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Brian May produces Badger Badger Badger protest song

By | Published on Wednesday 24 April 2013

Brian May

I’m going to guess that if I asked you to name the first internet viral video you can remember, it would be Weebl aka Jonti Pickings’ ‘Badger Badger Badger’, an infinitely looping Flash video featuring dancing badgers, mushrooms and a scary snake, all set to an infuriatingly catchy (and just infuriating) tune.

So catchy was it that a decade later, you may, like me, get that tune stuck in your head whenever you read anything about badgers. It certainly played in my mind the whole time I was writing this article about Brian May’s campaign to reverse a government decision to launch a cull of the animals in Gloucester and Somerset last year.

Now (AT LAST) the two are together in what is either genuine empathy with May’s fight to halt the badger cull or the ultimate act of trolling. Either way, the Queen guitarist is now producing a new version of the track, beefed up from its original form with some off cuts from Queen’s ‘Flash’. May revealed the news at a meeting of the Team Badger Coalition on Saturday in Taunton, Somerset and played a work-in-progress version of the work.

Speaking in front of the 200 assembled badger fans, May said: “I invited [Picking] to my studio because he sent me an email saying that he’d like to help with the badger problem – this is the guy who made this ‘badger badger badger’ thing. So what we’ve come up with… well actually it’s him, I produced it, but it’s mainly his idea and it’s not quite finished because we’re gonna get Brian Blessed on it”.

And so, you can hear the Blessed-less version of the new track here:



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