one of the most sorted men in rock, who has spent most of his life in one of the biggest bands on the planet, has just finished telling the Oxford Union about his severe depression. And Brian May is a man with a message.

     A more unassuming rock star it will be hard to find. Before he starts Brian's thanked everyone and apologised for everything that might possibly go wrong. No huge ego at play here then. There is an obvious urgency though, and an obvious unease. This isn't something he could do just anywhere - to start with the tabloid press and the mainstream music rags are out because they can't be trusted. That's why he's telling us. That's why he's here. Because he wants to reach people to pass on a message. The message is simple - money and fame will not make you happy. People make you happy. You make you happy. And don't ever let yourself forget it.

     As he speaks half of him is constantly turning to catch a glimpse of his partner (and former Eastenders star) Anita Dobson, the women he holds responsible for changing his life. Brian may have found a new source of strength but he still looks a man in desperate need of assurance. Life, he explains, has not all been the fun and games you might have thought. Sell out gigs were followed by long solitary nights in hotel rooms. After coming back from a massive stadium gig, he would sit in hotel room feeling utterly alone - the live connection with so many people made it that much harder to deal with the silence. And as Freddie and co partied Brian shied away from the drugs and rock'n'roll lifestyle, as the guilt he felt for the effects that touring were having on his family compounded his ever growing depression.

     It's not that he didn't enjoy it, and this is far from a bitter mans rant or an old man's moan. He just feels that in reaching so many of rocks ultimate goals he didn't pay enough attention to the journey. He recounts a story about the Freddie Mercury tribute concert where various artists joined Queen and, via video clips of Freddie on a giant screen, the late great man himself. Having rushed around all day sorting, organising and eventually playing, May came off stage, following one of the most legendary concerts ever staged (Freddie Mercury can now add having number one records to selling out Wembley Stadium as amazing feats for a dead man) and exited stage left. The nearby Def Leppard enquired where he was off to in such a hurry and he replied that there was an interview he just had to do. No, they insisted, what he had to do was turn around and look out at the hundred thousand people packed into Wembley and see what he had achieved. It was only then, he explains, with tangible emotion in his voice, that he actually stopped for a minute to start appreciating it.

     Last year Brian May checked himself into a rehabilitation centre. By his own account he was a wreck. As the public Brian May grew stronger the private Brian May was falling apart. And nothing mattered. Not the numerous silver, gold and platinum disks. Not the number one records or the sell out tours. He had failed to look after himself and the people he loved. His mistake was not to be selfish enough. Too often he fitted in with other people's plans when he really needed space and time. So why is he here telling all this to the students of Oxford? Because his son made him see the parallels between success in the music world and success in the academic world. They both encourage you to focus attention away from yourself onto some external goal. They both make you perform to other people's standards. They can both make you feel you are not what matters. And Brian, more than anyone else, knows the pain that can cause, so he's here with a message to the kids. You're not alone and you're not the only ones. Success isn't the most important thing - yes if it makes you happy, but if it doesn't then what's the point? Make yourself happy, that's the key. Respect yourself and take care of yourself. If there's something that you worry about because you can't sort it out yourself then try to get to a point where you can hand over those worries to some higher power. Don't be afraid to ask for help. Don't leave it too late.

     He tells us that some of his lyrics will help explain what he means and so he starts singing 'We Will Rock You'

Buddy you're a boy make a big noise
Playing in the street gonna be a big man some day
You got blood on yo' face
You big disgrace
Kickin' your can all over the place

Buddy you're a young man hard man
Shoutin' in the street gonna take on the world someday
You got blood on yo' face
You big disgrace
Wavin' your banner all over the place

Buddy you're an old man poor man
Pleadin' with your eyes gonna make you some peace some day
You got mud on your face
You big disgrace
Somebody gonna better put you back in your place

     It's got to be one of the most surreal events ever to take place at the Oxford Union. But it fits. It fits because one look at Brian May's eyes says that this the truth, and the truth hurts. This is total f**king integrity.

     The looks of the faces around the room say it all. No one expected this. Celebrity chit chat, yes. But heart felt testimony to the irreducible link between all human beings . . . If they're anything like this here writer then Brian's audience will have felt like they'd known him for years. Ok, in the superficial way that your mum knew Princess Diana maybe, but we felt like we knew him. We know so many of his songs off by heart we could do a gig on our own. There aren't many conceivable poses he could make that aren't covered by one of the photos we've cut out, or one of the videos we've watched until the tape ran thin. And all along he wasn't the happy go lucky person we believed him to be. All along he really wasn't that more fortunate than anyone who spent the first forty years of their life avoiding loneliness. And that's the message. We're not that different, you, me and Brian May.

     So now the talk is over and it's time for the interview. But were do you start? Well, if there's one topic that follows on from someone telling you how it feels to go a life time in silence it's how it feels to break a lifetime of silence.

     "It feels a damn sight better than it did before. It's a billion times worse than going on stage. On stage I know what I'm doing - I walked into this place thinking that I was going to look like I'm such an idiot, you know? I was very unsure. I very seldom do public speaking, and even in our business if I have to get up to receive an award it's very hard to just to say a few words. It's funny isn't it? You can go up there to play but to say a few words is tough. It's also more scary to play to a small number of people because you can see everyone's eyes. It's well freaky . . . dude"

     And with a light-hearted comment here and a joke there the tension is relieved. It seems like a burden has been removed. Brian looks drained by the whole thing, but also relaxed. This must be one of thousands of interviews he's done in his lifetime but it's a mark of how much Brian May still feels he has to do that he always looks interested in what you've got to say, always thinks hard before replying and always appears to answer with total honesty.

     "It's funny because I don't get nervous playing the guitar. It's more things like this - the unusual things. That's where the real challenge is. I love performing, I really do, but that was a big challenge for me today and I was thinking about it for weeks . . . I had all kinds of stuff in my diary but this one was looming up and I thought that out of all that stuff I had to be prepared for this."

     There's understandable concern that he wasn't misunderstood, that it all made sense and that we don't think that he's made a fool out of himself. The surprise factor felt by those who'd imagined they knew him seems to be something that he hadn't really considered. Hearing about it only serves to make him more sure that this was the right thing to do.

     "I didn't want to do "just another Queen speech". I made a decision as soon as the subject came up that this was the right sought of place to speak my truths. It's very hard to find a place to do that - you know, most of the places that come up, TV, radio . . . even more so the printed word - you are so open to being misrepresented. This place (the Oxford Union) is world renown for being a place where you can speak your truth so I just decided immediately that this would be the place that I would do it"

     For a while his own truths have been taking a back seat to his other passions - animal rights and AIDS charities are just two of the groups he has leant high profile support to. This isn't the usual case of an ignorant celebrity not prepared to put their money where their words are though. An expression of deep thought encompases his face when he talks about the money raised by Queen, and it's a testament to the involvement which he still maintains with his chosen causes.

     "I'm very proud of the Mercury Pheonix Trust. It was started to deal with the money made from Freddie tribute concert but it's amazing because it seems to have just kept generating money. So far we've distributed about £5m to AIDS charities around the world, and I'm very involved in that and the British Bone Marrow Donor Association which is involved in building a register of donors to save children's lives. The animals thing is just something which is very close to my heart and I feel it more and more strongly as time goes on. It's very interesting because sometimes there can be a conflict because we support a lot of AIDS care but we also support AIDS research and you can imagine that you have to look very carefully at it to figure out what they're doing and how they're doing it and if it comes to experimenting on animals to see what happens on humans I'm normally against it. I'm not totally . . . you know, I'm not a fool and I know that there are grey areas but my overall feeling is that most of the stuff that is done on animals is unnecessary and I don't feel we have the right. As a human being I just don't feel we have the right. It's a moral issue with me, and that's it."

     Despite all the rhetoric there's an incredible humble quality at work here. He's happy to admit that he might be wrong and that others know more than him. It's just his gut feeling and he couldn't live with himself if he didn't try to make a difference. That doesn't mean that he thinks he's the best placed person to do it or even a well placed person. His rejection of politics is a combination of this acceptance of his own limits with the realisation that he can make more of a difference from the outside.

     "Noooooooo, I wouldn't like to go into politics. I think I'm not very good with people on mass, I'm much better with people one-to-one . . . maybe that's an outdated view point. I just never saw myself as a politician because there's so much wrangling to do I don't know if my heart could bear it. I think I can have more of a positive impact by not doing that. I want to be able to do things like the film I'm doing about native Americans. I can't tell you much otherwise someone else might go out there and do it first but basically it's based on my feelings about how we've treated other races. I suppose I have a great interest in the whole business of how populations evolve and I'm interested if evolution has built into it that one branch of a species has to try and compete and obliterate another one. It kinda seems that way, you know, . . . and the white man has made a better job of exterminating his rivals than almost anybody else. Anyway me and my friend Dirk Mags who is an ex-BBC genius, we just had this passion for quite a few years and I guess you can see the start of it when I wrote 'White Man' which was about what we'd done to the North American Indians. As soon as you start touring America and you start equating what you see with your eyes to what you've learnt in the history books you realise that you haven't been told the truth, so the film really sets out to tell some real truths. To me it's worth doing not just because 'let's feel sorry for the Indians' but because I feel that humanity lost a page in the book when that happened and maybe it was a crucial page that has lead us to a place where we are no longer in balance - I use the balance thing a lot and strangely enough the tribe which we've chosen to depict have this idea of balance as the centre of their beliefs."

     As the conversation drifts from the charity work and tonight's revelations, it is inevitable drawn towards the music. Re-assessing his former work he claims that Queen weren't the followers of the concept album that some music writers had thought.

     "Although a lot of our albums had a bit of a theme - Day At the Races, State of the World - they weren't quite concept albums in my mind. We'd always get together and say 'well, there's a crop of songs here' and then we'd use a selection process and then we could kind of mould them to make them cohere. The funny thing about Queen was that there was a strong cross fertilisation the whole time. We normally found that when we went into the studio we would argue the whole time about anything but underneath all that there was a common kind of feeling about as to where we should be at that particular time, and of course that had already determined what songs were in our heads individually and then things just start to form a pattern. It's like being given a jigsaw puzzle that at first doesn't fit at all but after playing around with it you realise that actually it's gonna kind of make sense. But we never set out to make concept albums like Pink Floyd would do.

     The same applies to A Night At the Opera. We didn't set out to write a history-changing song (Bohemian Rhapsody) but we did have one eye on the bigger picture because you work on a lot of levels - you want to write a good song and then you think a bit about everything else as well. But you see this funny thing had happened because we'd made three albums, the last of which was Sheer Heart Attack and we had a hit single and touring success but we were totally in debt because we had managers that were crooks, basically. That's only part of the story and perhaps it's an over simplification but anyway, when we went in to make A Night At the Opera we had nothing to lose. We couldn't get any more into debt, it wasn't possible so it became a sort of make or break thing. I'm pretty sure that if A Night At the Opera hadn't been the success it was then we'd have split up and gone our separate ways. Anyway, by then John Reed had taken the management burden off us and he just said 'right guys, don't worry about anything, just go in there and make the best album you've ever made' and with the joy of having that sort of yoke taken off us that we just went in and loved every minute of it. That applies to both those albums - A Day At The Races too. We just thought 'how far can we go'? We were big fans of the Beatles and they had taken advantage of the studio as it was in those days but all kinds of new toys had come in by the time we were in there so we though that we'd use every colour in the pallet and create something that had never been created before."

     But where does all this leave us? What has been Queen's lasting legacy? For May it's clear that he wants people to remember the songs and not the reputations or the stage shows. It started off being about the music, and in true rock'n'roll style Brian May wants it to end being all about the music. And when you meet Brian May on a mission, you figure that you better let him have the last word.

     "It's very interesting . . . we don't seem to have too many great rock stars around today. When we were around there was Freddie and Bowie . . . Steve Tyler is still a great front man but I guess he's one of the old guard as well. Maybe Robbie Williams is going to be that guy - he's the closest thing we have to a great rock star. I wasn't of that opinion in the early days - I thought he was a loser in the early days, I have to say that, but I saw some of his stuff over Christmas and he could entertain and he had a good voice, of that there is no doubt. He sometimes shows that great confidence that you need and some of that arrogance which goes with it which I don't mind . . . I think he should steer clear of trying to joust with the likes of Liam Gallagher because that just brings things down and it trivialises things for me . . . he should be above that level by now, he shouldn't even need to consider what someone like Liam Gallagher has to say. I suppose Freddie was an inspiration for him in a way . . . I met Robbie for the first time at the Brits and I just sort of looked at him in the face and said 'OK, you want the job then?'

     I don't think that's what we'll be remembered for though. I hope it won't anyway - not the showmanship but the music. I think a lot of our songs really reached people - 'Too Much Love Will Kill You' has probably had the widest affect on people because most people in the course of their lives come across a situation like that. I was quite shocked how many people do . . . it's not a generally recognised thing. That's it you see because although we've talked about charity and everything else I think that although it's great that you can do music concerts to fundraise and all the rest, music is really important just for itself. Music is utterly worthwhile for its own sake . . . and I know that Freddie would agree with me - the most important thing is the music. You know it's not enough to live. There shouldn't be poor people, there shouldn't be people suffering unnecessarily, there shouldn't be people being tortured but if you could give everyone a decent standard of life but there was no art, no music, no poetry - if those things weren't in the world then life would hardly be worth saving."