This week, German and French television premiered Queen: We Are the Champions, which tells the story of the greatest sports anthem of all time. The documentary was directed by longtime Queen associate Hannes Rossacher and features new interviews with Brian May, Roger Taylor… and me! While the film has not aired in the U.S. yet, if you are overseas you can see me talk about the resonance of Queen’s anthems and how Adam Lambert has ascended to Freddie Mercury’s throne.

The two-hour show also features interviews with Brian May, Roger Taylor, Adam Lambert and his family, Simon Cowell, Rami Malek, and the Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins. Airing April 29 on ABC at 8 p.m.!

Queen + Adam Lambert kick off their limited-run Las Vegas residency at the Park Theater this Saturday, Sept. 1. It’s an event that has been a long time coming. Truly, from the moment Lambert first entered America’s living rooms and the American Idol audition room nine (yes, NINE) years ago and belted out “Bohemian Rhapsody,” he seemed fit for a Queen and destined to one day front the legendary glam-rock group.

Lambert may have lost the Season 8 Idol title to Kris Allen, but he was undoubtedly the winner of that season’s splashy finale, when he and Allen joined Queen’s Brian May and Roger Taylor for a spectacular performance of the fittingly titled “We Are the Champions.” While Allen held his own that evening, it was clear from the look on May’s face that he was especially amazed by the rock chops of “a wonderful singer called Adam Lambert.”

“It was a nice time, because both of those boys were great, but there was something about Adam,” May tells Yahoo Entertainment while promoting his retrospective photo book, Queen in 3-D, which has an entire chapter, “Madame Lambert,” devoted to Adam. “This chemistry was instant, and it was like we were already kind of in a band with him. It’s quite strange. [He didn't join Queen] for a little while afterwards, because [he] couldn’t. He was under contract to the American Idol people. But when we had the opportunity to work with him, we did three songs in Ireland for an awards show [the 2011 MTV Europe Awards]. We did ‘The Show Must Go On,’ ‘We Are the Champions,’ and ‘We Will Rock You,’ and everybody, including us, went, ‘Oh, this works. It just has it. It just has the right ingredients.’”

Many European MTV viewers were unfamiliar with the Idol alum but were understandably wowed and eager to see more. Suddenly, there was demand for a new Queen world tour, and “Queenbert,” as they were jokingly nicknamed by fans, made their full concert debut at Kiev’s 140,000-capacity Independence Square at a joint show with Elton John for the Elena Pinchuk ANTIAIDS Foundation. Fans excitedly uploaded all two hours of the televised event to YouTube, and as more gigs followed in Russia, Eastern Europe, and England (where the supergroup played a sold-out, three-night stint at London’s Hammersmith Apollo), American fans started to wonder when they’d finally get to witness this remarkable show too.

In the Queen in 3-D book, May jokingly writes that late Queen legend Freddie Mercury would almost be downright jealous of his successor’s vocal prowess. “Freddie would love and hate him, yeah; I mean, you know, he’d be like, ‘You bastard!’” May quips. “Because, I mean, Adam has a real gift from God. That voice is a voice in a billion, and nobody has that range, nobody that I’ve ever worked with. And not just the range but the quality throughout the range and the passion to use that instrument. And I’ve seen Adam develop, just like I watched Freddie develop. … He was great to start with, but now, we’re doing something like ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’ onstage, and sometimes I almost stop playing because I think, ‘What did he just do?’ He’s so free with his interpretations, and it’s spine-chilling, just the sound he makes and the way he interprets a song.”

While May stresses that Lambert “in no sense imitates Freddie” — a point that Lambert, a huge Queen fan himself, makes humbly every night onstage — May explains that Lambert “provides that piece of the jigsaw puzzle, which is, I mean, stupendous. We would never be doing this now if it weren’t for Adam.’

“It’s an incredible life. I feel so grateful that [Queen] had it. And we still have it.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Entertainment.

Sitting with Yahoo poring over his glossy new coffee table book, Queen in 3-D, guitar god and stereoscopic photography enthusiast Brian May pauses on page 52, gazing at a candid shot of late Queen singer Freddie Mercury with his long-term girlfriend Mary Austin, for whom Mercury wrote several songs, including “Love of My Life.” Some people might be surprised to learn that Mercury considered Austin his soulmate, but even after he came out to her in 1976 and they ended their romantic relationship, the two remained extremely close. When the singer — who would have turned 71 this week — tragically passed away in 1991 from bronchial pneumonia resulting from AIDS, he even left Austin his house and the bulk of his fortune. He had reportedly told her, “You would have been my wife, and it would have been yours anyway.”

Now May reveals to Yahoo that Mercury and Austin’s unusual but beautiful love story will be a prominent storyline in the eight-years-in-the-making Freddie biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, which will be directed by Bryan Singer and is expected to come out in December 2018. The actress Lucy Boynton (Gypsy) has just been cast in the role of Austin. And it looks like the film might even feature a bit of a love triangle.

“Strangely enough, Mary was the girl that I picked out as somebody fabulous, and I was kind of going out with her,” May reminisces with a chuckle. “And Freddie came up to me one day and said, ‘Are you serious with Mary? Can I ask her out?’ And he did, and they were lovers for a long time.” May then adds more seriously, “And she really was still Freddie’s closest person right to the end of his life, I would say, even though he made that transition — which was very painful, obviously, for him and for her — into a different world. But she was an enormous part of Freddie’s life, and he always wanted her approval, and he wanted to protect her.

“That’s something which we’ve had very much in mind [with this movie]. What was Freddie’s journey? What did it mean?” May continues. “That’s why we took so long to approve a script, because it has to tell the truth, and it has to be real. It also has to be entertaining, because the last thing that Freddie would want is to have something dull out there, you know? But it has to tell the story as it was. And it’s a unique story, because Freddie was close to Mary. He was close to his men friends. He was also very close to us. We were such a tightly knit family, so in a sense, we were Freddie’s closest family — because Queen lasted longer than any of our marriages! I’m sorry, that’s just a fact!”

The first “family member,” so to speak, to officially join the Bohemian Rhapsody cast was Mr. Robot’s Rami Malek; it was announced back in July that he will play the iconic Freddie. (Sacha Baron Cohen was originally supposed to star in the film but he dropped out, reportedly over disagreements with Queen about the film’s direction.) “You’ll just see this guy, and you will believe he’s Freddie, I’m sure. He already has the body language, and he has the kind of persona of Freddie,” May gushes. As for Gwilym Lee, the actor who will portray May, the guitarist says, “I met him [recently], and he’s great. Yeah, I loved his presence. He has a great depth to him, a very thoughtful nature. He’s a serious actor.”

Rami Malek Looks Exactly Like Freddie Mercury In Queen Biopic https://t.co/orsZVD7UQs pic.twitter.com/uUBWGQi5xO

— Sixx Sense (@SixxSense) September 5, 2017

While May is solemn when discussing Mercury’s life and death, the self-described “passionate stereoscopic geek” brightens when talking about his love of stereoscopy — which began for him at age 11 in the 1950s, after he sent away for a stereoscopic photo of a hippopotamus advertised on a box of Weetabix breakfast cereal. Now the founder of the London Stereoscopic Company, May enthusiastically demonstrates how to use a stereoscope viewer — known as an owl — using a special-edition version in a custom shade of yellow that matches Mercury’s famous 1986 Wembley Stadium jacket.

“I used to dream of sharing this experience with the world,” he says, viewing rare Queen in 3-D photos that begin with the band’s heyday and go all the way through to what May cheekily dubs the modern “Madam Lambert” era with new frontman Adam Lambert.

“You’re looking through a window into the past, and it’s very evocative. I was very conscious making this book, sort of rediscovering all of the things that we’ve been through in our lives. It’s an incredible life. I feel so grateful that we had it, and we still have it.”

Now let’s hope Bohemian Rhapsody is one day released in 3-D. Along with Malek and Lee, Joseph Mazzello has just been cast as Queen bassist John Deacon, and Ben Hardy will play drummer Roger Taylor.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Sitting with Yahoo and poring over his glossy new coffee table book, Queen in 3-D, guitar god and stereoscopic photography enthusiast Brian May pauses on page 88, gazing at a candid shot of late Queen singer Freddie Mercury — one of his favorite Freddie photos ever, though he only recently uncovered it while working on the book and un-archiving hundreds of pictures he snapped over the decades.

“In stereo, it’s so intimate. It’s so close that it’s like he’s alive,” May muses. “It’s like you could touch him and speak to him.”

Mercury, of course, tragically passed away in 1991 at age 45 from bronchial pneumonia resulting from AIDS; he would have celebrated his 71st birthday this month. The press hounded the iconic frontman until the very end; Mercury never officially came out during his lifetime, and he only publicly revealed his illness the day before his death. In Queen in 3-D, May writes candidly about Mercury’s struggles with the media, comparing his experience to the very different experience of current Queen frontman Adam Lambert, who is able to live in the spotlight as an openly gay man in a way that Mercury sadly never could.

“The whole ethos of our band really was that it didn’t matter,” May tells Yahoo. “That’s kind of inherent in the name Queen, even, which is why I was attracted to it. The whole thing that embodied the spirit of Queen was it doesn’t matter what your sexual proclivity is, any more than it matters what race you are, what color you are. Queen was meant to be something very across the board and international … and we kind of fulfilled that dream. And it was so normal for us that it wasn’t even worth discussing.

“So it was never discussed. Really, we didn’t. And Freddie went through a big transition, because in the beginning, I used to share rooms with him. So I know what Freddie did when we first got started, and it was nothing to do with men! But he gradually metamorphosed into the person that he was comfortable with, and became sort of the gay man. But it wasn’t public, and it wasn’t until he was virtually about to die that he was able to announce it very clearly, because we wanted to establish this charity to fight AIDS [the Mercury Phoenix Trust]. …. But it’s because he was able to announce this just before he died, rather than die in some kind of mystery. So it was a brave thing for Freddie to do at that time.”

On page 175 of Queen in 3-D, May frankly addresses the current political climate, expressing concern that society will enter another conservative, closeted era like the one Mercury had to endure. “I think we all fear it,” he tells Yahoo. “I mean, the way this country [America] and Britain is going is — in my opinion — backwards in regards to acceptance of the differences between us. … I see things going in the wrong direction. I see [Britain] leaving Europe, so we’re leaving behind all these wonderful accords that we had. You know, the international spirit we’re trashing. And I see this country doing what it’s doing, which is making LGBT a hard case to be. … And I think it’s sad. Maybe things have to get worse before they get better; I don’t know. But it doesn’t look too good at the moment, and I think it’s impoverishing all of us — the fact that we’re not heading in the direction of compassion and acceptance of each other’s differences.”

While May gets serious when discussing politics or Mercury’s death, the self-described “passionate stereoscopic geek” brightens when discussing his love of stereoscopy — which began for him at age 11 in the 1950s, after he sent away for a stereoscopic photo of a hippopotamus advertised on a box of Weetabix breakfast cereal. Now the founder of the London Stereoscopic Company, May excitedly demonstrates how to use a stereoscope viewer — known as an owl — using a special-edition version in a custom shade of yellow that perfectly matches Mercury’s famous 1986 Wembley Stadium jacket.

“I used to dream of sharing this experience with the world,” he says, viewing rare Queen in 3-D photos that begin with the band’s early days (another snapshot highlight, on page 56: that time when Mercury shaved his chest for a photo shoot and later regretted it) and go all the way through to what May cheekily dubs the modern “Madam Lambert” era with the aforementioned Adam, whose voice May calls “one in a billion” and a “gift from God.”

“You’re looking through a window into the past, and it’s very evocative. I was very conscious making this book, sort of rediscovering all of the things that we’ve been through in our lives,” says May. “It’s an incredible life. I feel so grateful that we had it, and we still have it.”

As for the press’s harsh treatment of Queen and Mercury back in the ’70s and ’80s, May says, “Freddie was just lacerated by the media, and it’s so funny to hear people now talking about Freddie like he’s some kind of god. Well, you know, he deserves that, but the contrast between the way he was treated before and what happens now — it makes me smile. And Freddie would really smile. I hope he’s up there smiling somewhere.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.