Sir Brian May is “very taken” with the idea of a Queen hologram show.
The 78-year-old guitarist currently performs in the band with original drummer Roger Taylor and singer Adam Lambert, but he admitted the thought of getting the full band – including late frontman Freddie Mercury and bassist John Deacon, who retired in 1997 – together again in some form “really appeals” to him.
He told Big Issue: “Freddie is still alive through the music that we listen to all the time. In a sense, John is still with us in the same way, but now we have so many other opportunities.
“I mean things that are immersive, like The Sphere in Las Vegas, it will be possible to give people the experience very closely of what things were like for us when we were Freddie, John, Brian and Roger. And that really appeals to me.
“In our Queen shows for a very long time I’ve been doing ‘Love of My Life’. And in the end, Freddie comes in and joins me as on video. It was just quite simply done, but it’s a way of involving Freddie, and I think we can basically take that a lot further.”
Of a possible hologram-type show, he added: “It wouldn’t be just playing old footage or whatever. it would be creating Queen as if we were creating it today. I’m very taken with the idea that we can be the original Queen again.”
However, Roger didn’t seem quite as taken with the idea, noting that he “had a good time” and “enjoyed” the ABBA Voyage show – which features hologram versions of the Swedish group – he wasn’t convinced by it, though he believes technology has improved even further since it debuted in 2022.
He said: “I didn’t find the actual projections that convincing. I do think technology now has come so much further since the ABBA show started, I think a lot more can be done.”
Brian began thinking about the band’s legacy while looking back over the group’s past work.
He said: “It’s just one of the ideas in my head, and I suppose it is fuelled by working on the reissues, as we’ve completely reconstructed Queen I, and we’ve been working on Queen II.
“It’s just about ready to be re-released, and it’s great to re-experience that joy of creation that we had in those days. It’s immensely complex. Queen II is more complex than Bohemian Rhapsody.”
The We Will Rock You guitarist previously insisted he didn’t want a hologram version of Queen until all original members of the band were “gone”.
Appearing on The Graham Norton Radio Show podcast, Brian said: “We’ve talked about and looked at holograms of Freddie.
“We love to be live and dangerous, that’s it, that’s our emphasis.
“Now, when we’re all gone, yeah sure, make an ABBA thing about us, but while we’re here I want to play live.”