“If Brian and I feel we have some good material, why not?” Roger Taylor teases new Queen material
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Could Queen make one more album, more than three decades after Freddie Mercury’s death appeared to have ended the band?
That’s the tantalising prospect that was teased by Roger Taylor in a fan-led interview in this month’s edition of Uncut magazine. It was in answer to one questioner who asked if they’ll ever hear new Queen music again.
Taylor responded with: “Well, I think you might! Brian and myself were talking the other day, and we both said that if we feel we have some good material, why not? We can still play. We can still sing. So I don't see why not."
The two remaining members of the band – bassist John Deacon retired from public life in the late '90s – have spent the decades since tending the legacy and keeping the Queen name in the public eye via the media of jukebox musicals (We Will Rock You), biopics (Bohemian Rhapsody) and regular touring.
The latter has been undertaken with substitute lead singers stepping into Mercury’s shoes. Between 2004 and 2009 this was ex-Free vocalist Paul Rodgers and this collaboration brought about a new album, 2008’s The Cosmos Rocks.
But the album was a critical and commercial flop and in a 2015 interview with Classic Rock, even Taylor seemed to admit that the collab hadn’t hit the mark: "I just think that Paul's more blues and soul – one of our favourite singers, ever, but, when it boils down to it, he wasn't the perfect frontman for us.”
Since then Taylor and May have undertaken several lengthy tours with American vocalist Adam Lambert, but as yet there has been no new material. Unless you count the slightly re-written, erm, You Are The Champions, which was released as a one off single in aid of the Covid Solidarity Response Fund in 2020, and we don’t.
Elsewhere in the interview the drummer debunks the urban myth that one particularly riotous back-in-the-day Queen party featured dwarves with bowls of cocaine on their heads.
"It's rather funny,” he admitted. “But it is a myth - I didn't see any, anyway. But there was a man who moved under meat. He lay on a table covered in cold cuts, and when somebody approached the table, he would wobble, and all the meat would move and freak people out."
He added, "I think that's much stranger than a dwarf with cocaine on his head."