Queen-inspired musical

“We played Denmark and we were playing arenas over there,” says the former Hear’say singer turned musical theatre specialist.

“And when you’ve got a finale like that and you are in a stadium, you really feel like you are a rock star!”

Now it’s Southampton’s turn to feel the music, with the Queen-inspired musical We Will Rock You pitching up at the Mayflower for a six-week stint until May 28.

If you’ve not seen it before, be prepared, Noel warns: “It’s loud! First and foremost, it’s loud, but it is a fantastic show.

“The synopsis is that it is set 300 years in the future when all live music has been banned. My character Galileo is a young dreamer guy. He has these visions and dreams of making melodies from the past.

“It’s a strange conceit, but you have got the incredible music of Queen to tie it all together, and to sing all those songs is just the stuff of dreams for me. The music of Queen is part of our British cultural heritage. It conjures all the magic of Live Aid, the magic of all those great videos that they did.

“And the music is beautifully suited to the theatre. When I saw it in London, the script for me didn’t work as well because it was playing to such a huge tourist-based audience. Once you go out in the provinces, then you can see that the comedy is really hitting home much more.”

The Ben Elton comedy.

“There is definitely a rhythm to the comedy. It’s got that British crudeness that we enjoy. It’s like The Young Ones humour.”

A great next step for Noel: “It’s all musical theatre for me now, therefore to be playing something like Galileo is just amazing for me, just because of the scale of the role. There is not a lot of musical theatre that vocally bigger than this.

“The biggest challenge is to execute the music because it is so well-known. You are not Freddie Mercury and nobody could be Freddie Mercury. You have just got to go out there and perform, and the great thing is that they are letting me do that. What I like about this is that they are not trying to make me into something that I am not.”

Tickets on www.mayflower.org.uk or 02380 711811.