Queen's Brian May Says That He Respects Eric Clapton But That Clapton's Vaccine Beliefs Are "In The Fruitcake Jar"
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News August 9, 2021 9:58 AM By Tom Breihan
Eric Clapton has made his views on COVID, and on all the attempts to fight it, very clear. Last year, Clapton joined Van Morrison on the anti-lockdown protest song "Do You Want To Be A Slave?" More recently, Clapton claimed that he'd had a "disastrous" response to the AstraZeneca vaccine and promised that he won't play any shows that require proof of vaccination to attend: "I will not perform on any stage where there is a discriminated audience present." Now, a fellow British guitar legend has respectfully called bullshit on all of that.
Queen's Brian May, who's an actual astrophysicist when he's not being a rock star, recently gave an interview to The Independent, blasting the British government's COVID response and telling the story of how he needed emergency surgery after suffering a heart attack last year. (It wasn't just torn butt muscles.) During that interview, May praises Clapton while, in the same breath, dismissing Clapton's anti-vaccine posturing:
I love Eric Clapton, he's my hero, but he has very different views from me in many ways. He's a person who thinks it's OK to shoot animals for fun, so we have our disagreements, but I would never stop respecting the man. Anti-vax people, I'm sorry, I think they're fruitcakes. There's plenty of evidence to show that vaccination helps. On the whole, they've been very safe. There's always going to be some side effect in any drug you take, but to go around saying vaccines are a plot to kill you, I'm sorry, that goes in the fruitcake jar for me.
You can read the full Brian May interview here. In other Brian May news, he's apparently considering a sequel to Bohemian Rhapsody, the massively successful 2018 Queen biopic. According to NME, May recently said on Instagram Live that the band members are "looking at ideas" for a sequel: "It's going to be hard to follow that one as none of us could have predicted how massive that was going to be." It's hard to imagine a movie about the Paul Rodgers and Adam Lambert eras of Queen, but I can't imagine what else May might be talking about there.