Queen’s Brian May talked to BBC Radio about late singer Freddie Mercury.

The guitarist was asked how is he celebrating Freddie’s anniversary death every year, replying:

“Well, I don’t celebrate. I just quietly sit and think. I always feel strange on that day and people sort of want to make a fuss but I don’t feel like making a noise.

“I like to celebrate his birthday. It’s not like it’s the only time we think about Freddie, we think about him all the time, he’s a part of our lives and that could never change.

“In so many ways, you can’t get through a day without thinking about Freddie in some ways.”

Asked more about AIDS disease and Mercury’s reaction to that, May said:

“I remember us looking at newspaper articles in the studio talking about this strange disease which had been found in San Francisco, and seemed to be incurable, and seemed to be in gay men.

“And it seemed to be very distant.

“I remember we had a short discussion about it and thought it was something to watch out for. But we didn’t really talk about it much, Freddie certainly didn’t talk about it much.

“But was certainly in the back of my mind, and probably all of their minds for a long time.

“And if we jump forward, I guess, two and a half years or so, we started seeing Freddie suffering from something and we didn’t know what it was.

“We started to wonder and we didn’t have a conversation for a long time because it didn’t seem to be appropriate.

“And it was much later that Freddie came out and said, ‘Look, you know what I’m dealing with, I’m sure. This is what I want to do.’

“So I’ve compressed it a long time but probably we all thought always it’s not gonna affect us, this is something that affects other people. And it turns out that Freddie got it too early.

“If he got it a few months later, he would have survived because that wonderful cocktail of drugs was evolved, which basically dealt with the symptoms and enabled people with AIDS a normal life.

“Freddie didn’t have the benefit of that. He had the benefit of the greatest specialists in Britain and the world, but they didn’t have the knowledge at the time to save him.

“So, we’ll eternally be sad that’s the way things turned out.”