Queen + Adam Lambert haven’t performed since their Rhapsody world tour wrapped up at Japan’s Tokyo Dome on Feb. 14, 2024. And in a new interview with The Times, guitarist Brian May revealed the band won’t ever return to the road.
“I made a decision 18 months ago that I didn’t want to tour again,” May said. “A close family friend died when we were in the States, so I said to my tour manager, ‘I’ll just nip home for a few days and come back.’ She looked me in the eyes and said, ‘You know you can’t do that.’ I love to play, I love to travel, but the trade-off is sacrificing your freedom. I have a wife [the actress Anita Dobson], grandchildren and a lot of astrophysics I want to do, so I’m thinking maybe 50 years is enough.”
He’s not, however, ruling out other ways to bring Queen’s music into large communal spaces. “We do want to do something fairly revolutionary,” May said. “Not as ABBA did, but along those lines… Last year I went to the Sphere, my juices started flowing and I sketched out a whole Queen show. I think an immersive experience is still on the cards and it could conquer time and space, but currently you can’t make it without AI and I have serious misgivings about that… Data centers are a massive evil and have to be fought.”
In September 2025, May told Rolling Stone that he was simply exhausted with life on the road, though he wasn’t quite ready at that time to forever rule it out, as he’s now done. “I’ve had 50 years of touring and there’s a part of me that thinks it’s enough,” he said. “I don’t like the idea that you wake up in your hotel room and you’re trapped. I had a few experiences recently where stuff happened at home with my family and I could not go home. It got under my skin and I just thought, ‘I’m not sure if I want this anymore.’ I feel like I’ve given up my freedom too many times. So my feeling at the moment is I don’t want to tour as such. I still want to play shows. I still want to innovate.”
In January of this year, May told the Daily Mail that he didn’t want to cross the Atlantic for shows because “America is a dangerous place at the moment.” “It’s very sad because I feel like Queen grew up in America and we love it, but it’s not what it was,” he said. “Everyone is thinking twice about going there at the moment.”
This doesn’t mean the members of Queen + Adam Lambert are going to remain inactive. Drummer Roger Taylor recently released his solo LP Violence Insane in a Beautiful World, and Lambert dropped his own album, Adam, in July. He also honored George Michael at the MTV Video Music Awards last month with a performance of “Freedom! ’90.”
There are also a series of archival Queen projects in the pipeline, starting with the new Queen concert film Queen Budapest. It was filmed on July 27, 1986, when Queen became the first major rock band to play a show behind the Iron Curtain.
Of course, it’s also quite possible that May will have a change of heart. If so, he’ll be far from the last rock star to launch a tour after claiming to be done.
