Brian May, axeman for Queen, has responded to comments that he sounded a bit ill-tempered on “American Idol” when dealing with contestant Ace Young’s requests to adapt the arrangement to “We Will Rock You” for his performance of the song.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” May assured his fans, in a blog entry on his official website.
Shockingly, a reality show took events and…GASP!…edited them to make them more dramatic than they actually were in their original context.
Here’s May’s tale of how things really went down:
“We had an interaction with Ace, a conversation in which we gave him the best advice we possibly could, based on studying the demo’s which we already had in our iTunes – which I’d personally given a lot of time to study. This conversation, in my book, ought to have been private, but that is not the style of the show, sadly. But the even more unfortunate thing is that you are then in the hands of the video editors, who seem to seize with glee anything that looks negative. It was edited in such a way that it looked as if I was purely negative – they very naughtily inserted a bit that I said about “not on my own song” so it appeared that I said it AFTER we had played together, which was not the way it happened …making me look like I was against the whole thing. But this was not the case. Having said that I wouldn’t be able to play the arrangement exactly like his demo, and that I didn’t think it would work without the stomps and claps which are foundation of the song, we then discussed how we could improve his ideas and with a mixture of a quick conference and spontaneous creation we came up with a kind of mixture of his thoughts and ours – WHICH WAS THE BASIS FOR THE ARRANGEMENT THAT YOU SAW THE HOUSE BAND PLAY ON THE NIGHT ! It was actually pretty damn good, I thought, for a quick attempt … and he sang it very well live. If you talk to ACE he will confirm that we parted on the very best terms, and he thanked me for the input. I made it very clear that I respected him for taking chances and trying to make the song his own. The version you saw on TV used a straight sample beat with stomps and claps which set up the song in the first verse in the classic way, and then a working in of an underpinning riff (close to what I had done in our rehearsal period together, in response to Ace’s idea) and then back to a straighter 3rd verse, but ending in his delayed phrase end stop, again, just as we did it together …. and I thought it was damn good.”
So there!
