Queen explore ABBA Voyage-style show: ‘I’m taken with the idea we can be the original Queen again’

Queen look set to be reimagined as AI hologram avatars for their own ABBA Voyage-style show, according to band members Brian May and Roger Taylor.

Rumours circled last year that Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, who died in 1991, was set to become an AI hologram after the company who manages his back catalogue filed a trademark for his name in 3D and VR. At the time, Queen’s representatives responded to requests for comment that there was “nothing to say”.

May and Taylor are currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of the band’s global chart-topper “Bohemian Rhapsody” but have given their biggest hint yet that an ABBA Voyage-style Queen experience could come to life soon.

Read more:

• As ABBA Voyage sails on – who’s still bringing in the money, money, money
• Roger Taylor on Elvis, Freddie Mercury’s belief in Queen and his weekend with Bowie
• Why are we so obsessed with surrounding ourselves with music?

“Freddie [Mercury] is still alive through the music that we listen to all the time,” Brian May says in this week’s Big Issue magazine – the first of four bumper Christmas specials – out now.

“In a sense, John [Deacon, bassist, who retired from music in 1997] 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.

“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.”

Taylor reveals he left a trip to an ABBA Voyage show with mixed feelings. “I had a good time. I enjoyed it,” he says. “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.”

May also revealed that it’s tinkering with past work that has led to his vision of the future for the band.

“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,” he said. “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’.” 

Read the full interview with Brian May and Roger Taylor in this week’s Big Issue, on sale from vendors now. If you can’t reach your local vendor, support them by purchasing a Vendor Support Kit, which equips them to sell in the cold and wet weather.

Brian May and Talia Dean’s Christmas single Praise Your Name is out now

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