“In my head I was there with Freddie in those moments, even though this was happening long after he was gone”: How Brian May completed the last Queen song that Freddie Mercury wrote alone

In 1995, four years after the death of Queen singer Freddie Mercury, the band’s final studio album was released.

Made In Heaven was comprised of tracks recorded in the last months of Mercury’s life, and as guitarist Brian May said: “I think it’s quite possibly the best album we ever made as a Queen album.”

In an interview with MOJO magazine, May said of Made In Heaven: “There is so much of Freddie in that album, and it seemed a lot of the time like he was in the studio with us. Not in any kind of maudlin way, but in a joyful sense. It was like, ‘What do you think about that, Fred?’ 'Oh, okay.’ It seemed like he was there.

“It was incredible that he [Mercury] was able to leave us with so much great material to work with. I think it’s quite possibly the best album we ever made as a Queen album. I feel like it sums us up.”

Made In Heaven includes the last song that Mercury wrote alone, the Christmas-themed ballad A Winter’s Tale.

May said that when recording his guitar solo for A Winter’s Tale, he imagined that Mercury was with him.

“Freddie wrote the song in Montreux,” May recalled, “in a little house on the lake that we called The Duck House. The extraordinary thing is he’s talking about life and its beauty at a time when he knows he hasn’t got very long to go, yet there’s no wallowing in emotion, it’s just absolutely purely observed.

“So that’s the way I wanted my solo to be. It was one of those things where I could hear it in my head, long before I actually got to play it. And when I recorded it, at my home studio, in my head I was there with Freddie in Montreux in those moments, even though this was happening long after he was gone.”

May also revealed that he had experienced mixed emotions when listening to this song and others from Mercury’s final years.

“Sometimes you listen to those songs and you realise Freddie was in pain and that’s hard,” he said. “But those moments are all precious, the moments when the creativity flowed and we lost ourselves in the music, so I enjoy listening to them now. I’ve come full circle.”