http://brianmay.com/brian/brianssb/brianssb.html
THE SUNDAY TIMES - A RUBBISH ARTICLE,
AND AN ABSOLUTE BETRAYAL OF TRUST
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Well, here's a message for you, Krissi Morison and your scummy pals. I hope you think it was worth it. Because neither I nor any intelligent reader of this travesty will ever give you the time of day from here on in.
Look at this garbage !! We gave the Sunday Times a worldwide exclusive to serialise my "Queen in 3-D" book. This is what they came up with. "Freddie and Me" is NOT what the book is about. And the photograph used for this cover is nothing to do with the book and is so crudely cut out and stuck on that garish yellow background, you just have to wonder how these people sleep at night, churning out this cheap rubbish.
We gave the ST exclusive use of ALL the photographs in the book. They used just two of them, one of them reproduced not much bigger than a postage stamp; the rest of the piece illustrated with recycled ordinary snaps from God knows where. The opening of the piece inside says "Tragedy, debauchery ... and dwarves ... " !! NONE of this tired old stuff features in the book, or was discussed in the interview. This woman came into my house, pretended she was a fan and was going to write a nice piece about the book, as agreed; then went away and wrote this pathetic sensationalistic drivel. I'm angry and disgusted. It's been a long time since I've seen such crass journalism and experienced such a betrayal of trust. Folks - please ignore this trash - the book is NOTHING like this.
Over the last few weeks we have meticulously kept to the agreement we had with this newspaper. It’s been a pain in the neck, but we felt honour-bound. We denied EVERYBODY else any access to the pictures or the text of the book. We even sat with a huge pile of books under the table for the first 4 days at the Photo London fair - when the whole audience of our talk would have liked to buy them … purely to honour our agreement to embargo everything until the 'serialisation' in the Times supplement came out. I specially gave them publicity too, in radio interviews, and at our talk to Photo London last week. And this is how they honoured their side of the bargain.
I think the worst part of it all to me is that people will see this article and think that this came from me. They’ll think that this is the way I see things, and that this is what the book is about. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. I can hardly believe that they had exclusive access to all the wonderful pictures in the book, which were today causing people to gasp as they saw them, but they chose to use random flat pictures from elsewhere to illustrate the article. And no acknowledgement whatsoever that this is, uniquely, a stereoscopic book.
Queen frontman Freddie Mercury had lost almost all of his foot to complications from AIDS by the time he died, a former bandmate has revealed.
Sources: New York Post - Read full article at https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/brian-may-exclusive-interview-queen-debauchery-and-freddie-mercury-7ggdmdsrg
Tragedy, debauchery … and dwarves — the guitarist Brian May gives Krissi Murison an access-all-areas account of his life with Freddie Mercury and rock’s most flamboyant band
Guitarist Brian May said Mercury – who was 45 when he died in 1991 — didn’t want to let on to anybody how much he was suffering.
“The problem was actually his foot — and, tragically there was very little left of it,” May told The Sunday Times Magazine.
“Once, he showed it to us at dinner. And he said: ‘Oh Brian, I’m sorry I’ve upset you by showing you that’. And I said, ‘I’m not upset, Freddie, except to realize that you have to put up with so much terrible pain.’ ”
May, 69, said he regrets that Mercury couldn’t live long enough to benefit from the “magic cocktail” of antiretroviral drugs that would come just months later and stop AIDS from becoming the life sentence it once was.
“He missed by just a few months,” May said regretfully. “If it had been a bit later, he would still have been with us, I’m sure.”
The singer was bi-sexual and only revealed his illness to his fans in a statement 24 hours before he died.The visitors to Freddie’s dressing room started to change from hot chicks to hot men. It didn’t matter to us — why should it? “In the beginning, the band lived on a shoestring. We couldn’t afford individual hotel rooms, so I would share a room with Freddie"
Discussing the disease publicly was not something Mercury wanted to do, May said.
“Of course, we all knew [he had AIDS], but we didn’t want to [acknowledge it]. He said: ‘You probably gather that I’m dealing with this thing, and I don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t want our lives to change, but that’s the situation.’ And then he would move on,
”And years later, he said, ‘I suppose you realise that I’m dealing with this illness.’ Of course, we all knew [he had Aids], but we didn’t want to. He said, ‘You probably gather that I’m dealing with this thing and I don’t want to talk about it and I don’t want our lives to change, but that’s the situation.’ And then he would move on.”
A blonde woman gazes at Freddie from the seat next to him.
“That’s Mary, his long-term girlfriend.” Despite Mercury’s sexuality, Mary Austin was his longest relationship and the woman he called “the love of my life”. “They were still very close right to the end,” May nods. “He took care of Mary in his will.”
"Fat Bottomed Girls — I was proud of that song. The nude photoshoot was fun at the time, but I wouldn’t find it amusing now. Attitudes change"
