Brian May has hinted again that Queen are looking at the possibility of going down the Abba-route and developing a hologram show, possibly at The Sphere.
The guitarist was speaking to The Big Issue when conversation turned to the idea of reuniting ‘virtually’ with his bandmates Freddie Mercury and John Deacon, who is still very much with us but who retired from public life in the late 1990s. “Freddie is still alive through the music that we listen to all the time,” said May. “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.”
May continued to muse on this possibility, saying: “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.”
Talking about a potential hologram show, he said: “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.”
Any such show would face a number of hurdles. Firstly – the very real problem of Freddie Mercury not being alive. The Abba Voyage show is, of course, a product of the actual real members of Abba going through the rigmarole of having their stage movements captured by the motion technology and pre-recording all their vocal parts and stage announcements.
Queen’s frontman is sadly not around to do this, so like it or lump it May and Taylor would be left with a choice of employing a Freddie-wannabe (or Adam Lambert). Or using old footage.
Then there is the issue of John Deacon. Would the reclusive bassist want to go through the hassle of the motion capture process? Would he even accede to the hologram idea in the first place?
The likeness of Mercury for virtual reality and 3D has already been registered by Mercury Songs, the organisation that owns his solo songs. However, in the past May has seemed reluctant. In a podcast for Graham Norton’s Radio Show back in 2023, the guitarist said: “We’ve talked about and looked at holograms of Freddie, (but) 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.”
