Content Warning: This article discusses suicide ideation. If you need help in a crisis, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. For further information about depression contact beyondblue on 1300224636 or talk to your GP, local health professional or someone you trust.
Brian May has spoken out about how the death of Queen singer Freddie Mercury had him contemplating suicide.
In a raw interview with The Guardian ahead of the reissue of his debut solo album, May opened up about his dark period following his friend’s death.
“I felt like life was over. I was very close to driving off the bridge several times. Very close. It was Hammersmith Bridge,” the guitarist told the publication.
May explained: “I lost my dad to cancer around the same time. And my marriage broke up, because I fell in love with another woman (his now wife Anita Dobson). The marriage was probably breaking up anyway, but that was the final catalyst and the breakup was very painful and grisly.
“I felt like I was losing my kids as well; I felt like I was losing everything. I was just trying to grapple my way around in the darkness, and music was the only thing I could cling to; it was a kind of therapy.”
“On the Back to the Light album you hear me in a very raw state,” he continued.
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“At the beginning of it we were starting to lose Freddie; in the middle of it we lost him; by the end I was getting accustomed to it. So what you hear is a desperate grasping at a straw that will lead me back to the light.”
Mercury died in 1991 at age of just 45 due to complications from AIDS.
“We were completely blown out of the water. We just sat there in disbelief. And we didn’t get over it for a very long time.
“I’m not even sure we’re over it now but there was a two-year period where we were grieving and behaving irrationally, almost denying the existence of Queen.
“I couldn’t bear the thought of being kept in that place,” he added. “But you do get over it to a point. And now I realise that Queen is in me and I am in Queen, and that can’t change.
“And we got to the point where it now seems like Freddie is with us. It doesn’t seem like he left anymore because he’s in everything we do. I can never have a single day without thinking about Freddie.”
Recently, the rocker has also dealt with a slew of health issues, including suffering a heart attack and being forced to evacuate his country home due to a wildfire in Surrey, England. As an added gut-punch, May’s London home was flooded earlier this year due to wild storms.
“It’s made us feel violated,” he said of the experience. “It’s what it does to your soul to lose your possessions, to see them swimming about in it. I had to tear up all my old photograph albums, the very first ones I ever had when I was eight years old, to try to save the photographs.”
He added that he’s now hoping to get out of the busy city.
“It’s brutal, it’s noisy, it’s polluted. Nobody has any consideration. So we’re feeling like we want to get out. That is very wounding: I love London, I grew up here. But I don’t think I can deal with it any more.”
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Check out ‘Driven By You’ by Brian May:
