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Since the death of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury on November 24, 1991 at the age of 45 his bandmates have kept the legacy of the music alive. One way they did this was by staging a musical featuring the band's songs. We Will Rock You officially launched in the West End on 14 May 2002, following previews which had begun on 26 April, at the Dominion Theatre. To ensure that the show's band did justice to their music Queen employed their touring keyboard player and musical director Spike Edney to oversee proceedings.

The 74-year-old - widely known as the "fifth member" of the band - had played with the group since 1984 and despite not being a fan of musical theatre, got a call off Jim Beach - Queen's manager asking him to take the reins on the show's music. Speaking exclusively to Express.co.uk he admitted the show could have made him a multi-millionaire but he wasn't enamoured of the idea of it. "I didn't want to be involved in We Will Rock You. Jim Beach called me and he said the musical's going ahead, we want you to be in it. I said, What on earth for? It's eight shows a week playing the same thing."

For a musician who had paid his dues and done his "10,000 hours" having toured with his own band and working extensively as a freelance musician with acts such as Edwin Starr, this was unthinkable.

His worst fears were realised almost immediatrely. "I soon found out that there's very little room in a West End musical band for your own interpretation," he said.

"Imagine if you sit down at a desk and you're going to type a letter, and it's the same letter every day, and you know that at a quarter to 11, you'll be putting a full stop at the end of this sentence, and at 3.30 in the afternoon, you'll be putting a hyphen here, and at 5.30 it will be over. It is like that.

"That terrified me. That is not what I want to do," he candidly confessed. "So they said, 'Well, you've got to sign up for six weeks, and that's the standard amount.' And I was counting the days. And all I wanted to do while I was there was scream, 'this is not how they (the band) play it. They don't play it like this'," he laughed.

"At the end of the six weeks, I thought, thank f*** for that. I'm done. And they said, 'Right now you can train up people to cover for you and you can have time off'. So I recruited a dozen keyboard players, and for the next 14 years, I kept most of the freelance piano players in London employed, because I could only bear to do so much at any one time.

"So I got it down to the fact that I would do a Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, because that's really boring time anyway, and then I would do the matinee on a Wednesday. But then I would spend the rest of the days having a life and not being that guy who has to say to his wife at 5.30pm every night: 'Right, I'm off to work now, and I'll see you at midnight tonight. And that's how I stayed the course," he admitted.

He confessed: "If I'd have actually worked every show, I could have been a multi-millionaire by the end of the 14 years." The show ran from 12 years in it's inital West End run but had also been two years in development.

Four decades on from first playing with Queen, Spike is now getting set to share his story in a series of memoirs covering his entire life and career including his time working with the rock legends. It falls into three volumes, the early years, the Queen years and the SAS (Spike's All Stars) years. "I intend to get that out this year but what I am going to do is release some chapters on Substack - just to give people a taste of things to come," he said.

You can sign up to read chapters of Spike Edney's book via his website