Brian May has spoken about the “emotional” experience of returning to film a music video in the location that featured on the cover of his 1998 album Another World.
The album, the Queen guitarist’s second solo effort, has been reissued as part of his Gold Series campaign, which also saw his debut solo album 1992’s Back To The Light, originally recorded and released during Queen’s final years with Freddie Mercury, reissued last year.
The 74-year-old has now also released Otro Lugar, a Spanish language version of the track Another World, which is also accompanied by a music video filmed earlier this year on location in Tenerife, La Palma and El Hierro, part of the Canary Islands.
The music video sees May visiting Tenerife’s Teide Observatory and also features a tree found in El Sabinar, in La Dehesa, which featured on the album cover of Another World when it was released more than two decades ago.
May told the PA news agency: “It was very emotional, that tree means a lot to me, it’s a kind of symbol to me apart from its natural beauty.
“It’s an icon, because to me it represents the way an organism, a plant or a tree or a person in difficult circumstances has to bend or else it will break. And this tree has adapted to its situation where the prevailing winds are always strong and always in the same direction, its bent over, it looks like a woman to me always with the hair streaming in the wind.
“And I just fell in love with the beauty of it. But it does mean a lot to me, in terms of its symbolism. And that is woven into the album…
“But going back, I just felt an emotional rush more than I was prepared for, and I wanted to rush up and hug it. But I didn’t do that because it now has a rope around it, which I’m really pleased about. Because this tree needs some respect.
“It’s been there for hundreds of years, and if everybody rushed off and started hugging it and trampling around it, it would suffer, so all that time ago, I did express the wish that people would respect it.
“And it seems that they do, I noticed that nobody went past the little ropes around (it), nobody went through. So I sat near the tree, but not actually touching it out of respect.”
The musician had previously visited the Teide Observatory while studying for his PhD and received his astrophysics doctorate in 2007.
He said of the Spanish version of the song: “I spent a lot of time in Spanish speaking areas, notably in Tenerife, where I did my work for my thesis… I love the language, I just love the musicality of it and I have some great friends who I’m still close to in the Canaries.
“So it’s always been a love of mine. Somehow the language speaks to me and I wanted this particular song to have that sound of the Spanish language. Because to me, those places where I worked above the clouds are another world. It’s something completely magical to me.”
May will also soon be on the move again as Queen + Adam Lambert resume the UK and European legs of their Rhapsody World Tour, which were postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
He said: “It’s amazing, its very exciting and a little daunting, I have to tell you, because not having done it for two years, we need to establish that we’re up to the job.
“I’ve been really heavily training, I’ve been physically training and playing a lot.
“And trying to get my mind back into that place where we were abruptly stopped in Australia when the whole thing broke, and we came back to lockdown in England, which was really dismal and hard for everyone…”
Brian May’s Another World reissue and the Otro Lugar music video are out now.
