- Music
- 30 Aug 11
The legendary guitarist joined the emo standard-bearers at Reading
As musical hook-ups go, last weekend saw a particularly high-profile one. Gerard Way and co have never played down the depth they owe to the music of Queen, so it must have been particularly thrilling for them to see Brian May join their Black Parade on stage. The hook-up went down at Reading, as the frizzy haired axeman arrived for a rendition of 'We Will Rock You', before adding his distinctive guitar sound to the song 'Welcome To The Black Parade' to the delight of the festival crowd. Gerard Way has been talking about how it all came together:
"I wrote an email to Brian after getting his email off [producer] Rob Cavallo. There was this story that you [Queen] played a show in Paris and got booed off and Freddie [Mercury] said, 'We’re gonna come back and be the biggest band in the world'. And after what happened to us at Reading in 2006 [when they were bottled], people would ask us, 'Are you gonna do that again? [play the festival]' and I’d go, 'Not unless we're headlining it.'
"So I told him this whole story and how we were gonna go back and could he give me some advice. So we just got talking and I went to his house – I got off a plane, went to his house, went to his jam room, jammed out, did a soundcheck. I had a feeling that morning, it flipped in my brain, not, ‘Are we ready for this’, I almost felt like ‘Is the crowd ready for us?’"