Queen may have just reissued their 1974 album Queen II, but Brian May has revealed that the band are involved in a legal tussle with the relatives of the man who created its iconic cover shot: Mick Rock.

Rock, one of the greatest photographers of his time, created a series of unforgettable images for the rock stars of the day, including Syd Barrett, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. One of those was the Queen II cover; this features the four band members looking up at the camera, with Freddie at the front, arms crossed. The shot was later recreated in the Bohemian Rhapsody video and ten years later for the promo for One Vision.

However, The Sun reports that May has let on that Rock’s relatives are suing the band. Their contention is that the late photographer – he died in 2021 – wasn’t properly recompensed for his work with Queen.

“His family is suing us at the moment for vast amounts of money,” the guitarist said.

“Mick was a lovely guy, very ambitious, quite money oriented. We paid him very, very well for what he did for us. His dependents became incredibly greedy and decided that everything was his idea, and we owed him millions and millions, not just in the UK, but all around the world.

“So they’re suing us all around. So it’s a little hard for me to be objective about the thing. I’m sorry he’s not around because I know if he was around, we’d go, ‘Oh, come on, we’ll settle this’. We’d shake hands and it would be done tomorrow.”

In another interview promoting the Queen II reissue, May also said that another big Queen tour is out of the question at the moment. Talking to the Daily Express, the guitarist said: “(I) have loved touring over the years, and I'm very grateful for it. It's been a fantastic thread to our lives. But at the moment, although I love playing live, I don't feel that I want to be away for months on end at this point in my life, it may change. I'm not saying I'm retiring. I'm just saying right now, I don't feel like I want to.”

However, Roger Taylor sounds still up for it. Talking to the same outlet, Taylor said: “I don’t feel similarly. I always love touring and was always happy to do it. I love my grandchildren, but I don’t want to give up my life in order to be with them. I’m very lucky. I have a lovely house, but I don’t want to be in it all the time. I’m still in the world and like to get about. So I would certainly not be averse to playing again.”

Brian May has signalled that Queen will probably not tour the US again, because it’s too dangerous.

The band and Adam Lambert last played there in 2023, but talking to the Daily Mail, the 78-year-old guitarist said if he and Roger Taylor do play live again, they will skip the US.

“America is a dangerous place at the moment, so you have to take that into account,” May explained. “It's very sad because I feel like Queen grew up in America and we love it, but it's not what it was. Everyone is thinking twice about going there at the moment.”

May didn’t go into any more details. Perhaps with the recent killings in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal ICE agents in the news and anti-ICE protests across the US, he doesn’t need to.

May also recently explained why he will never play Glastonbury. The reason is simply, it seems: badgers.

“I wouldn’t do Glastonbury next year because of the politics of the people who run it. Unless that changes, I won’t do it,” he said.

“They like killing badgers, and they think it’s for sport and that’s something I cannot support because we’ve been trying to save these badgers for years, and they are still being killed, so that’s the reason we’re missing out on it.”

By ‘they’ May seems to be referring to Glastonbury owner Michael Eavis. A dairy farmer, Eavis has previously described May as a “danger to farming” because of his criticism some years back of a badger cull which Eavis claimed at the time was essential to combating the spread of bovine TB.

When asked by the Mail if Queen had turned down an appearance in the past, May said: “I don't think the conversation of us doing it has ever taken place because they know how I feel.”

Brian May has given Steve Vai the gift of a lifetime. It’s a Red Special replica, custom built by Andrew Guyton, with some signature Vai-style twists on the Queen guitarist’s DIY custom electric guitar – not least a change of colour, reimagining the O.G. Red Special as the ‘Green’ Red Special.

“I own a lot of guitars, but this one stands alone. Its soul and history are baked into it and topped with a healthy smattering of love,” says Vai, writing on his Instagram account. “I will treasure it for the rest of my life, and yes, I’m taking this one to the grave with me.”

Vai is not the only high-profile recipient of a Guyton-built Red Special replica from May. Just before Christmas, Tony Iommi received a Red Special built to the exact specifications as May’s original, only with the neck profile based on Iommi’s Jaydee Old Boy SG-style electric.

Vai’s ‘Green’ Red Special is a more radical take on the instrument, with the jumbo EVO-gold frets, yin-yan inlays on the birds-eye maple fingerboard, and that translucent Green finish revealing all the eye-popping details in its quilted maple top.

But like Iommi’s Red Special, perhaps the most significant update to the Red Special formula is the neck, with Guytone giving Vai’s instrument a mahogany neck that’s shaped a little more like those he would find on his Ibanez signature guitars – and this is definitely for the best, because Vai has a little history with the Red Special.

“In the 1970s, when I was a kid in Carle Place trying to figure out how to play anything in tune, Brian May was one of my absolute heroes,” writes Vai. “His tone and touch oozed of rock and roll class, and the songs he wrote and the notes he chose dug deep into my psyche and helped shape a future fantasy image of myself in my mind.”

The Red Special played a starring role in this fantasy. Vai even entertained ideas of making his own guitar. A “total lack of expertise” put paid to that. But still, the Red Special was the one. More than a guitar, it was “a mythical object, an alchemical wand built by a young genius and his dad”. Growing up, Vai studied everything about it. Little did he know he would get his hands on it, and sooner rather than later. He got his chance not long after moving from to the West Coast in 1980.

“At 20 years old I move to LA, landed a tiny apartment at Fairfax and Sunset, start working with Frank Zappa, and one night I walk into the Rainbow Bar and Grill and see Brian just standing there. Alone. Like a normal human,” says Vai. “I thought I was hallucinating.”

He was not. And being a 20-year-old kid Vai said hello. May being May, i.e. a mensch, he “did the unthinkable” and invited Vai to Queen’s rehearsal, where he got to see the Red Special up close.

“Sitting in a room with the entire band was already unreal enough, but then I saw the Red Special. I pointed and said, ‘Is that it?’ Brian said, ‘Yup. Want to try it?’ Time definitely slowed down,” recalls Vai.

This was his chance. But as is often the case, our imagination doesn’t meet reality. The Red Special is like Thor’s Hammer, an Excalibur built from the ground up and tailored to May’s unique playing style. It felt weird in Vai’s hands.

“After idolising that guitar my whole youth, holding it was seismic,” continues Vai. ‘I thought, ‘This is it, I’m finally going to sound like Brian May.’ But much to my chagrin, I didn’t of course. I sounded like me. And between the gauge .08 strings, ultra-low action, and a neck the size of a small tree, I played it like a baby giraffe on roller skates. Still, it was heaven.”

Vai never forgot that moment. Neither did May, though he did forget some of the details. In 1991, when the pair were playing Guitar Legends in Spain, May was recounting the story of when one of Zappa’s young protégés came to a Queen rehearsal and played the Red Special, “who who played amazingly well”. Vai kept his powder dry.

“I let him tell me the whole story and then said… ‘Brian, that was me.’ This stands as one of the most satisfying full-circle twists the universe has offered me,” writes Vai.

And now he has another, a ‘Green’ Red Special, one of one, “beyond beautiful” – and a guitar that Vai finds a little easier to play.

“It somehow honours the spirit of the Red Special while allowing me to feel completely at home inside it,” writes Vai. “Must be the green.”

What do you get the guitarist who has everything? Let’s just assume they have already got their own Gibson (and Epiphone) signature guitars. They already have their own custom-wound electric guitar pickups (Gibson again).

What if they have actually heaved heavy metal into existence, and have pretty much seen it all?

This festive season, Brian May had this exactly problem when thinking of a suitable Christmas gift for his best pal, Tony Iommi; and he found the perfect gift. He got the Black Sabbath guitarist and godfather of heavy metal a master-built left-handed version of the Red Special, the electric guitar May built with his father when he was starting out and has used almost exclusively ever since – only this Red Special comes with some choice customisations, as per Iommi’s preferences.

Overseeing the build was Andrew Guyton, of Guyton Guitars, who has first-hand experience with the O.G. Red Special, having been tasked with refurbishing it. Guytone has been making officially authorised replicas of it since 2003, and he infused this Queen guitar with some classic Sabbath DNA.

“It’s built with the exact vintage construction of Brian May’s original Red Special, but shaped to match Tony’s iconic Jaydee Old Boy neck,” explains Guyton.

Like May, Iommi is a big fan of the Dallas Rangemaster treble booster. It was a huge part in finding his sound. Guytone has taken all of this into account. “[It] features a built-in treble booster and authentic vintage-style pots and pickups to replicate the classic tone,” he adds.

All that is missing is a Vox AC30 – and maybe a Maestro Echoplex – and you have Brian May’s tone, all in one guitar, but with the feel of one of the most legendary metal guitars of all time, the Jaydee Old Boy.

The Old Boy built by John Diggins in the late 1970s and was first used by Iommi to record overdubs on Black Sabbath’s 1980 studio album, Heaven & Hell. Soon after, it became his number one electric.

A second-gen SG-style electric, it reflected Iommi’s changing tastes, from the big stuff (the pickups, the 24-fret neck) to the small but significant details, such as the strap button being moved from the top horn to the neck heel, a feature that now all Gibson SGs share.

Old Boy’s distressed finish could be said to be ahead of the curve. But that was just an accident.

Diggins had made this guitar on his kitchen table. The finish didn’t cure properly. Oh, and someone left it in a car in a baking hot day.

“It wasn’t forced. It wasn’t made to look like that,” said Iommi, in the official Tony Iommi website. “It had nice paintwork when I first had it, and it just fell away. One of the stupid things was leaving it in the boot of a car in the States, and the heat made all the paintwork start bubbling – that’s what started the relic look.”

Chances are Iommi won’t be leaving his new Red Special in the boot of the car. This one is a keeper. “Huge thanks to my best friend Brian May and master builder Andrew Guyton for this incredible left-handed Red Special replica,” wrote Iommi. “Andrew personally delivered it last week — a true gift from Brian, two years in the making. Christmas came early!”

Festive, heartwarming, we love it. And maybe these two legends should put these guitars to work in the studio some time soon.

Brian May has hinted again that Queen are looking at the possibility of going down the Abba-route and developing a hologram show, possibly at The Sphere.

The guitarist was speaking to The Big Issue when conversation turned to the idea of reuniting ‘virtually’ with his bandmates Freddie Mercury and John Deacon, who is still very much with us but who retired from public life in the late 1990s. “Freddie is still alive through the music that we listen to all the time,” said May. “In a sense, John is still with us in the same way, but now we have so many other opportunities.”

“I mean, things that are immersive, like The Sphere in Las Vegas, it will be possible to give people the experience very closely of what things were like for us when we were Freddie, John, Brian and Roger. And that really appeals to me.”

May continued to muse on this possibility, saying: “In our Queen shows for a very long time I’ve been doing ‘Love of My Life’. And in the end, Freddie comes in and joins me as on video. It was just quite simply done, but it’s a way of involving Freddie, and I think we can basically take that a lot further.”

Talking about a potential hologram show, he said: “It wouldn’t be just playing old footage or whatever. It would be creating Queen as if we were creating it today. I’m very taken with the idea that we can be the original Queen again.”

Any such show would face a number of hurdles. Firstly – the very real problem of Freddie Mercury not being alive. The Abba Voyage show is, of course, a product of the actual real members of Abba going through the rigmarole of having their stage movements captured by the motion technology and pre-recording all their vocal parts and stage announcements.

Queen’s frontman is sadly not around to do this, so like it or lump it May and Taylor would be left with a choice of employing a Freddie-wannabe (or Adam Lambert). Or using old footage.

Then there is the issue of John Deacon. Would the reclusive bassist want to go through the hassle of the motion capture process? Would he even accede to the hologram idea in the first place?

The likeness of Mercury for virtual reality and 3D has already been registered by Mercury Songs, the organisation that owns his solo songs. However, in the past May has seemed reluctant. In a podcast for Graham Norton’s Radio Show back in 2023, the guitarist said: “We’ve talked about and looked at holograms of Freddie, (but) we love to be live and dangerous, that’s it, that’s our emphasis. Now, when we’re all gone, yeah sure, make an Abba thing about us, but while we’re here I want to play live.”

Next month will mark half a century since the release of Bohemian Rhapsody and with that in mind, Brian May and Roger Taylor have given a lengthy interview to Rolling Stone in which they talk about the song’s genesis and debate its still contested meaning.

Bohemian Rhapsody was the culmination of a particularly progressive period in rock’s development, when bands were afforded time to experiment and slather overdubs over a single track, and there was still a sense of progression in the medium, and, Roger Taylor adds, “you actually had to be good at your instrument – that doesn’t seen to be a necessary requisite these days.”

The single was at that point the most stunning example yet of the layered harmonies which became a Queen trademark. May explains that was something they took from the Beatles, particularly the Abbey Road track, Because: “We were transfixed,” he says. “I can feel the shivers going up my spine.

"We thought ‘Oh, my God, that has to be the most daring piece of pure harmony we’ve never heard.” But for May and Taylor it was more than just that one track. “It was everything the Beatles did,” he emphasises. “We were able to sort of take up where the Beatles left off.”

And then there was the gong. “I remember Led Zeppelin had a gong,” says Taylor. “So we had a much bigger gong. Pathetic one-upmanship, really.”

But what is Bohemian Rhapsody actually about? The magazine interviewed John Reid, then-manager of both Queen and Elton John (he was Elton’s lover for a while). Reid is convinced it’s about Freddie coming to terms with being gay, especially the line ‘Gotta leave it all behind and face the truth’.

“I think that’s the key to it,” he says, “and a little bit of self-doubt, and the fact that he could never be that open to his parents.”

Roger Taylor, though, is unsure and says he still doesn’t know what the song which created his (and the band’s) career is all about: “So many people have been wondering, ‘What’s the secret meaning?’ I’m not sure there is one.”

Brian May has revealed that he’d not only be open to a Queen Sphere residency but he is “having conversations” about the possibility.

The 78 year old guitarist was talking to Rolling Stone about touring when the subject of the hi-tech Las Vegas venue came up.

“ I’m very keen on the Sphere,” he said. “It’s got my mind working. I sat there watching the Eagles, thinking, ‘We should do this. The stuff that we could bring to this would be stupendous.’ So, yeah, I would like to do it. We’re having conversations.”

May didn’t say whether those conversations were simply between him and the other active member of Queen, Roger Taylor (and presumably their semi-permanent Freddie replacement, Adam Lambert) about the idea, or whether these were actual negotiations with the Sphere’s people.

Part of the attraction is that the guitarist is simply tired of life on the road. “ 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.”

He told the magazine that he and Taylor had no plans for retiring Queen just yet. “ I don’t think we’re done. And I don’t think we’re gonna say, you know, final farewell tour or whatever. 'Cause it never is, is it?”

Queen have been working with Adam Lambert since 2011 but in all that time have yet to release any new music (aside from one hastily re-recorded version of We Are The Champions during Covid).

May dangled the possibility that their huge back catalogue could still be added to: “It's always in the mind," he said. "Not many people know, but Adam and we have been in the studio trying things. Nothing really materialized so far. Some things are meant to be and some things are not.”

It’s coming up for half a century (blimey) since Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and its accompanying A Night At The Opera album, and so, as is this way with these things, both are getting a 50^th anniversary reissue this autumn.

Originally released in November 1975, the album is coming out again on crystal-clear vinyl with gold labels (gold, you see, for fifty). Bohemian Rhapsody, which spent nine weeks at Number One in 1975/1976 and then another five in 1991/1992 in the wake of Freddie Mercury’s death, is being reissued on transparent blue vinyl – in both 7 and 12 inch forms – and as an exclusive picture disc. There’s also a cassette, if you’re into such things.

A Night At The Opera was the first Queen record to top the UK album chart and show the full extent of the band’s range, from the hard rock of Death On Two Legs to the Kinks-like knees up of Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon to Brian May’s folk-influenced 39.

The album’s pièce de résistance, though, was undoubtedly Bohemian Rhapsody, which was quite unlike anything any pop fan had heard in 1975. Even the Beatles at their most audacious hadn’t ever attempted anything as outlandish as this six-minute-long multi-part single with an operatic section, layered harmonies and, oh yes, a gong.

“We truly felt like we could try anything at that point,” guitarist Brian May said in a statement. “As songwriters, we were challenging each other and competing with each other in the best possible way. It really was a watershed album for us. Thanks in a large part to Bohemian Rhapsody, people knew who we were – not just in the UK, but in America, Australia, everywhere.”

“We were at the peak of our confidence,” adds drummer Roger Taylor, “It felt like there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do, and it shows on that album. A Night At The Opera is such an eclectic album. It’s mad and it’s wonderful and it’s got a bit of everything in it.”

The 50^th anniversary package for A Night At The Opera comes out on October 18 in the UK, to coincide with National Album Day. Those outside the UK get it a day before, on October 17. Bohemian Rhapsody is being reissued two weeks later, on October 31.

Brian May has collaborated with UK glam rockers The Struts on a song the Queen guitarist has described as “one of the best rock songs ever.”

High praise indeed. May is referring to Could Have Been Me, which was the Struts' debut single back in 2013. It didn’t reach the British chart on that occasion, but has been a slow-burning success for the band, eventually reaching silver status in the UK. Now they've released a new version, with May adding his own inimitable touches on guitar.

Talking to Classic Rock, May said: "I wish I'd heard that song when I was a kid."

"It's a classic," the Queen man enthused. "It's one of the best rock songs ever. It was actually bigger in America than it was in Britain: it passed people by over here, and it shouldn't have done. I'm hoping that this is an opportunity for the song to really connect all around the world."

"I love the song," the guitarist continues. "It's a very inspirational song. ‘I don't want to look back and think I didn't live my life and take all the opportunities that were in front of me.’ - I love that sentiment.

"You can say it in words, of course, but you really feel it in the song. Could it be me? It says everything that a kid needs to know when they're growing up."

Apparently when the Struts' record label Interscope were presented with ideas for the single, they warned the band ‘Don't put too many guitars on it, because guitars are on the way out.’ May, it seems, is affronted on their behalf, saying: "I could hardly believe I was hearing that. It’s ridiculous."

"People talk about guitar music being dead, but it’s always going to be with us. It’s deeply embedded in our psyche."

The Struts frontman Luke Spiller seemed made up with the collab. "This song is all about seizing your dreams and living life to the fullest, no matter the obstacles," he told Classic Rock. “It’s a powerful anthem that reminds us to chase what sets our souls on fire. Collaborating with Brian on this track is a dream realised, and I can’t wait for you all to feel the energy and inspiration behind it.”

And for May, working on the track brought back memories of his old band. "Working with Luke, I'm often thinking of Freddie (Mercury)," he admits. "There are a lot of similarities. They both have this unstoppable belief. They have incredible voices, they’re great songwriters, but they have that extra ingredient: ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to let the world come to me.’ That’s what Freddie had, and that‘s what I see in Luke."

The new version of Could Have Been Me is out now.

It was in 1995, four years after the death of Freddie Mercury, that Queen’s final album was released – and as guitarist Brian May said, it was a project that was both challenging and rewarding.

The album was named Made In Heaven, and it was created using some of the final vocal and piano recordings made in Mercury’s lifetime.

These recordings were subsequently enhanced by May with drummer Roger Taylor and bassist John Deacon at the band-owned Mountain studio in Montreux, Switzerland.

In a 2017 interview with MOJO magazine, May recalled of these sessions: “Suddenly we were back in the studio, Roger and John and I. We’re looking at all this stuff, and we’re thinking: this is what we created, this has been an enormous part of our lives.

“So we really dived into it with great passion and energy. And there were moments of great joy.

“Also for that album we pillaged a few things from Freddie’s solo work, and refashioned them, which was a great labour love.”

The song Made In Heaven was first recorded for Mercury’s solo album Mr. Bad Guy and released as a single in 1985.

“Made In Heaven, the track, I always loved it,” May said. “But Freddie merely sketched it on his solo album, with a couple of synths and drum box.”

The version that featured on the Made In Heaven album was a far more lavish production, created by May with Queen’s trusted engineer, co-producer, mixer and keyboard player David Richards.

“I spent months creating a panorama for Made In Heaven,” May said. “But it eventually got too big for me and I had to call in David Richards to get it all under control.”

In that same interview May also discussed Queen’s entire body of work.

Referring back to classic albums from the ’70s such as Sheer Heart Attack, A Night At The Opera, A Day At The Races and News Of The World, May said: “They’re not perfect. Nothing’s perfect. There are little flaws, but the flaws are almost as much a part of it as the success of it.”

He also described the group dynamic and the sense of rivalry between the four of them as songwriters.

Famously, they could all write hit singles.

Mercury’s hit songs included Killer Queen, Don’t Stop Me Now, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, We Are The Champions and the mother of all rock epics, Bohemian Rhapsody.

Roger Taylor’s included Radio Ga Ga, A Kind Of Magic and One Vision (the latter credited to Queen but based in Taylor’s idea).

John Deacon wrote Another One Bites The Dust, You’re My Best Friend and I Want To Break Free.

And May wrote We Will Rock You, Fat Bottomed Girls, Flash and Hammer To Fall.

May told MOJO: “We were very aware, quite early on, that we had a good balance of talents.

“The convention with us was: somebody brings in a song, puts it on the table, we all mess with it, change it, evolve it, and then the person who brought it in has the final say on its final form.

“But your song is your baby, and you get pretty emotional about it. You’re sort of fighting for your life when you think that an album is going to come out that doesn’t have your voice on it the way you want it to be. And I find that’s true of life in general, not just making albums. That feeling of being roped out of a situation is a powerful and dangerous thing.”

He continued: “I think we had an interesting structure of working, because obviously we hammered out all of the musical stuff together in the studio and on the road, but there was a kind of bedrock of ‘what is this song is about?’ which wasn’t touched.

“The person who brought the song in would have that knowledge inside him but it wouldn’t be discussed. That was sacrosanct.

“We had an unwritten law that you don’t pull the lyrical side of a song to bits. Everybody writes songs about what is around them, but unconsciously the songs are always about what is inside them as well.

“I think that’s universally true. So we unconsciously regarded that as private territory and not to be discussed.

“This changed later on. I remember sitting down with Freddie and speaking about It’s A Hard Life, and hammering out every word of every line together, because we were actually talking about what this song meant.”

The same was true of one of the last songs Queen recorded in Mercury’s lifetime.

“I remember Freddie and I sat for a long time working on the lyrics for The Show Must Go On,” May said. “He wasn’t very well, but he sat for a few hours working on a couple of lines.

“And okay, there was still a level beyond which perhaps we didn’t look, but as far as the story of the song went we were hammering it out together.

“Then he disappeared and I didn’t see him for quite a while because he was quite ill at that point, and I finished off the song using those bricks that we built together, the cornerstones.

“I think Freddie and John [Deacon] also had moments of getting close to the inner meaning of a song," May said. "Freddie and John worked on Another One Bites The Dust very closely.

“John wasn’t a person who could sing, so John would speak it to Freddie and Freddie would start to sing it, and I think during that process they would unravel it: what is this thing that we’re doing?

“And I think it was true between all four us.”

In 1977, the year of punk rock, Queen responded with News Of The World, an album filled with short, punchy songs – none shorter or punchier than We Will Rock You.

This is, undeniably, the greatest rock anthem of all time.

But how did the band create something so simple and effective?

In a 2023 interview with Total Guitar, Queen guitarist Brian May, the author of We Will Rock You, revealed how it was written and recorded.

“The song was born one night in Bingley Hall in the Midlands,” he said. “We were a group which was doing quite well, we had a good following, and we had this thing where people insisted on singing along to our songs. And I think we were quite irritated by it!”

Asked why the band didn’t like their fans singing along to their songs, May replied: “Because we thought, ‘People, just listen. We’re working really hard, so bloody well listen!’

“But they were unstoppable. And this particular night, they sang every word to every song, which was rather novel in those days.

“I mean, I went to a Zeppelin concert and I don't remember people singing along to Communication Breakdown or whatever they were playing. When Zeppelin played, they listened. They banged their heads, and they listened. And I thought about our concerts: why don't you buggers listen instead of singing?

“Anyway, that night at Bingley Hall we came off stage and we all looked at each other in amazement, because all that singing from the audience was so extreme.”

May recalled how, in this moment, he had a change of heart and made a suggestion to singer Freddie Mercury.

“I said to Freddie, ‘Maybe, instead of fighting this, we should be encouraging it. Maybe we should be harnessing this kind of energy which seems to be happening.’ And we all agreed that this was something really interesting that we should experiment with – letting the audience be a bigger part of the show.”

With this, the seed of We Will Rock You was sown.

May explained: “I thought, what can you ask an audience to do if that audience is all crammed in together? There's not much they can do except stamp their feet and clap their hands, but they can also sing. And if they can chant, what would they chant? And with that, I could hear it in my head: ‘We will, we will rock you!’

“I was hoping that this would become something which would catch on. We would have a song which would be led by the audience. So that's why there's no drums on there – just the stamping and clapping that the four of us did.

“Very luckily, we found bits of an old drum riser lying around in the studio in Wessex in North London, which was perfect to stamp on. And with the help of [co-producer] Mike Stone, I evolved a whole business of multi-tracking with various prime delays to make it sound huge, but not echoey. There's no echo on that. So it sounds like you're in the middle of a thousand people stamping and clapping. And then we put the other stuff on it.”

May admitted he had doubts about the track.

“I was very nervous about this,” he said, “because it seemed like it was kind of over-simplistic, maybe. And I wasn't sure if it was going to sound like a proper song.

“But as soon as I heard Freddie singing it, I started to be more confident, because he sounded like a kind of rabble-rouser. It sounded like he was going to encourage the audience to do this stuff. And so it was all aimed towards getting the audience involved. It was aimed towards the live situation. And somehow it worked.”

Initially, May’s belief in this song was not shared by the band's drummer Roger Taylor.

“I remember Roger had severe misgivings about it,” May said. “And he certainly didn't want to put it at the beginning of the album.

“He said, ‘No radio station is ever going to play this! It doesn't sound like a rock song.’

"But I fought that corner. And generally I didn't win those arguments, but this time I won.

“So that was the beginning of the album. And it was also my thought that we should weld We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions together as a couple. And that worked out very well – partly because those songs both have the same end in mind, they’re both enveloping the audience and involving the audience, treating the audience inclusively – and partly because it just made such sense musically. It just worked so well.

“So that was the beginning of the album, and that was the single – the two tracks together. It was No.4 in America, a big hit all over, really.

“And this whole thing changed our lives radically. Because from that point on, we stuck to that resolution – we became a band that encouraged participation. And that's not the way we started off, but it became a great thing.

“It probably sounds all very obvious now, because everybody gets the audience to clap and sing along, but that's not the way rock ’n’ roll was in those days. And I think it was a great bolt out of heaven. Looking back, it’s a no brainer – but at the time it was a radical departure.”

May also took an unorthodox approach with his guitar solo in We Will Rock You.

“I don't think it was planned,” he said. “I just wanted to rock!

“But I did want to break that boundary as well – because everybody puts guitar solos in the middle of the song, and I didn't want to do that. I wanted this song to happen with the audience, and that would then lead me to the stage, so the guitar solo would be the climax of the song.

“That was pretty unusual at the time, and I can't actually think of another song that does that. So that was deliberate.”

Brian May was voted the greatest guitarist of all time in a 2023 readers’ poll by Total Guitar magazine – but the Queen legend has conceded that Steve Vai and Joe Satriani are more technically accomplished players.

Speaking to MOJO magazine in 2017, May discussed his instinctive approach to playing guitar.

“I think a huge amount of a guitarist’s sound is in the fingers and in the body and in the mind as well in the way it’s played,” he commented. “You own a guitar, play it, and it becomes a part of you more and more as time goes on.

“I’ve picked up other people’s guitars and they go, ‘Oh, it seems to be in your fingers, it’s not actually in the guitar.’ I guess it’s a mixture.

“The sound that people mainly know me for is a guitar that sustains, and something happens to you when you hold a guitar like that in your hands.

“I always used to wonder about that when I was very first starting off. I remember people used to sing and play at the same time, the same notes, and I thought: I wonder how that happens? And it happens through doing it for a lifetime.

May admitted: “I have none of that high-speed, high technical skill of a Steve Vai or a Joe Satriani.”

But he added: “What I have is a connection between the mind and the fingers, which just serves me in a particular way. I find that I can connect what’s in my head through the fingers to what’s coming out, and it’s quite a smooth connection.

“You get to the point where you can almost turn off any kind of thinking process and you just allow what’s in your head to go through your fingers.”

In the same interview, May also recalled how he and singer Freddie Mercury fought each other during the mixing of the classic Queen anthem We Are The Champions – but in an unexpected way.

He told MOJO: “I remember it very clearly – mixing We Are The Champions with Freddie.

“On that song, the last couple of choruses have guitar going through them. Now, we were very wary of that, because we liked order in our music. But the guitar in that case was kind of competing with Freddie’s vocal.

“In those days it was all manual mixing and we both had our fingers in that mix. And strangely enough, Freddie had his hand on my guitar and I had my hand on his vocals.

“And he’s pushing up the guitar more and more and I’m going, ‘Freddie, are you not overdoing it?’

“And he says, ‘No, the guitar is fighting with the vocal here and that’s the way it should be.’”

May also said in that interview how he valued physical product in the age of streaming.

“I do like to see bits of creative work,” he said. “I want to hold it in my hand. It’s still a good feeling.

“That’s why I like the physical CD or the vinyl. To hold the CD in my hand is a great feeling, because the rest of it is a bit nebulous.”

And he spoke of the value of art over commerce.

“The fulfilment isn’t in watching its chart performance or sales,” he insisted. “The fulfilment is in knowing that it’s done to the best of your ability – it’s fulfilled a dream, and it’s become what you dreamed it could be.

“It’s the creation of those things, and you know that no one else has done it, and nobody else could have done it quite in the way you’ve done it.”

Live Aid was billed as The Greatest Show On Earth and a ‘global jukebox’ – and Queen delivered on both counts.

At Wembley Stadium on 13 July 1985, Queen stole the show before a crowd of 100,000 and a global TV audience of 1.9 billion.

With singer Freddie Mercury at his peak, this was surely the greatest performance of the band’s career.

And in one of the smartest moves ever made by a major rock band, Queen used their allotted 20 minutes of stage time with a setlist designed for maximum impact, cramming in six songs – beginning with an abridged Bohemian Rhapsody and featuring Radio Ga Ga, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Hammer To Fall before climaxing with We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions.

In a 2017 interview with MOJO magazine, guitarist Brian May recalled how Queen had structured their Live Aid performance after instructions from the event’s co-creator Bob Geldof.

May explained: “The directive from Bob was: ‘This is a global jukebox, don’t get clever, play the hits.’ And that’s exactly what we did. We knocked those songs into a form where they were slightly compressed to fit into the time allotted.”

Speaking to Total Guitar in 2023, May discussed how the unorthodox set-up at Live Aid, with a fast turnaround for each act, made it stressful for the participants.

“It was kind of the Wild West,” he said, “because no one had ever done it before. Bob Geldof insisted that it was going to be possible, but a lot of people told him it couldn't be done – that you couldn't get bands on and off quickly enough.

“There really wasn't a precedent for Live Aid. So yes, we were stressed, but there was so much joy and excitement that overrode everything.”

May told Total Guitar about his own unusual arrangements on the day of the show.

“It was a glorious day,” he recalled. “A beautiful sunny day. For the opening ceremony we arrived at Wembley Stadium in a helicopter, which was very exciting for us young boys, and when we watched Status Quo open the show with Rockin’ All Over The World, I was sitting in the royal box with Prince Charles and Princess Diana. It was incredible.

“I mean, Princess Diana had a lot to do with that," May said. "She sort of made rock ’n’ roll okay for royalty. It seemed like a new world.

He continued: “Right after the ceremony I flew off again in the helicopter to Barnes [in south London] and went to a fair with my kids. And everywhere I walked in the fairground, there were radios on and you could hear Live Aid evolving.

“So I remember having that incredible excitement in my stomach thinking, God, we're going to be back there soon doing it. And when we went back there, yes, there were a lot of nerves, a lot of adrenaline…”

In the MOJO interview, May elaborated: “The moment when we were going on was a mixture of excitement and terror. It was an unusual experience from the start, not just a rock concert at all. Everyone was there for Bob and for that cause – those starving people.

“And the event was sold out before we were added to the bill. We knew this was not our audience, so when we went on the adrenaline that was flowing was massive. But it turned into a glorious experience.”

Asked if Live Aid was Freddie Mercury’s greatest moment, May said: “It really was. Freddie rose to the occasion.

“He was already a master of the art of communicating with a football stadium full of people. And when we did Radio Ga Ga and the whole audience all did the double handclap thing, I remember getting chills in that moment. It was the same for We Will Rock You, and at the end they all sang We Are The Champions.”

In Total Guitar, May denied that Queen were on a mission at Live Aid to blow everyone else off stage.

“We didn't go there to do that,” he said. “We went there to do our bit. I think the whole thing was very pure and genuine. Nobody was trying to capitalise on it.

“Everyone was there because they were inspired by Bob Geldof in his quest to solve the world's hunger problems. Nobody had ever done that before, so we all wanted to help. And of course, nobody wanted to wake up the next morning and think that they hadn't been a part of it.

“I didn't think when we came off that it was our best performance or anything like that. I was conscious that it was a bit ragged. And I mean, one-offs always are – there's always bits that you love and bits that you hate.

“This wasn't something that we'd done on stage time after time. It was a set specially put together for that occasion. And when you watch it now, it's not without its tense moments.

“The end of Hammer To Fall is very questionable, you know? But nobody cared - because the adrenaline that was flowing in Freddie was pretty magnificent.

“He, and also the rest of us, benefited from the fact that we had played stadiums before, and very few artists who were there that day had.

“We’d been to South America and done these incredible gigs in stadiums in Argentina and Brazil. So we had a measure of what it takes to play to 100,000 people rather than a theatre or an arena.

“Freddie, when you watch him now [in the Live Aid footage] he looks so full of confidence. And he is. He knows he can do it.

“He knows that we've already done this thing of involving the audience. He knows that he can get the audience on his side, in spite of the fact that nobody had bought tickets to see us. I don't think Freddie ever had any doubts.”

May also told Total Guitar that Queen’s triumph at Live Aid was the result of the powerful chemistry that the four members of the band had on stage.

“We kind of grew up together very quickly,” he said. “And we interacted from the beginning. It was a very natural, organic kind of relationship. We were very interactive.

“You know, Freddie would be very conscious of me on stage, and I would be very conscious of him – in a musical sense, and also a physical sense.

“Being on stage is a very physical thing. You have a kind of an awareness of each other, and it's in the placing and the body language and the channels of energy that reach the audience.

“So we were very much in harmony, without even trying.

“We were a machine which worked. And that applies to the whole band. Everybody had their place. And it just evolved in a way which you couldn't have put together.

“It couldn't have been manufactured. It just evolved. Fortunately, we were the right people to be together at the right time.”

It’s the fortieth anniversary of Live Aid this month and Roger Taylor and Brian May have been recalling Queen’s show-stealing set and have revealed that the band originally had serious doubts about doing the gig at all.

“We thought it was going to be a disaster.” May has told Radio Times. “Freddie, in particular, said, ‘I haven’t got the right feeling for this.’ He wasn’t the leader of the band, but if he dug his heels in there was no dragging him, so we parked it.”

“I said to Freddie, ‘If we wake up on the day after this Live Aid show and we haven’t been there, we’re going to be pretty sad.’ He said, ‘Oh, f**k it, we’ll do it,’” said May.

Roger Taylor too was apprehensive about doing the show. “We hadn’t been on the Band Aid single, and we felt relatively senior compared with a lot of the younger acts. It wasn’t necessarily our audience because we were a very late addition,” he said.

“And it was daylight, which we don’t like because the stage lights have no effect. Plus it was so thrown together on the stage, we just had to hope all the elements would come together.”

Nevertheless once they committed, they committed, and over three rehearsals at a theatre on the Euston Road, Queen hammered out a tight 17 minute greatest hits set, that was extended to 21 due to Freddie Mercury’s ‘ey-oh’ audience participation segment.

On the day, it was only once they got to Wembley that nerves kicked in, according to May: “We watched Status Quo come on and play Rockin’ All Over the World, and I thought, ‘This is the biggest thing we’ll probably ever be part of, and we’re going to be there in a few hours.’”

The band went their separate ways for a few hours – Taylor wandered around Kensington, while the guitarist actually took his family to a fair on Barnes Common. They returned to Wembley and took to the stage at twenty to seven, as planned. “Queen had a great trust in each other. We were perhaps lacking in oil, but we were a well-exercised machine,” says May. “Then, from the moment we hit the stage, the response from the crowd was so deafening, it took your breath away. I ran on, which I don’t normally do, all due to adrenaline. From the beginning, we felt we were at home.”

“At the end, I came off thinking, that went OK but also very aware of the places where it nearly fell apart. It came off the rails quite significantly at the end of Hammer to Fall. If you look at it, you might think that was on purpose, but it wasn’t. I came off very conscious of the flaws in our performance, but I also knew Freddie had been great.”

Jean-Michel Jarre has announced he’s releasing Live In Bratislava, what he’s calling “the definitive audio-visual record” of his gig last year in the Slovakian capital.

As usual with the 76-year-old producer, it was no-expense-spared all-bells-and-whistles son et lumiere spectaculaire. More than 100,000 people gathered across Bratislava in May 2024 along the banks of the River Danube to feast their eyes on the show, which included a 400-drone ‘ballet’, fireworks-a-plenty and laser displays. Lots of lasers. Jean-Michel Jarre loves his lasers.

Also involved was Queen’s Brian May who accompanied him on a new arrangement of Dvorák’s New World Symphony, as well as newly adapted works Bratislava Time and Rendez-vous Bratislava. There were further contributions from the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra and a 19-piece chorus from the Slovak Philharmonic Choir.

So yes, it was big alright. Putting it all on involved some 170 tonnes of equipment, 21 LED screens, 150 projectors, hundreds of kilometres of cabling and the largest stage ever built in Slovakia.

As befitting an event of that scale, the release isn’t just a bog standard CD. Oh no. There’s a double CD digipack, plus a Blu-ray which features the ‘Unseen Director’s Cut in 4K’ which has PCM 2.0, DTS HD 5.1 and Dolby True HD 5.1 audio.

The limited edition ‘Ultimate Collector’s Box’, meanwhile, features both the CDs and Blu-ray as well as a deluxe coffee table photo book and an ‘exclusive’ 10-inch blue vinyl of the producer’s new track, Bridge To The Future. You pays your money, you takes your choice.

In a statement, Jean-Michel Jarre said of the release: “Since that very special night in Bratislava, we’ve worked with a brilliant creative team to bring together the most complete, cinematic version of the concert possible. The sound on this release comes from the live TV broadcast of the concert, capturing the raw, in-the-moment energy of the performance. I’m proud to finally share this with everyone. Not only those who joined us in Slovakia or watched online, but all who want to relive the experience."

If you missed it, and it sounds like your bag, the veteran electronic pioneer is on tour around Europe in June and July. There are more details on the Jean-Michel Jarre website.

Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Dolly Parton, Brian May, Nile Rodgers, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Emmylou Harris, Bruce Springsteen and Eric Clapton are among the many artists paying tribute to a genuine rock ’n’ roll innovator in the new book Buddy Holly: Words Of Love.

With cover art by another Rolling Stone, Ronnie Wood, the hardback edition of Words Of Love is out now.

The concept for the book originated from The Who singer Roger Daltrey, who says: “Words Of Love is a perfect title for this stunning and definitive history of Buddy Holly. As well as being one of the great rock ’n’ roll pioneers, Buddy wrote and sang some of the most beautiful and enduring ballads about love.”

In the foreword, Paul McCartney writes: “The first time I ever heard Buddy Holly was when the record That’ll Be The Day came out. It sounded energetic. I thought it was a black band and we couldn’t figure out how they did it.

“It was Buddy Holly and the Crickets . He was playing the lead guitar, which we loved, but he was also singing it, which we loved, and he’d written it, which we loved. So on a number of levels he was very inspirational . He became a hero for us and gave us the idea to go and do it ourselves.

McCartney concludes: “He was a great hero to all of us, and because he wore glasses this even allowed John Lennon to wear his in public and not have to whip them off if there was a girl passing by!”

Elsewhere there are tributes from many other famous artists from various generations — from Cliff Richard and Van Morrison to Ed Sheeran and Sam Fender.

Mick Jagger says: “To English people Buddy Holly was an enormous inspiration. He was a songwriter, which Elvis wasn’t. And he wrote very simple songs, sort of lesson one in songwriting. Great songs, which had simple changes and nice melodies and changes of tempo and all that. You could learn from Buddy Holly how to write songs. He was a beautiful writer.”

Jagger’s bandmate Keith Richards adds: “Maybe it was the fact of doing Buddy’s song Not Fade Away that gave us that extra propagation to start writing our own stuff. I think Buddy’s inspiration was that he wrote his own songs, which influenced The Beatles incredibly, and it slowly dawned on us that it would be great if one of us could write some songs, and two of us would be fantastic.

“He had an influence on everybody. Everybody who is playing now and just coming up because of what they’ve listened to — it’s been handed on. Buddy passed it on via The Beatles, via us, everything he did.”

Brian May comments: “Buddy Holly was my absolute hero as a kid. Those first Crickets singles on 45 rpm discs with black labels, slipped into brown paper sleeves, were probably the most exciting acquisitions of my whole childhood . They’re still some of my most prized possessions.

"The moment when I learned of Buddy’s tragic death remains etched indelibly in my mind. In that movement of grief, I think something inside me decided that the world that Buddy Holly and the Crickets had carved out was where I wanted to be.”

And there is this testimony from Eric Clapton: “Buddy Holly made a very, very big impression on me. The first Fender I ever saw was the bass that the guy in Jerry Lee Lewis’ band was playing when they made the film clip for his song Great Balls Of Fire. I’d never seen anything quite like it before.

"The next thing you know, these guys in England were using it, and Buddy Holly was using a Sunburst. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It was like seeing an instrument from outer space and I said to myself, ‘That’s the future — that’s what I want.'”

Words Of Love: Buddy Holly is available now via Amazon

Putting on a festival in a desert was never going to be easy. And yet somehow Coachella happens and this year, 125,000 average visitors per day braved life, limb and financial ruin in order to be part of the in-crowd.

And while there are some moments of greatness – huge thanks to Lady Gaga, Post Malone and Charli XCX for pulling it out of Coachella 2025’s dusty bag – for the most part it’s only ever bad news – from terrible performances, inadequate sound systems and tech, to horrific price gouging on a captive audience – that makes it into the outside world.

And frequently, while it’s attendees that pile on the complaints, broadcasting their dismay across social media, they may have only themselves to blame.

Too big to fail?

While Coachella is just one of the biggest festivals in the world (in terms of sheer size the UK’s Glastonbury Festival across 900 acres of lush farmland, easily knocks Coachella’s 642 acres of scorched desert into a cocked hat) it’s easily the most profitable with general admission tickets costing $649 for the first weekend and $599 for the second.

And, of course, once captive in a compound usually completely unable to sustain human life, the cost of staying alive – from food to accommodation to washroom facilities – easily adds thousands to that total, with luxury packages offering access to ‘VIP areas’ for those not wishing to muck in, costing ten times as much.

The net result of all this ‘fun’ is that Coachella has slipped from free-wheeling, ‘let's do the show right here’ hippy-styled, anti-authority, anything-goes, love-in, to an over-priced, overworked, cash generation machine.

Catalogue of errors

Thus, this year Coachella has played host to the usual dissatisfaction and disasters.

"Yesterday, when I pulled up, the artist before warned me that the sound had been chipping out to dead silence for sometimes minutes at a time," wrote DJ and producer BAMBII who appeared on Coachella's Do LaB stage.

"The equipment I played on was also completely malfunctioning. It's safe to assume had we been bigger artists on the main stage, this issue would've been fixed way earlier within the show day.

"Like so many other artists on that bill, it took a lot of hard work to even get to the position to be booked. Music is my entire life and I believe at a bare minimum the least a festival as reputable as Coachella could provide artists they're not paying, is a working sound system."

It’s just a continuation of Coachella’s rep for bad sound. Lana Del Rey’s headliner last year had fans complaining about sound quality, giving rise to a worried and lacklustre performance. Likewise Grimes' DJ set got spewed out at double speed due to a programming incompatibility.

In previous years we’ve seen Ariana Grande suffer audio issues during a surprise guest appearance with Nicki Minaj, Billie Eilish bring out Vince Staples, only for his mic to remain resolutely off, and – most famously – sticklers-for-quality Radiohead were forced to leave the stage not once, but twice due to technical problems.

And of course, our favourite of the lot, when Frank Ocean was scheduled to perform his long-awaited comeback gig at Coachella complete with an artificial ice rink and a squad of skaters only to have to pull the lot at the last minute due to… absolutely nothing working properly.

Frank, mate. It IS the middle of a desert after all…

But that’s perhaps not really the root of Coachella’s problems.

It’s not them. It’s you

In addition to being expected to achieve the impossible audio-wise (multiple artists performing with countless bits of gear in a freakin’ desert) there’s the small matter of Coachella’s audience…

Arguably, with costs skyrocketing, Coachella’s appeal increasingly only hits home with over-privileged, cash-laden, rite-of-passage-seeking elites with little interest in music.

Coachella is now the festival to be seen at, rather than a festival with anything actually worth seeing.

And given the current crowd’s always-on connectivity and expectation for quality and flawless presentation at all times, it seems that the vagaries and anything-can-happen nature of the live scenario entirely fails to deliver for them.

Hence the barrage of online moans.

Likewise, their willingness to deliver any kind of interaction or excitement to help the performer along has evaporated alongside their tollerence.

After all, they’re going to 'do the gig' whether you applaud or not. So why bother?

Never (ever) again

The results range from disinterested audiences (see last year’s Blur’s interaction, where, in the face of audience indifference to a singalong of the Boys and Girls megahit they didn’t even know, Damon Albarn promised that they would never see him again) to a failure to recognise greatness even when it’s just risen out of the stage right in front of them.

Yes, this year’s worst audience was at Benson Boone’s gig where he only magicked up the actual real Brian May to do a solo during his (ill-advised?) cover version of Bohemian Rhapsody, only to have the audience fully unable – despite his on-mic protestations and explanations – to understand just how brilliant May and everything they were looking at and hearing actually was.

Witness Boone’s post-gig TikTok reenactment of his frustration here:

What’s the answer? Drop some prices and get more music fans in there? Pay more to the tech staff behind the scenes? Or – controversial – stop trying to do a festival in the desert at all.

Either way, Coachella remains the one we all love to hate. We can’t wait to see what it chews up and spits out next year.

It’s a Queen song so over-the-top that many would think it was composed by Freddie Mercury. But no - it was Brian May who wrote Flash.

As the theme song to the 1980 sci-fi adventure movie Flash Gordon, it came in two versions.

In the album version, titled Flash’s Theme, the dialogue is all lifted from the movie’s opening scene. The single version, titled simply Flash, features dialogue from different parts of the story - most famously, the exclamation “Gordon is alive!” from Brian Blessed’s character Prince Vultan. And it's this version that is known and loved around the world.

Flash reached No.10 on the UK chart and was a hit in various other countries.

“I'm very proud of the song,” May said in a 2024 interview with Total Guitar.

But as the guitarist went on to explain, there was a moment when he believed the song would be rejected by the movie’s producer Dino De Laurentiis.

May told Total Guitar: “I was so immersed in the Flash Gordon project. I always loved that kind of ’50s science fiction stuff anyway, and I was very aware that the way that the film was evolving was very comic book.

“It was very tongue in cheek. Very retro. Mike Hodges, the director, handled it that way in a very clever approach, I think.

“But strangely enough, Mike didn't see eye to eye with the producer of the film, Dino De Laurentiis, who was the the guiding force behind the whole thing.

“Dino saw it more as a serious epic, but it was Mike who said, ‘No, you can't do that. It's got to have this element of fun and slightly taking the mickey out of itself.’

"So in the end Mike won, and some of what I was trying to do with this track is to do a comic book in sound. That's exactly what it is.

“So it's slightly exaggerated. It's a little over-heroic, if you like. But it's fun. It's colourful.

“And there is also a little undercurrent of something deeper in the lyrics: ‘Just a man/With a man's courage.’

“That, to me, is what gives it its heart and soul, because there is something rather rather lovable about the character of Flash Gordon. He’s so innocent. And there's this love affair going through the film as well, and I think you really warm to him as a character, even though he's unreal, he's a comic book character.

“So that's what I tried to put in the song.

“And,” he continues, “I wanted to make it something that people would just grab ahold of very easily.

“I could hear ‘Flash!’ very quickly in my head. So it was just a question of realising it in the studio. I had a lot of fun with it.”

May, however, was in for a surprise when Queen’s music for the soundtrack was first presented to producer Dino De Laurentiis.

As the guitarist recalled: “When we'd made all the tracks in demo form, having seen the rushes of the film, we had a session with Dino and Mike Hodges, all of us in Trident studios playing back what we done for the film.

“And Dino sat there with a face like iron. Like, ‘I'm not sure if I like this?’

“The last thing we played was Flash and Dino went, ‘Yes, it's very good, but it's not for my film.’

“That was a mortal blow for me. I thought, I didn't encapsulate what the film needed.

"But Mike took me aside and said, ‘Don't worry, I'll sort him out. He will love it!’

“And the conclusion of the story is when we had the premiere of the film. Dino came over to me and said, ‘Thank you for what you did for my film. It's beautiful!’ So that was that was nice.”

Summing up this extraordinary track, May said: “It is very fluffy, but I'm proud of it - because within my brief within the genre, I think it does fit perfectly.”

Brian May has once again hinted that new Queen music is a possibility.

Speaking to MOJO magazine, the guitarist was asked if he could imagine writing another song for Queen.

May replied: “I think it could happen.”

Last year, May’s bandmate, drummer Roger Taylor, also addressed the subject of new Queen music.

“Brian and myself were talking the other day, and we both said that if we feel we have some good material, why not?” Taylor said. “We can still play. We can still sing. So I don’t see why not.”

In his new interview with MOJO, May added: “Both Roger and I are constantly writing and coming up with ideas and doing things in our studios. I could have the beginnings of a Queen song right there in front of me now. It’s just whether the idea reaches maturity or not. It’s whether that seed can grow.”

It is now 30 years since the release of the final Queen album, Made in Heaven, which arrived four years after the death of singer Freddie Mercury.

Since 2001, May and Taylor have toured with singer Adam Lambert as Queen + Adam Lambert.

Roger Taylor is also interviewed in the new issue of MOJO, and names his favourite song that Brian May wrote for Queen.

“Who Wants To live Forever is a great Brian song,” he says. “But it would have been even better if he’d let Freddie sing all of it.

“I think it’s slightly over-arranged, too, but wonderful all the same.”

If there is one Queen song that Metallica’s Kirk Hammett loves above all others, it’s a deep cut from 1980.

The song is Dragon Attack, written by Queen guitarist Brian May for the band’s eighth album, The Game.

“I love that song!” Hammett said. “Brian’s guitar sounds so overly saturated on that song, more so than other songs. It’s like he walked over to his fucking tone booth and just turned it to eleven!”

In a 2024 interview with Total Guitar, Brian May revealed how he was inspired to write Dragon Attack during a “wild time” in Munich when the four members of Queen were regulars at a decadent nightspot known as the Sugar Shack.

“Dragon Attack started off very spontaneously,” May said. “It began with me and Deaky [bassist John Deacon].

“Probably it was more Deaky’s riff that mine, to be honest. But I took hold of it and built it into the song that it became.

“We were in that funk place, but this song has a real kind of rock funk feel. It came out of spontaneity and wanting to play the kind of music which was inspiring us when we would go down to the rock disco after working in Munich every night.

“We used to go to a place called the Sugar Shack, and it was definitely a sort of rock club, a rock dance club if you like.

“Generally they would play Queen music. But when Queen music came on it didn’t work so well - it didn't inspire people to get up and go nuts on the dancefloor, whereas a lot of other things did, songs that had a lot more space in them.

“So what I tried to do with Dragon Attack was make it the kind of track which was going to work in the Sugar Shack. That’s totally what it was about, which was to get girls excited and make boys want to get up and go nuts with them on the dancefloor there.

“So it's very spacious. The song doesn't have the usual kind of rhythm build-up. It's just the riff - bass, drums, guitar. Very open, very stark.”

May added: “The lyric also comes from the Sugar Shack.”

He explained: “The dragons are in the sugar shack. It's about that strange twilight world where where you stay till the lights come on in the morning, and you come out and it's dawn!

“It was a pretty wild time for us, and that's what I attempted to put in the song. It's all about us and the way things were, and the sort of sexy side of the peripherals of rock.”

Dragon Attack was the second track on The Game, following on from the disco-influenced mega-hit single Another One Bites The Dust.

“Dragon Attack was designed to be uniquely a dance track,” May said. “So you have Another One Bites The Dust and Dragon Attack which are both big departures from the way Queen had come up.

“I remember touring after we finished the record, and American radio picked up on those songs. We never expected they would. We thought they would want just the rock tracks. But they picked up on that stuff and it was all over radio!

“Every time we got into a limo or car or a restaurant or whatever, they would be playing those tracks.

“And it's interesting - it was the same time as The Rolling Stones put out Miss You, which is also very funky, very different for them. So there was a whole thing going on - rock was becoming funky for a while. And it worked!”

May reckoned that Dragon Attack and Another One Bites The Dust set the template for Queen’s following album - the controversial Hot Space, which was released in 1982.

As he told Total Guitar: “A lot of people said that the Hot Space album didn't work, but it actually did.

“It brought people to a new place. And it gave birth to Michael Jackson doing his incredible stuff - and later, Michael Jackson inviting Slash to play on a track with him.

“It was that fusion of funk and rock which I think lives with us to this day…”

Don’t Stop Me Now is one of Queen’s greatest hits - with a blockbuster guitar solo from Brian May.

But as May admitted a 2024 interview with Total Guitar, that song was a real challenge for him as a guitarist.

“Worldwide, it’s a massive Queen song,” he said. “It wasn't in the beginning. It was a sleeper and it grew.”

But when Queen recorded Don’t Stop Me Now for their 1978 album Jazz, May found himself sidelined by singer Freddie Mercury, who wrote the song and had very definite ideas about how it should sound.

“It was quite funny,” May recalled. “Freddie saw it very much as a piano song, a la Elton [John]. Powerhouse piano, powerhouse vocal, and that's it.

“So I played lots of rhythm guitar on it, and Freddie still said, ‘No, no, no, no - it’s a piano song!’

“That was a bit disappointing, but he did say, ‘Well, it does need a solo. I need you to take over the vocal.’ Which is what the way we thought about things.

“I said, ‘Okay, give me a verse and let me see what I can do.’ And being in the studio and hearing it evolve, I could sort of hear the solo in my head before I actually picked up the guitar to do it.

“As very often with me, [the guitar solo] a kind of little diversion. It's a counter melody. It's not the actual tune of the verse.

“But it's something which goes with it, a sort of counterpoint, and it’s something I could sing. And it was just a question of transferring it to a guitar.

“It's very simple. But I do notice that [the solo] gets a reaction from people. It steps up the energy quite a bit, even from a song that's got high energy. So I'm happy with it the way it is.

“Every time the solo comes up live, I think, well, actually I can't do much better than that! So I tend to play it more or less as it is on the record - with little variations.

“I feel like the audience is singing along to it, and it would be disappointing to them if I didn't play it!”

A Bristol teenager has built his own guitar in an apparent homage to his hero, Brian May.

The young British engineer is 18-year-old Sam Golder who has spent 18 months working on the instrument, which is made using wood from his grandfather’s stock.

Sam’s new guitar is based on the classic Flying V model and required extensive work, including precise sanding as well as the reconstruction of the electric components by hand.

“Brian May was a huge inspiration for this project,” Sam told the Bristol Post. “I grew up listening to Queen music, thanks to my dad, Robert, and last year I played lead piano in the band that provided the live soundtrack to our school production of We Will Rock You, which is, of course, based around Queen’s music and May’s iconic guitar sounds.”

May, of course, famously built his Red Special guitar when he was a similar age to Sam. It was constructed with the help of his father, an electronics engineer, from the wood of an 18th Century fireplace that a friend of the May family was about to throw away. Each of the guitar’s position inlays was shaped from a mother of pearl button, giving it an even more individual edge. May still occasionally uses the original today, though he now has a number of replicas in his collection.

Sam’s project began when he discovered some wood lying around at his grandfather’s home in Essex. He worked meticulously to shape the guitar, with additional help from his school friend who 3D-printed a tool to assist in the process. The electric components were bought online but had to be completely dismantled and rebuilt.

Sam is a huge Queen fan, but also apparently is inspired by a whole range of bands including draws Metallica, Linkin Park, Aerosmith, and Pink Floyd. Favourite guitarists? Well, aside from May, he rates Mark Knopfler, Slash and Randy Rhoads of Quiet Riot, who also loved a Flying V.

And the 18-year-old isn’t just a guitarist. Sam taught himself to play piano during lockdown via YouTube videos and he has his sights set on a career in music. Speaking to the Post, he said: “I wouldn’t be where I am without the band, my friends, and our head of music, Mrs Williams. One day, it is my dream to share my music on stage to millions of people, whether that be guitar, piano, or even both.”

In 1995, four years after the death of Queen singer Freddie Mercury, the band’s final studio album was released.

Made In Heaven was comprised of tracks recorded in the last months of Mercury’s life, and as guitarist Brian May said: “I think it’s quite possibly the best album we ever made as a Queen album.”

In an interview with MOJO magazine, May said of Made In Heaven: “There is so much of Freddie in that album, and it seemed a lot of the time like he was in the studio with us. Not in any kind of maudlin way, but in a joyful sense. It was like, ‘What do you think about that, Fred?’ 'Oh, okay.’ It seemed like he was there.

“It was incredible that he [Mercury] was able to leave us with so much great material to work with. I think it’s quite possibly the best album we ever made as a Queen album. I feel like it sums us up.”

Made In Heaven includes the last song that Mercury wrote alone, the Christmas-themed ballad A Winter’s Tale.

May said that when recording his guitar solo for A Winter’s Tale, he imagined that Mercury was with him.

“Freddie wrote the song in Montreux,” May recalled, “in a little house on the lake that we called The Duck House. The extraordinary thing is he’s talking about life and its beauty at a time when he knows he hasn’t got very long to go, yet there’s no wallowing in emotion, it’s just absolutely purely observed.

“So that’s the way I wanted my solo to be. It was one of those things where I could hear it in my head, long before I actually got to play it. And when I recorded it, at my home studio, in my head I was there with Freddie in Montreux in those moments, even though this was happening long after he was gone.”

May also revealed that he had experienced mixed emotions when listening to this song and others from Mercury’s final years.

“Sometimes you listen to those songs and you realise Freddie was in pain and that’s hard,” he said. “But those moments are all precious, the moments when the creativity flowed and we lost ourselves in the music, so I enjoy listening to them now. I’ve come full circle.”

Brian May was in attendance at the Gibson Garage London yesterday to support the launch of his new signature guitar, a stunning limited edition SJ-200 12-string fresh out of the Custom Shop at Bozeman, Montana.

The Queen guitarist shared the story behind the guitar’s design, explaining why he prefers his 12-string guitars to be strung in reverse, with the octave and the standard strings swapped around, and he accompanied Brian May Guitars signature artist Arielle onstage for a performance of the Everly Brothers’ So Sad, Love Token from May's 1992 solo album, Back To The Light, before finishing their set with a poignant rendition of Queen’s Love Of My Life.

It was an emotional occasion. Gibson CEO Cesar Gueikian made a speech. May's family were there. He spoke of his pride at putting his name to the first ever 12-string version of the SJ-200, and how his planetary design for the pickguard graphic featured the planet Mercury as a tribute to the late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. He also revealed that it turns out it is quite difficult to design 8-pointed star inlays out of agoya shell but the luthiers at Bozeman managed it.

And the occasion took May all the way back to when he was beginning on the guitar. As he noted to the crowd, Elvis played one, the Everly Brothers played them, and both were influences on him when he was starting out – a time when May risked suspension from school because the guitar was strictly forbidden.

This was a different time. There were no YouTube lessons in those days. If you wanted learning materials for guitar you had the great Mel Bay and that was it. May didn’t even have that. He had his ear.

“I started off on acoustic, and I was on acoustic for a long time, and all I did was sing and play accompaniment,” he said. “It was a long time before I became clever enough to play what I call single notes. I could hear people doing it on records but I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to do it myself.”

He was in good company. None of his friends did either. The instrument might have contraband under official school policy but that didn’t stop him and his friends taking their acoustic guitars on-campus. May and friends build up a “kind of competition” as to see who could develop their playing faster, and shared their progress out of sight of the teachers.

“In the lunch hours, we would hide behind the cycle sheds because it was illegal to have a guitar at my school,” said May. “Seriously, things were very different in those days! Hampton Grammar School, you would get suspended for even having a guitar let alone possessing one at school.

“So behind the cycle sheds, we would hide, and we would play, and go, ‘Hank Marvin’s done this, y’know. And this…’ All these wonderful things were happening. Elvis was happening. Buddy Holly was happening. And we were finding out what they do, how they do it. That’s what we wanna do!”

It worked out in the end for May. He learned guitar without unduly disturbing his academic career, and completed his studies in 2007 with his PhD in astrophysics from Imperial College London. And the guitars he played got considerably better over the years.

He modded his first acoustic with a home made pickup before perfecting his craft on the father/son product that brought him his iconic Red Special electric guitar (that got a quick workout during Love Token). And now he has this opulent 12-string – a guitar he described as a “dream come true.

“As soon as I held the guitar, I thought this is what I need,” said May. “It has such presence and such a beautiful breadth of sound. Gibson has done the most beautiful job, it has the lovely solar system on it, including Mercury, but the most important thing is it sounds massive.

“It’s very traditional old-school technology, not made with AI or mechanised in any way. I take fantastic pride in it and I’m very honoured to have worked with Gibson. From the days when I used to gaze enviously at the guitar catalogues, sitting there with my Dad, I wish he was here to see this amazing fusion of the collaboration we’ve made.”

Read more about the Gibson Custom Brian May SJ-200 12-string here. This Vintage Sunburst doozy is available now, priced $7,999 and limited to 100 instruments worldwide. See Gibson for more details.

Gibson has unveiled an immaculate signature acoustic guitar for Brian May, reimagining the SJ-200 as a 12-string and dressing it the King of the Flat-Tops with a planetary-inspired design.

This limited edition signature guitar really is stunning, an example of the good people of the Bozeman, Montana Custom Shop operating at the peak of their powers. Just look at that headstock and those fingerboard inlays, 8-point stars fashioned from eco-friendly agoya (also known as akoya).

For months, many have speculated – MusicRadar included – as to May’s relationship with Gibson, after he appeared at the launch of the Gibson Garage London alongside Tony Iommi and Jimmy Page. Was a Gibson-made Red Special electric guitar in the works? Well, there still could be.

But with May officially in the Gibson artist family it was just a matter of time before we saw a signature model. This, as it turns out, was borne out of necessity.

“The idea for this guitar came when I needed a 12-String on tour, and the one I was accustomed to wasn’t performing right on stage,” says May. “The guys at Gibson very kindly said, ‘We’ll make you something special that you can use on the tours.’”

And they weren’t wrong. It is not just that this is a high-end acoustic guitar build, featuring a AAA Sitka spruce top, AAA rosewood on the back and sides, and a two-piece AAA maple neck (with a Rounded profile to make those chords feel nice and comfortable and a decorative walnut stringer), but May’s 12-string is reversed in the sense that its heavier strings are strung on top, the octave strings on the bottom, making for quite a different voicing.

Also, that planetary pickguard? That is a design from Dr Brian May himself, referencing his academic background in astrophysics and featuring a tribute to Queen’s late frontman, Freddie Mercury.

“One of the things I asked for was for the octaves to be placed around the other way from where it is normally done, because I like to pick upwards and hear the top notes when I’m playing,” says May. “I like to hear the high octave coming through as then I can play tunes on it. If you look at this guitar, the beauty of it, and the beauty of the sound, and look at the science in this guitar, look how much technology and craftsmanship has gone into this guitar.

“Gibson was able to put the universe on it in a figurative way and the planet Mercury is here, and that is a little nod to a friend of mine that is always with me.”

Gibson is only making 100 of these worldwide. They are accordingly priced for collectors at a cool $7,999. The Brian May SJ-200 12-String ships in a signature hard-shell guitar case, inside which you’ll find a certificate of authenticity and a hand-signed booklet.

Cesar Gueikian, CEO, Gibson, says it is an “absolute privilege” to be working with Brian May.

“Brian’s impact on music and culture is second to none and was a transformational influence on my personal music journey,” says Gueikian. “We are deeply honoured that Brian has trusted Gibson with this SJ-200 12-string guitar, and we are excited to finally bring it to music lovers around the world. Thank you, Brian.”

Other features include a Fishman Matrix acoustic guitar pickup and preamp system. You will be cheered to know that the neck joins the body with a compound dovetail joint, set with hot hide glue. The fingerboard is Indian rosewood, has a 12” radius and seats 20 frets. The guitar has a 25.5” scale length and a bone nut.

It really is an opulent build. That agoya is reprised on the Indian rosewood bridge. The gold Grover Rotomatics are a sight to behold on the headstock.

For more details and pics, head over to Gibson.

We’ve all been there, turning up to a gig only to find out that all the guitarists will be playing through the same backline, cue the onrushing panic as we try to get a decent tone out of an unfamiliar guitar amp. It is some comfort to learn that the greats are no different – even Brian May has a war story to share.

In a recent interview with Guitarist, the Queen guitarist recalls an evening in the early days in which he had to play through a Marshall tube amp and the experience was so bad he sounded like “an angry wasp” and struggled to play a lick.

To make matters worse, Jimi Hendrix was the headliner that night at the Olympia, in London, and we all know how the Marshall stack and Hendrix’s unearthly style made for an era-defining electric guitar tone.

“We played one show at Olympia. Top of the bill was Jimi Hendrix and everybody essentially played through the same gear,” said May. “So I plugged into a Marshall stack with my guitar and treble booster. Turned it all the way up – and it sounded so awful. I could hardly play.

“I didn’t know what to do. It sounded like an angry wasp. It didn’t have any depth or articulation, I couldn’t play chords. It was a really hard experience for me.”

This was a familiar story for Queen back in the day – and it wasn’t just May who suffered. When recording their eponymous debut album at Trident Studios, Roger Taylor had to make do the studio’s drum kit and it killed his game.

Speaking in October last year at the launch of Queen’s rebuilt and restored debut, retitled Queen I, May said he could see Taylor struggling.

“I remember Roger getting angry because he was in such an unfamiliar situation,” said May. “He has been drumming for years, and he’s pretty good as a drummer, he can do a thing or two! Instead of playing in a room with his kit, which he knows inside out, suddenly he is in a tiny little room with a foreign drum kit, which was tiny and transparent as I remember.

“It was plastic, all covered in tape, literally covered in all this tape. They’d taken most of the skin off the bass drum and it’s got a cushion inside. He’s trying to play this thing and he hates it!”

“Yeah, there was no resonance or anything,” replied Taylor. “Not what you want.”

In 1971, Taylor had used his own drum set to record the demos for the album at De Lane Lea Studios, and though nothing fancy – his kit was cheap, too – they sounded much better. The drums sounded like Taylor. And that sound matters. Just as May was thrown by the Marshall, Taylor couldn’t play with his usual freedom.

“We were told: ‘This is the Trident sound’. But we didn't want the Trident sound. We wanted our sound,” said Taylor. “I really had a bad time playing that kit, which is why, actually, if you listen to the demos – which I played on my relatively cheap kit in De Lane Lea – it's a higher standard of drumming. It’s quite busy, but it makes sense. And it’s just better to listen to.”

Queen ultimately swapped out every single one of Taylor’s drum beats for the Queen I reissue. And May, well, he too made his choice, finding his sound with the Vox AC30 combo. With that, his treble booster, and his home-made Red Special, he had his tone. And Hendrix sure had his.

For the avoidance of doubt, May assures Guitarist that Hendrix and the Marshall did not disappoint.

“After we’d played, I stayed behind backstage and I looked through between the amps as Jimi came on stage, plugged into that same amp – and it sounded like a cataclysm,” said May.

You can read the full interview with May in the latest issue of Guitarist, available now via Magazines Direct.

Back in September this year Brian May surprised his concerned fans with the reveal that he’d suffered a stroke but – good news – was feeling fine and was in recovery.

The legendary Queen guitarist described how, "out of the blue, I didn't have any control over this arm," he described, but after a “very exciting” ambulance trip to his local Surrey, UK, hospital and the “most fantastic care” from staff there.

Writing following his recovery, May said: "The good news is I'm okay. Just doing what I'm told, which is basically nothing. I'm grounded. I'm not allowed to go out - well, I'm not allowed to drive, not allowed to get on a plane, not allowed to raise the heart rate too high... but I'm good."

Before explaining to concerned fans that: "I didn't want to say anything at the time because I really don't want sympathy. Please don't do that because it'll clutter up my inbox and I hate that,” and making light of his state as a “health hiccup.”

Of course, what his fans wanted to know was how was his playing faring up? “The good news is that I can play guitar after the events of the last few days,” May said.

His wife, actress Anita Dobson confirmed his status soon after, telling social media that they were “very pleased” with May’s progress and that she was “completely confident” that May would “make a full recovery”.

New health update

Following the scare, and request for calm the pair have concentrated on May’s recovery with no further word. However, Dobson recently appeared at the Television & Radio Industries Club Christmas Lunch, where she was honoured and given a Legend award.

“He’s much better now, he’s stabilised now, which is brilliant,” she said at the event. “I just hope we don’t have any more recurrences. He’s got the use of that arm, which was a bit of a challenge, back now. So, yeah, he’s good to go now. He’s playing the piano quite a lot in the house. He likes a lot of Beethoven. I love it - the piano in the house is really, just very relaxing.”

Dobson also revealed that May had taken it very easy, giving himself time before even attempting to play again.

“He didn’t actually try until after he’d recovered quite a bit,” she said. “And then he very slowly started to pick up an acoustic guitar and gradually just exercised the muscles. And it very quickly came back. He’s just retraining the messages from your brain to that arm, that it’s actually okay to do what it used to do. It was scary. And also being a genius for someone like that. His brain’s overloaded, that’s what it is. He’s too clever for his own good.”

Dobson also revealed that following May’s ‘grounding’ the two would be travelling to Lapland this month to “meet the elves”.

The couple celebrated their 24th wedding anniversary a fortnight ago, with Brian saying on social: “Take care out there folks and Carpe Diem ! Because tomorrow ... who knows where the wind might blow.”

May’s most recent trauma isn’t his first. In 2020 he revealed he'd suffered a heart attack while recovering from a painful, gardening-induced muscle and back injury. "It was about 40 minutes of pain in the chest and tightness, and that feeling in the arms and sweating,” he explained at the time. "I was actually very near death [but] I didn't die. I came out and I would have been full of beans if it hadn't been for the leg."

Brian May has revealed how a bout of depression and a “bastardised” cheapo acoustic guitar led to the creation of one of Queen’s all-time greatest tracks, The Night Comes Down.

Speaking in the latest episode of Queen The Greatest, the YouTube series documenting the making of their recently restored and reissued 1973 debut album, May, modded £10 classical guitar in hand, discussed the evolution of the track, and how it would become an declaration of artistic intent. Queen was going to be a band who were determined to do things their own way in the studio.

The Night Comes Down is one of the most audacious tracks on Queen’s debut, where they apply their theatrical, widescreen sensibility to an arrangement that plays out like a medieval prog ballad. It might be grand, epic, and ambitious, but its melancholy was coming from a very real place. The Night Comes Down evolved in May’s head and he was not always in a good place at the time.

“The song, actually, was being about those moments when you are not jolly, those moments when you feel like you’ve lost it,” he says. “And when I look back at it, I was very young to be writing that stuff but I did get depressed in those days.

May says “it was always about relationships,” admitting that he was “never any good” at making them work. He knew he had his friends, his studies, and his band were getting somewhere; there was a lot to be positive about. But that positivity was fragile.

“I had moments where I thought, ‘I am in a great place. I can make music. I’m with great friends. I’m at college doing stuff that I love doing. Everything’s great.’ And then somehow, everything would fall apart,” he says. “It’s like the night came down in my head. So that’s what the song was about. It’s not a jolly song.”

If the song was about depression, it was facilitated, and maybe even inspired by May’s acoustic guitar. This was what was always in his hands at the time.

Last week, we brought you the story of how May modded this guitar with pieces of flint and a knitting needle with the intention of making it buzz like a sitar. But in this video segment, he goes into greater detail about the modifications he made to it – and even plays a little bit of The Night Comes Down to show how still buzzes to this day.

This unassuming nylon-string was made by Hallfredh but it has been wholly transformed by May, and you cannot perform a more radical – and potentially ruinous – modification to a gut-string acoustic than restringing it with a set of steel acoustic guitar strings.

“The bridge wasn’t really high enough to make them vibrate cleanly but I turned this into an advantage because I liked the buzzy sound it made,” says May. “It made it sound a bit like a sitar.”

That was mod #1. More would follow. May carved out his own hardwood bridge and installed it on the guitar. He stuck pins and needles in it. The buzzing got louder and this unique sound influenced who he actually played the instrument.

“I sort of bastardised this guitar,” he admits. “But it made this sound very much like a sitar, but, I suppose, a bit warmer, and I learned to play that way on [this] acoustic, playing lead on acoustic which wasn’t necessarily done that much.”

Nor was placing the acoustic front and centre of a rock band’s mix. That was considered unconventional at best, bad practice at worst.

But May wrote the track around this acoustic tone and he had a vision for the electric to accompany it. His Red Special – the acme of his DIY luthiery projects – was to play a supporting role, whether the engineer and producer liked it or not.

“We were told in these little excursions we had into those studios, ‘You can’t mix acoustic guitar with electric guitar,’ And we would go, ‘Well, why?’ ‘Well because the electric guitar’s too loud.’ ‘Don’t be ridiculous! You can make it as loud as you want in the mix,’” says May. And that’s what they did.

Challenging the received wisdom of the time, that acoustic and electric guitars did not belong in the same mix, May pumped the acoustic up in the mix.

“There was this sort of myth around, ‘Oh it’s not going to work.’ So I wanted to prove to myself that you could make the acoustic guitar the front instrument, and the electric guitars could actually be behind,” he says. “The electric guitars are like a string quartet behind the acoustic guitar. And they are not too loud because you have them at the right volume in your mix!”

May and Queen ultimately won that fight. Though they were never fully happy with the recording of their debut. Roger Taylor was playing on the studio’s drum kit and they hated the sound. It was plastic, covered in tape. Taylor said it had no resonance to it. He struggled through those sessions.

For the 2024 Queen I reissue (the original was just titled Queen), the band transferred the original 16-track tape recordings onto digital and employed a team of audio restoration engineers to enhance the sound of each and every one of Taylors’s drum beats.

This was a particularly laborious process, especially seeing as Taylor was, in May’s words, a “quite busy” player.

“He would do a lot of fills but it fits so perfectly with the way we were playing,” says May. “I think, probably, now he would say, ‘oh no, I was doing too much’ but actually it was perfect for the time.”

The guitars, too, got some hi-fi TLC for the reissue. One of the problems with the original recording was that the band did not have control. Nor did their producer, Roy Thomas Baker, who had been given a brief by the studio bosses – who were also Queen’s label bosses – to make it made it sound like a Trident record. But a studio’s house style was never going to be Queen’s style.

“[Roy] was taking all the beautiful room sound off the track,” says May. “I remember sitting there with him, I remember thinking, ‘At least the original isn’t being destroyed here. At least this is an alternative and maybe one day we can go back and look at the original.’ And we’ve now done it.”

Queen I is available now on all formats, including a Super Deluxe six CD and vinyl box-set.

• Queen's Brian May and Roger Taylor on how “manic goat” Freddie Mercury found his voice in the studio and became rock’s greatest frontman

Speaking as they unveiled the newly renamed, “rebuilt” and reissued version of their 1973 debut album, Queen I, in London last month, guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor recalled how the sessions at Trident Studios were not only the making of the record, but of the band, too – and in particular of their frontman, Freddie Mercury, whom May says was just finding his voice at the time.

May says there was no questioning Mercury’s energy, but he hadn’t worked out how to use it.

“Freddie was in a real transitional phase,” said May. “I’m sure Roger will agree but when we first met Freddie he charged around a lot, he screamed a lot, he shouted, and it made a huge impression on people. But people were quite taken aback. It was a kind of unbridled performance. He didn’t have the measure of his instrument.”

The studio experience changed everything. Mercury used it as a proving ground for how he could use his voice. Hearing himself on playback taught him everything he needed to know.

“As soon as he is in the studio, he hears his voicing come back at him through the speakers and says, ‘No, I don’t like that. I’ll do it again. Do another one.’ In a very short time, he tailored his performance to the way he wants to hear it,” said May. “He became a really expert vocalist really quickly. He found his voice and he found the means to use it.”

Pointing to the album cover – Mercury standing in a purple stage light, arms aloft with his mic stand – May says this was a prophecy that was about to come true. This was the performer Mercury was evolving into before their eyes.

“He became a colossal force – and not just a voice,” said May. “A great musician and a great writer, and a person who could reach to the back of any gig, whether it was the Marquee, a room this size, or if it was a stadium in Argentina. He reached every person who was at that show.”

Mercury’s force shaped how Queen were going to perform. He would lead them. When they arrived at Trident Studios, they were young, callow, having to record on the studio’s downtime while the stars tracked their records during the day.

“We were signed to the owners of the studio so that is why we got that [time]. I remember there was Lou Reed and David [Bowie] producing Transformer,” says Taylor. “He’d just finished Hunky Dory and Ziggy [The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.] This was the place to be.

“The Beatles did All You Need Is Love there. It really was the place to be, Harry Nilsson, et cetera. So we thought it was great. ‘We’re in Trident!’ But we were the ones on the downtime and we walked out when the cleaners came in.”

They were full of ideas, full of songs, and had no doubts about how how they wanted to present themselves. to their audience. Queen came from an era when bands were good but they stared at their feet – shoegazers before shoegaze the sound. Those bands couldn’t communicate with the audience.

“We had a different attitude,” said May. “From the very beginning, we said we would communicate. We would give people a great time. We would give our all for the hour, two hours we were onstage, and we would be connected. It would be showbiz, if you like. We would be projecting our ideas, and so it was different from the start, and Freddie led that.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” said Taylor. “[Deadpan] I don’t think he realised how dreadful he sounded before. I mean he sounded like some manic goat! But it was just extraordinary with this vibrato… Anyway, he turned out to be our beautiful, wonderful Freddie, whom we’ll never forget.”

Queen I presents us with the wholesale remix of the band’s debut, in which they have digitally augmented every one of Roger Taylor’s drum beats because they hated the sound of the original drum kit, enhancing the electric guitar sound to give them more resonance, more life, and seemingly bringing everything forward in the mix.

It is as how they wanted it to sound originally, and it serves as a reminder of just how audacious Queen’s arrangements were from the start – some of which came together in the studio – and the lengths they would go to create their sound.

May revealed he put flint and a knitting needle under the bridge of his cheapo acoustic guitar to make it buzz like a sitar, using it to great effect on The Night Comes Down.

If Mercury made full use of the studio monitors in learning how to hone his vocals, everyone used the adrenaline from being in a top recording studio for the first time.

“We were excited to be in there at all,” said May. “I think you would have seen us very much immersed in it and we felt privileged to be there at all, and we were enjoying each other’s company, and we were enjoying working with each other and developing new ideas.

“We had written a lot before we went in. We had some songs that we had been rehearsing. But a lot of things took shape in the studio, like My Fairy King, which was an extraordinary piece of work.”

Queen I is available now on all formats, including a Super Deluxe six CD and vinyl box-set.

Brian May has always been one of guitar’s great modders. This, after all, is the genius mind behind the Red Special, the electric guitar that he and his father built from the ground up, turning some spare wood from a fireplace and whatever else was lying around into this truly unique tone machine.

The rest is history. But some of his lesser-celebrated mods are no less radical – like those he made to a cheapo acoustic guitar during the recording of Queen’s 1973 debut album.

Where most players set their acoustic up to sound cleaner, searching for that hard-to-find sweet spot where the action is super-playable and yet there is no string buzz spoiling the party, May took a different approach, and he has revealed the lengths he went to ensure the guitar did buzz on record – even going as far as to use “a knitting needle” in the process.

Last week, May and Roger Taylor unveiled Queen I, the band’s album as you have never heard it before, “rebuilt” with an all-new mix, featuring each and every one of Roger Taylor’s drum beats “augmented”, and with guitars that now sound they way May wanted them to in the first place, with more resonance, more oomph.

At the launch party, May told BBC 6 Music’s Matt Everitt that the sessions at Trident Students were a time of great discovery, with a lot of sounds that the band were just learning to create in the studio.

“We had a lot of stuff in our heads,” said May. “We are just being able to put it on tape, so that was very exciting, trying things out for the first time.”

Some of these ideas had been long-held ambitions. Hitherto, the band didn’t have the means to make them a reality. “It was the first time I managed to get a three-part guitar solo down,” said May. “It was in my head for years before that. But to actually do it was amazing.”

What Queen were able to do under the watchful gaze of producer Roy Thomas Baker surpassed even their own expectations. Some of their compositions – particularly tracks such as The Night Comes Down, with its quasi-Medieval prog guitars – sound as audacious today as they did in ’73.

“Yeah, The Night Comes Down, looking back on it I am quite surprised actually because it is quite complex and difficult,” said May. “I wouldn’t like to be playing it live onstage at this moment because it’s tricky! And it’s played on a strange little guitar.”

Yes, this strange little guitar. This was the subject of May’s curiosity. What if it could be made to buzz? May’s idea was that it would sound like a sitar. What we hear on the record sounds not far off, with the overtones from the strings giving it texture that sits somewhere between a 12-string guitar and a harpsicord, or at least tone-wise they are in the same universe. It sounds perfect for the track. Best of all, it was cheap. Dirt cheap.

“You can spend thousands on an acoustic guitar,” said May. “This was a little guitar that cost about £10, but it had buzzy strings and I encouraged the strings to be buzzy by putting flint and knitting needles and stuff under the bridge, so it sounded a bit like a sitar. That’s why the guitar sounds like that.”

It begs the question: what model was it? And who made the acoustic? May did not share that information but he has spoken about this guitar in the past. Ground Guitar’s Dan Kopilovic, with a little help from fellow internet gear expert Phil Chapman, has identified it as a Hallfredh, which May discussed in his 1983 interview with Guitar Player.

May noted that he used it on Jealousy, from Queen’s 1978 studio album Jazz, and White Queen, from Queen II (1974). He said he had replaced the original bridge with a hardwood bridge, sanded it down and installed a piece of fret wire to give him those sitar-esque overtones.

Should Queen ever record again – and a couple of weeks back Roger Taylor hinted that this was a possibility – we might hear May's customised Hallfredh acoustic again. “I still have the guitar,” said May. “It still buzzes. But I’m not sure I could play [The Night Comes Down] right now.”

Queen I is available now on all formats, including a Super Deluxe six CD and vinyl box-set.

Queen unveiled their reissued and expanded debut album before a live audience in central London last night, with Roger Taylor and Brian May explaining how the project was nothing less than a mission to rebuild the album from the ground up – to the extent that every single one of Taylor’s drum hits on the original recording was digitally augmented for the release.

While none of the performances of the 1973 original have been changed, the band transferred its 16-track analogue tape recording to digital, turning it over to audio engineering specialists to enhance the sound.

All aspects of the album's mix have had a spit and polish. May was not altogether happy with the electric guitar sound but he says the differences between the original guitars and the 2024 rebuilt and renamed version – it is now titled Queen I – are “subtle.” The guitars we hear on Queen I are more up-front and present.

Everything has been mixed to sound more immediate, as though you are in the room with the instruments.

If the guitars needed some TLC, Taylor’s drum sound was a different matter. That demanded a more radical intervention. He tracked his parts on the studio’s drum kit and it was a horrible experience.

“I remember Roger getting angry because he was in such an unfamiliar situation,” said May. “He has been drumming for years, and he’s pretty good as a drummer, he can do a thing or two! Instead of playing in a room with his kit, which he knows inside out, suddenly he is in a tiny little room with a foreign drum kit, which was tiny and transparent as I remember.

“It was plastic, all covered in tape, literally covered in all this tape. They’d taken most of the skin off the bass drum and it’s got a cushion inside. He’s trying to play this thing and he hates it! You can feel it. Right? It was hard for you?”

“Yeah, there was no resonance or anything,” replied Taylor. “Not what you want.”

It wasn’t what any of the band wanted. But they were young. This was their debut. Roy Thomas Baker was in the control room and he was a hard task master. And all things considered, the band were just happy to be there, recording in the off-peak hours while the blue-chip stars recorded during the day.

“We were signed to the owners of the studio so that is why we got that [time] I remember there was Lou Reed and David [Bowie] producing Transformer,” said Taylor. “He’d just finished Hunky Dory and Ziggy. This was the place to be. The Beatles did All You Need Is Love there. It really was the place to be, Harry Nilsson, et cetera. So we thought it was great. We’re in Trident! But we were the ones on the downtime and we walked out when the cleaners came in.”

“We were excited to be in there at all,” added May. “I think you would have seen us very much immersed in it and we felt privileged to be there at all, and we were enjoying each other’s company, and we were enjoying working with each other and developing new ideas. We had written a lot before we went in. We had some songs that we had been rehearsing. But a lot of things took shape in the studio, like My Fairy King, which was an extraordinary piece of work.”

May describes Queen I as “the director’s cut” and it has been a long time coming. This has been something they have wanted to do for years.

“It’s exactly how we wanted it,” said May. “We waited 52 years to get to this point, to make it the way it should have been in the first place. We always hated the fact that Roger wasn’t playing his own kit. It didn’t sound like Rodge.”

Queen also took the opportunity to restore the tracklisting to how they wanted it. Mad The Swine was left off the 1973 release but is back here, sequenced between Great King Rat and My Fairy King. It sounds incredible. All of it does.

Queen I is available now on all formats, including a Super Deluxe six CD and vinyl box-set which contains a cornucopia of unreleased material, including live tracks and demos, plus behind-the-scenes audio recordings of the band in conversation – and disagreement – with each other. It’s the sound of rock history being made, a coltish but prodigiously talented band learning what it took to make a record.

On 16 October, Queen legend Brian May proclaimed The Last Dinner Party as “the new British Rock Royalty” after seeing the band’s show in London and posing for a photo with them backstage, which he shared on Instagram.

Brian thanked the band’s lead guitarist Emily Roberts when he stated: “They completely smashed it tonight at the Eventim Apollo. What a great show! What a joy!!! Thanks Emily for inviting me. That was just what I needed – a good ol’ dose of Rock Tonic. Folks, you have to see these guys!”

Brian also shared footage from the concert as The Last Dinner Party performed their hit song Nothing Matters.

And if Brian enjoyed himself that night, so did Emily as she got to meet the man she described as a hero in a recent interview with Total Guitar.

As she said of her early days learning to play guitar: “The first few songs I learned were Tears In Heaven by Eric Clapton and loads of Led Zeppelin stuff... all the classics!

“And my original guitar hero has always been Brian May, because I love being able to sing along to the solos. I didn’t even learn them at that point, I was just listening and appreciating because Queen were one of my first musical loves.”

Emily also revealed how she played the role of Brian May in an all-female Queen tribute band in the days before The Last Dinner Party. She performed just one time with this tribute act before the pandemic put an end to their plans, but it was an experience that she learned from greatly.

“I loved Queen and knew it would be fun to learn all the solos and parts,” she said. “We only did one gig in the end, at a Queen convention near Hull. It went great. That probably ended up influencing my rock playing more than anything else, because I spent an entire summer solidly trying to get inside Brian’s playing, hearing all the little details.

“My favourite song to play was Hammer To Fall. That was always fun! Don’t Stop Me Now has a really great solo. Then there’s We Will Rock You, The Show Must Go On, there are so many. A Kind Of Magic was great, especially for those fast staccato licks. I loved it all, to be honest.”

She also cited Brian’s influence on The Last Dinner Party’s album Prelude To Ecstasy, from the soaring modal leads on tracks like Nothing Matters to a lot of the single-note riff ideas in place of the usual chordal approach favoured by many a rock band.

“The single note thing has massively influenced the way I write parts in The Last Dinner Party,” she said. “Listen to what I play on Portrait Of A Dead Girl or Sinner... it’s all single note ideas, which comes from Brian.”

A classic interview with Pantera legend Dimebag Darrell is one of the highlights of the last-ever issue of Total Guitar, which goes on sale this week.

This final issue features excerpts from many other interviews from across the years with cover stars including Jimmy Page, Brian May, Noel Gallagher and Matt Bellamy. But for pure foul-mouthed entertainment, nothing can beat the conversation with a drunk Dimebag from the summer of 2004 - just a few months before the guitarist’s life was cut short.

At one point during this interview, Dime grabbed his new Washburn signature guitar and swung it at the head of TG writer Steve Allsworth. But even as the hangover from hell crept up on him, Dime remained lucid enough to discuss the magic of spontaneous creation.

“I’ve got to the point where I just don’t f*ckin’ practice,” he said. “If I feel it’s slacking, I’ll do a little work. But dude, I’ve been doing this my whole f*cking life! I don’t know all the f*ckin’ scales, but you know what? If I knew all the scales, I’d know what something was gonna sound like before I played it. And then there’d never be that experience of stepping out there and saying, ‘Let me see if I can make this solo fly! Can I get that last lick in there?’ And if you can turn a sour note into a good one just by bending it a half step, you can almost make it sound like it was meant to be!”

And at the end of that interview, the man who would be buried in a Kiss-branded coffin, with one of Eddie Van Halen’s guitars, had some sage advice for TG readers. “As far as guitar playing goes, go to the old school - Randy Rhoads, Tony Iommi, Eddie Van Halen - for the lead chops. And do what’s right for you.”

Total Guitar’s Editor Chris Bird comments: "For me, it has truly been a privilege to work with a frankly awesome team of contributors and colleagues, and to have been able to spend the last 17 years of my life creating lessons and features for you.”

But that’s not the last you will see or hear of him. Chris will go on to a new role as Lessons Editor on MusicRadar and our sister sites GuitarWorld and Guitar Player - serving up high quality tuition content for the guitar-playing community.

If you feel jaded about the amount of remasters and anniversary reissues trying to tempt you to buy albums again that you already own with minimal incentive, we sympathise. We feel it too. But Queen has something that is not that – it's a complete overhaul of the band's 1973 debut album, out 25 October.

“This is not just a remaster, this is a brand new 2024 rebuild of the entire Queen debut album, which, with the benefit of hindsight, we have re-titled Queen I," says Brian May. "It is the debut album we always dreamed of bringing to you.” 

This is indeed the very first time any Queen album has received a new stereo mix, and the 6CD+1LP and book Queen I box set will feature no less than a whopping 63 tracks and 43 new mixes. But away from the impressive numbers, the core album itself is having its original running order restored as the band intended.

Originally, My Fairy King followed Great King Rat, but now the song Mad The Swine has been included on the record as the band originally wanted. The song was reportedly the source of disagreement between Queen and producer Roy Thomas Baker over its drum sound. It would eventually surface in 1991 as the b-side to Headlong after a remix by David Reynolds, But until now has never featured on Queen's debut, which will now has the following tracklisting:

1. Keep Yourself Alive
2. Doing All Right
3. Great King Rat
4. Mad The Swine
5. My Fairy King
6. Liar
7. The Night Comes Down
8. Modern Times Rock 'n' Roll
9. Son And Daughter
10. Jesus
11. Seven Seas Of Rhye...

For a taster of what's to come, you will be able to hear the remixed version of The Night Comes Down on Friday 13 September at 6am PDT / 9am EDT / 2pm BST. 

The boxset casts new light on the original De Lane Lea Studios demo, the album sessions' alternate takes and unused masters, backing tracks and a collection of 1973 BBC sessions. In addition, the sixth disc is devoted to a 1974 set at the Rainbow that features the Free-inspired song Hangman, which wasn't featured on the debut album, or ever tracked in the studio.

At the end of this disc is a fascinating piece of Queen history from the band's archives; recordings of Jesus and the Spencer David Group's I'm A Man recorded at the band's live performance at Imperial College's lecture theatre A.  This August 1970 performance predates even bassist John Deacon's arrival in 1971 and represents the earliest known recordings of Queen in existence.  

The Queen I album is sure to be the main focus here though. “All the performances are exactly as they originally appeared in 1973, but every instrument has been revisited to produce the ‘live’ ambient sounds we would have liked to use originally," explains Brian May. "The result is 'Queen' as it would have sounded with today’s knowledge and technology – a first.”

The formats available on 25 October include 6CD+1LP box set Queen I Collector’s Edition, Vinyl LP Queen I - 2024 Mix, 1 CD, 2CD Deluxe Edition, 1LP Picture Disc and Cassette formats. Preorder here.

Queen guitarist Sir Brian May has revealed that he has suffered a 'minor stroke'.

"I'm here to bring you some good news - the good news is that I can play guitar after the events of the last few days," May, 77, says in the video, moving his fingers to prove the point.

May continues, "I say this because it was in some doubt because that little health hiccup that I mentioned happened about a week ago and what they called it was a minor stroke."

Sir Brian also reveals that he was temporarily unable to use his left arm - "Out of the blue, I didn't have any control over this arm" - but that a 'very exciting' ambulance journey to a local Surrey, UK, hospital led to the 'most fantastic care' from staff there.

"I didn't want to say anything at the time because I didn't want anything surrounding, you know. I really don't want sympathy," May continues.

"Please don't do that because it'll clutter up my inbox and I hate that."

"The good news is I'm okay. Just doing what I'm told, which is basically nothing. I'm grounded."

"I'm not allowed to go out - well, I'm not allowed to drive, not allowed to get on a plane, not allowed to raise the heart rate too high... but I'm good."

It's not Sir Brian's first health scare in recent years. In 2020 he also revealed he'd suffered a heart attack while recovering from a painful, gardening-induced muscle and back injury.

"It's not something that did me any harm," he said at the time. "It was about 40 minutes of pain in the chest and tightness, and that feeling in the arms and sweating."

"I was actually very near death [but] I didn't die. I came out and I would have been full of beans if it hadn't been for the leg."

Brian May, best known for his work with Queen, has many distinctive features. He has one of the most iconic haircuts in rock, he plays a guitar made from a fireplace, has an instantly recognisable guitar tone and pushes Vox AC30s to places that no other mortal has ever pushed them. But when it comes down to chords, we don’t often spend much time talking about Brian. Until now. 

In this lesson we’re going to check out four chords from some Queen classics and look at how Brian uses them, and hopefully inspire your own rhapsodies. 

A6sus4

This chord, features during the intro of the track Hammer to Fall. Brian alternates between the A major chord and the 6sus4 extension for a Keith Richards-style swagger to the intro.

The 6sus4 chord is a very melodic variation to any chord and works great when paired with the major chord (played in an A major form) and moved back and forth.

The easiest way to approach this is to play your A major chord as a first finger barre, then use your second and third fingers to extend the chord.

Play guitar like Queen's Brian May

Dsus4

A big part of the Queen guitar sound is their ability to make everything sound orchestrated. Inside this there is a sense of tension and resolve. Suspended chords are a great way to bring some tension and resolve into your own playing.

At the start of the track Crazy Little Thing Called Love, you hear a simple D chord vamp which alternates between a major and Dsus4 chord. 

This movement sounds melodic, but also creates a resolved sound when the major chord is returned to.

The 10 essential songs beginner guitar players can learn now

A5/E

This chord is a blink and you'll miss it moment in the track Another One Bites the Dust. It appears in the funky rhythm that underpins the verses. Brian hits this A5/E chord in passing between the Emin and Amin chords of this section.

This is an easily transposable shape so can be played anywhere on the guitar.

This is an A5 chord with the 5th (The E) added again in the bass.

A major

In most circumstances an A major chord isn’t all that exciting, but this A major taken from the track We Will Rock You is a little different. 

Instead of the notes of the chord being the Open A and the 2nd fret on the D, G and B strings, those fretted notes have been moved up an octave to the 14th fret. This gives the chord a completely new flavour.

On the track, it actually goes back and forth between A and A6sus4, so brush up on both those shapes!

• 5 songs guitarists need to hear by Brian May

Brian May has revealed that he has spoken with Gibson about the possibility of a US-made version of his iconic Red Special, the electric guitar that he and his father designed that became his go-to instrument for his career.

Speaking to Guitar World, May said it was “not out of the question” that we might see the Red Special manufactured in the USA, perhaps even including a forensic replica from the Gibson Custom Shop’s Murphy Lab.

“We have spoken about such things, and it would be lovely to have an edition of the Brian May guitar based in the States,” says May. “After all, that’s where I started with Guild.”

Brian May’s relationship with Gibson came out of the blue when he joined Jimmy Page and Tony Iommi at the opening of the Gibson Garage London. 

At first blush, the Queen guitarist was the odd man out. Besides occasionally using a Flying V during the 1982 Hot Space Tour, and a Les Paul Deluxe, May has remained faithful to his own design. But the Gibson president and CEO Cesar Gueikian announced at the time that May had joined the Gibson family. That could potentially mean a signature acoustic guitar, but a Gibson-made Red Special would be a no-brainer.

Brian May Guitars presently makes all of its BMG Specials in South Korea. But when the first commercially available replica Red Specials were built, it was in the USA with Guild’s name on the headstock. By the sounds of it, May believes it is high-time there is another USA model.

“Guild made the first Brian May models, and then I went with Burns in [the UK],” he said “And then things changed, and I just wanted to do it myself. Now we have our own Brian May Guitars company here, but to have the facility to have some made in the States would be wonderful.”

Those Guild BM01s from circa ’93 were serious guitars, equipped with Schaller tremolo systems; Seymour Duncan provided the replica Burns Tri-Sonic pickups of May’s original b build. The Burns Red Special later made its debut in 2001.

May describes his relationship with Gibson as “great” but gives no indication as to when we might see these guitars. These days, when Gibson gets something lined up,  it tends to act fast.

If this TBC Gibson-made Red Special replica is a Murphy Lab high-end electric guitar, priced for collectors, you can bet it won’t meet the same fate that befell the first ever Red Special replica, made by John Birch.

As May told MusicRadar, that Birch replica, built as a spare to the original, ended up in pieces at a Queen show in New Jersey, in 1982. Coincidentally, the very same year that May was playing the Flying V.

“I suppose you know the story of its demise? Did I throw it over the amps in a fit of pique? Well, obviously I would never do that,” said May with a laugh. “But yes, I think that’s what happened.”

The Birch replica was restored by English luthier Andrew Guyton in 2006. But it was never going to eclipse the original.

“There were problems,” he said. “It turned out that the pickups didn’t have the warmth that mine had and the guitar was made of different materials, so it really didn’t have the sustain. The tremolo wasn’t as accurate and the neck was a lot thinner, because it was regarded as insane to make a neck as thick as mine.It was closer than the Gibson or the Fender to sounding like my guitar, but it didn’t really fulfil the job very well.”

Brian May might be working with Gibson but the chances of seeing him a Les Paul are slim. He told Guitar World that the Les Paul Deluxe he used as a backup was a beautiful guitar but it just wasn't his style, and he ended up giving it away.

“I had a Les Paul Deluxe for a long time,” he said. “It’s a long story, but sort of a rich sugar daddy of a fan gave it to me. I used it for a while. It was a beautiful instrument, but it was never quite right for my gear.”

You can read the full interview with Brian May in the latest issue of Guitar World, available at Magazines Direct.

Brian May is a fan of Pete Townshend. A huge huge fan, as it turns out.

In an Instagram message he posted on Monday, the curly-mopped Queen legend shared a pic of himself and Townshend and described the Who man as a “hero” who is “the master of mood change, a master of the suspended chord.”

He continued, “I owe so much to him... Pete Townshend’s a god of guitar and always will be! I’d seen him stand there and let the guitar explode into life on its own.”

In a sidebar, May emphasised his admiration for the man: “I’m glad I said this – I probably don’t say it enough,” he said. “I can’t imagine Rock Guitar without Pete Townshend. Looking back, it seems to me he basically invented it!”

“My playing owes so much to him. I’m not talking about the blues-influenced playing which also underpinned the evolution of 70s and 80s rock music - Townshend brought to the scene a blistering clang of super-amplified but not over-saturated chords - razor-edged monoliths crashing angrily through our brains, biting rhythmic hammer blows which would change the likes of me forever.”

And he offered some recommended listening for his younger followers: “Listen to Substitute for a tour de force of gigantic rhythm playing and a lyric ten times as deep as anything out there. Finally listen to the Who’s first chart smash - ‘[I] Can’t Explain’ - along with their version of the classic Summertime Blues. It transformed Rock and Roll into ROCK!!!”

It’s not the first time May has expressed his love of the Who. Talking to Radio 2 last year, he recalled seeing the band on their home turf of Shepherd’s Bush as a teenager. “It was mayhem let loose. It was just so loud, dangerous and anarchic, I guess. This was long before punk. So I think The Who kind of wrote the recipe for punk, if you like. So they played local to us and we went to see them a lot. We followed them, we loved them. They ripped out the rulebook.”

Townshend himself celebrated his 79th birthday last Sunday and an interview in the current edition of Mojo magazine reiterated that “The Who are not done yet.” Though he and Roger Daltrey have no current plans to work together, the guitarist stated “I don’t want to do what I did before and say we’re never going to work again.”

Daltrey, for his part, recently stood down from his role curating the annual Teenage Cancer Trust concerts and has expressed doubts about recording again with the Who. “What's the point of records?” he asked in an NME interview last year. “We released an album four years ago, and it did nothing. It's a great album too, but there isn't the interest out there for new music these days."

Jean-Michel Jarre and Brian May – what took them so long? Because on the evidence of their Bridge From The Future collaboration last night in the city of Bratislava, Slovakia at the STARMUS Festival, they're a progressive match made in heaven.

STARMUS is the globe’s preeminent gathering uniting science, art, and music, co-founded by May to "inspire the next generation of explorers and regenerate the spirit of discovery, engaging humanity with the biggest issues of our time.”

The free 12 May performance with Jean-Michel Jarre in front of 100,000 people opened the five-day event and was also offered to fans around the globe as a live stream (the YouTube clip below will be available for seven days), and the 76-year-old Queen legend was candid about how challenging the performance was for him in rehearsals. 

"This me ... in my mind this morning," he wrote on Instagram the day before the final performance with Jarre and the Slovenská Filharmónia. "I've put a lot of passion and work into preparing this little adventure ... but this is not easy for an old soldier like me. In fact it's probably one of the most challenging things I've taken on for a long time. 

"I felt very dissatisfied with what I came up with at last night's dress rehearsal - so doing a lot of rethinking today while we all wait for showtime to come around," admitted May. "Why do I spend all these precious days away from home ? Pursuing ... what ? And self-doubt rears its scary head to the point where I wonder who the Hell I think I am. 

"These are the kind of thoughts which beset performers, probably especially at my time of life. This is the inner reality. But I'm also conscious I'm incredibly lucky to have an opportunity like this – to work in a completely unfamiliar environment with an extraordinarily talented man with his highly skilled team. Among it all I'm very grateful."

May's care and dedication to getting things right for the fans who attended the show clearly paid off. “It was a blast!" beamed May after the show. "The perfect kick-off for Starmus Earth.”

The two-hour showcase proved the perfect fit for the futurist mindset of STARMUS, with Jarre still pushing the boundaries of the musical experience.

“It’s been 16 years since Brian and I met Jean-Michel in London and proposed to him a collaboration," explained May's STARMUS co-founder Garik Israelian. “We knew that Jean-Michel’s concert involves an ambitious production and never had an opportunity for this. It seems to me that we have been waiting for the Starmus Earth to make it happen. This is the first time STARMUS puts the spotlight on our planet and we want the general public to be more receptive than ever to the big questions of our time, of our planet. 

"There is no doubt that kicking off this special edition with a performance as spectacular as Bridge From The Future" will achieve that goal.  Jean-Michel Jarre has always brought us music from the future to make us vibrate with the present, and that is the spirit of STARMUS.” 

The performance collected workings of Jarre's greatest works with the following setlist:

THE OPENING
EPICA OXYGENE
OXYGENE 2
WEB SPINNER
EQUINOXE 4
EQUINOXE 7
FALLING DOWN
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION PART 2
THE ARCHITECT* (J-M JARRE & E. FROESE)
RENDEZ-VOUS BRATISLAVA
NEW WORLD SYMPHONY BRATISLAVA 2024* (A.DVORAK, ARRANGEMENTS BY J-M-JARRE & B. MAY
EXIT* (J-M JARRE & E. SNOWDEN
AZIMUTH
HERBALIZER
OXYGENE 19
GLORY* (J-M JARRE & A. GONZALEZ(=)
RENDEZ-VOUS 4
STARDUST* (J-M JARRE & A. VAN BUUREN J J D)
BRATISLAVA TIME

May and his Red Special joined for the ambitious New World Symphony that the two forward-thinking musicians arranged for the show. The guitarist summoning soaring and sorrowful ethereal sounds alongside Jarre and the orchestra before a beautiful solo spot for the melody of Largo. It's a reminder of a trailblazer of not just guitar, but how to deliver progressive, genre-melding music for the masses.   

• It’s ‘Jean-Michel flying car’ as the French electronic music pioneer becomes the world’s first passenger in the KleinVision AirCar

Brian May has paid tribute to the late Duane Eddy, describing how the rock ’n’ roll godfather’s Rebel-Rouser changed guitar forever, and recalling the time he met his hero and had the honour of watching him playing his own homemade electric guitar, the Red Special.

Eddy, who died on 30 April, aged 86, following a battle with cancer, was of the first generation of rock ’n’ roll guitar heroes, and his influence left a lasting impression on the generation to follow – not least May. Hearing Eddy’s signature style, picking out notes on the guitar’s lower register, letting them bloom in the reverb, left a lasting impression on the Queen guitarist.

Taking to Instagram, May expressed sorrow at the news of Eddy’s death, calling him an “inspiration and a hero” to both him and his father, sharing pictures of the moment he finally got to meet him backstage at a Queen and Adam Lambert show.

“I was so proud to meet him in 2017 and spend a little time, and proudly invite him to our show in Nashville, Tennessee,” wrote May, appropriately, accompanying the post with some audio courtesy of a bona fide Duane Eddy classic, Rebel Rouser [often stylised as Rebel-‘Rouser] – a composition May wants to talk about.

“This track was one of the very first solo rock guitar hits ever,” he continues. “Duane’s sound was distinctive, original and completely cutting edge at the time. His style involved bending low strings of his guitar, an earthy exciting innovation.” 

Co-written with Lee Hazlewood, released in 1958, Rebel Rouser was sometimes credited to “Duane and his Twangy Guitar” and both are in full effect. There’s something insouciant about Eddy’s note choices; his playing is so spare and yet just enough, speaking to something fundamental about the electric guitar through a tube amp with reverb. It sounds like Sam Elliott's cowboy voice. May says Eddy didn’t need a million notes to be a “revolutionary” guitar player.

“His style involved bending low strings of his guitar, an earthy exciting innovation,” he writes. “The first note of this Rebel Rouser riff is a low F Sharp on the bottom string of his guitar, hit, bent up to a G and back down again before the second note – the low E – is hit. It might sound like nothing out of the ordinary in these days of a million flashy electric guitar players, but at that time it was revolutionary – freeing the guitar from its former stiffness, and making it talk.”

On the London Records pressing of the 7-inch single, the back cover offers some neat biographical detail on Eddy, telling us is an “expert angler” and a strong swimmer, who has a record collection that features Segovia and Satchmo [Louis Armstrong] alike, and that he enjoys pizza and Mexican food. 

But the liner notes' final paragraph is instructive; it sums up neatly what Eddy was getting at with that style. It was adventurous and new and yet there was something unmistakably primal.

“Duane Eddy’s guitar might be characterised as rock-a-billy copiously embellished with the blues,” reads the blurb. “The hallmark of this style is a predominant use of the single bass string which gives us a driving yet haunting quality unmatched for freshness and vitality. There is within his work a certain elemental simplicity wedded to an almost unrestrained primitivism which results in a sound that is exciting even to the most jaded ear.”

Quite so. That was written in 1958. In 2024, that sound still sounds fresh. It is unmistakably the sound of the ‘50s but the passage of time has not shorn it of its power or sense of danger.

Speaking to MusicRadar in 2019, Eddy explained how a modded Magnatone tube amp was a key element to his Rebel Rouser tone.

“There was a bass player in Phoenix named Buddy Wheeler, who was also a pedal steel guitar player,” said Eddy. He and a friend of his, Dick Wilson, who’s a guitar player in Phoenix, modified Magnatone amps. They originally had two Jensen speakers in them. Well, they did away with those and put a 15-inch JBL and a tweeter in the amp, a 100-watt power pack and a spring echo, and then hooked it all together. Then they covered the case with black Naugahyde with a white grille front and charged $100 for it, which was a lot of money in 1957. They did that for several guitar players around town.”

Eddy described the Magnatone as one of the best amps in the world, even better than Chet Atkins’ legendary Standel.

“When I played through the Standel it would break up at a certain point,” he said. “But you couldn’t get mine to break up no matter how hard you hit the notes. They just rang clear as a bell.”

Sadly there is no video footage of Eddy playing May’s Red Special through a Vox AC30, and how that would compare the Gretsch/Magnatone fundamentals of his typical rock ’n’ roll rig. But then May has spoken about this before, telling Total Guitar in 2020 that it wouldn’t matter what Eddy was playing through – he would still sound like him.

“I played with Hank Marvin, and he picked up my guitar and I thought, ‘Oh my god, what’s that going to sound like?’ Well, folks, it sounded like Hank Marvin!” said May. “It’s in the fingers! I’ve had that pleasure of discovery many times. Duane Eddy is the same. It doesn’t matter what guitar he picks up, you know, and he played my guitar when we were on tour, which is a thrill. 

“It’s just there. It’s in the way people play, I think. And I’ve had that said about me. I remember I’ve picked up other people’s guitars and they went, ‘Oh, so it’s not your guitar. It’s you, is it?’ And I go, ‘Well, I dunno!’”

Jimmy Page also posted an Instagram tribute to Eddy. Page would have been 19 when he first saw Eddy play support Gene Vincent at his show at the Granada in Kingston, November 1963.

“Duane Eddy twanged the thang in the late ‘50s and ‘60s and you can hear his character sound appearing throughout the decades of popular music,” wrote Page. “He will be missed and my thoughts are with his family.”

Mark Knopfler’s eagerly anticipated all-star supergroup version of Going Home, his theme to Local Hero, has been released, with the single featuring over 50 legendary guitarists, including the late Jeff Beck, who opens the charity single with a “spellbinding” piece of electric guitar manipulation that would be his last ever recorded solo. 

Now we can finally listen to the track – all nine minutes and 49 seconds of it – can we work out who played what on the track? That is easier said than done. Produced by Knopfler’s long-standing co-producer and Dire Straits keyboardist, Guy Fletcher, Going Home has a credits list that reads like a who’s who of guitar. 

You’ve got David Gilmour, Eric Clapton, Slash, Brian May, Jeff Beck, Steve Cropper, Duane Eddy, Steve Vai, Sheryl Crow, Derek Trucks, Susan Tudeschi, Nile Rodgers, Pete Townshend, Hank Marvin, Tony Iommi, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Armatrading… The list of guitarists goes on and on, with other musical A-listers popping in, all to help raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America

Ringo Starr and his son, Zak Starkey, play drums. Sting plays bass guitar while Roger Daltrey plays harmonica. It’s a bewildering array of talent. Thankfully, a video will be dropping next week with a commentary on who is playing what to help us make sense of it all – though there’s no mistaking the work of Beck, Knopfler, Gilmour or May. 

And the Times has run a report from Paul Sexton – who wrote the sleeve notes – which sheds some more light on the project, which all started with Townshend and Clapton dropping by Knopfler’s British Grove Studios, in Chiswick, west London, followed by Sting and Sam Fender – whom we’d like to think got the same train down from Newcastle – with contributions delivered in-person and digitally from across the globe. 

When it came time to mix, Fletcher had an abundance of material to stitch together, and he got to work on a five-minute edit and the full version that’s being made available on digital platforms. 

He offered some clues as to who is playing what. For starters – and no one needed this one – Jeff Beck is playing the intro, as ever all fingerstyle, on the edge of break-up, jockeying the whammy bar, a performance Knopfler describes as “spellbinding”.

“Once I got Jeff Beck’s contribution, there was no way I was going to mess with that,” Fletcher told the Times. “It was as pure as it can be. What he did with it brings you to tears, it’s absolutely astonishing. Only five or six months after I received it, he passed away. The fact that he’s first is kind of beautiful.”

Fletcher says Armatrading plays electric guitar throughout the track and “just wailed” while there is no shortage of Gilmour for Pink Floyd fans to pick out.

“When David Gilmour came in, he played loads of stuff, but there were certain licks that were just absolutely Gilmour,” said Fletcher. “Same with Ronnie Wood, instant Stones.”

The track grows more rock as it gathers momentum, and much of that was to do with the influence of Queen’s Brian May, who made a telling contribution.

“Brian May did an entire section, about a dozen guitar harmonies, and when he comes in it’s unmistakably Brian,” said Fletcher, who added that Bruce Springsteen's contribution was similarly hard to miss, so keep your ears tuned for a Fender Esquire.

“What I really want to do, more than anything else, is just to thank each and every one for this sterling response,” said Knopfler upon the single's announcement in February. “I really had no idea that it was going to be like this. It hit Guy and I quite early on that we had to extend this piece somehow, to take in the number of people who joined in... I think what we’ve had is an embarrassment of riches, really. The whole thing was a high point.”

Going Home is available now, and it's for a good cause. You can find out more about those causes at Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America. 

Going Home (Theme From Local Hero) credits

• Joan Armatrading, Jeff Beck, Richard Bennett, Joe Bonamassa, Joe Brown, James Burton, Jonathan Cain, Paul Carrack, Eric Clapton, Ry Cooder, Jim Cox, Steve Cropper, Sheryl Crow, Danny Cummings, Roger Daltrey, Duane Eddy, Sam Fender, Guy Fletcher, Peter Frampton, Audley Freed, Vince Gill, David Gilmour, Buddy Guy, Keiji Haino, Tony Iommi, Joan Jett, John Jorgenson, Mark Knopfler, Sonny Landreth, Albert Lee, Greg Leisz, Alex Lifeson, Steve Lukather, Phil Manzanera, Dave Mason, Hank Marvin, Brian May, Robbie McIntosh, John McLaughlin, Tom Morello, Rick Nielsen, Orianthi, Brad Paisley, Nile Rodgers, Mike Rutherford, Joe Satriani, John Sebastian, Connor Selby, Slash, Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr and Zak Starkey, Sting, Andy Taylor, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, Ian Thomas, Pete Townshend, Keith Urban, Steve Vai, Waddy Wachtel, Joe Louis Walker, Joe Walsh, Ronnie Wood, Glenn Worf, Zucchero.

Gibson was not messing around at the launch event of the Gibson Garage London, flexing its convening powers to summon the three kings of rock guitar to celebrate the opening of its new flagship retail store. 

There they were: Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, and Queen’s Brian May, all gathered to mark the occasion. All legends of guitar. Immortals. 

But there was an odd man out in May, a player who was so unconvinced by the existing electric guitars on the '60s market that he was compelled to build his own, famously hacking up the fireplace and, with the help of his father, building the Red Special. The rest is history. He has rarely been seen without it ever since.

Something was afoot, or rather something is afoot, because as Gibson president and CEO, Cesar Gueikian announced, May had joined the Gibson family – and it wasn’t just for occasions like this, lending his ceremonially regal poise and bonhomie to gala events and catching up with old friends – “a couple of promising young guitarists” – in the process.

Gibson, which used yesterday’s event to announce an epic “multi-year partnership” with Jimmy Page, with signature guitars incoming, has been uncharacteristically coy when it comes to May, sharing no details. But the Nasvhille guitar giant and the Queen guitarist are definitely cooking up something. The question is what?

Is it a new guitar? Over the years May has drafted some pinch-hitters to stand in for the Red Special. On the 1982 Hot Space Tour that was a Gibson Flying V, pictured at the top of the page. It’s a little weird seeing May with a Flying V, but this was the ‘80s, when he even used a Washburn V-style back then, notably in the video for Princes Of The Sea. That said, May does wear the Tobacco Burst Flying V well.

He has also used a Les Paul on occasion, and defers to a Fender Telecaster when playing Crazy Little Thing Called Love. And yet, although it is not that strange to see him something other than the Red Special, the unique pickup switching system on his own design is integral to his sound – there is no way, zero, that he is going to be changing now. 

He did also use a nylon-string Gibson Chet Atkins acoustic electric guitar in the ‘80s, particularly for Who Wants To Live Forever.

“I have a feeling that’s the guitar on the record too, but I wouldn’t swear to it,” May told MusicRadar. “It has that lovely mellow, gut string sound. When we came across that guitar it was quite a revelation as trying to mic up acoustic guitars on stage is a nightmare, and it worked really well.”

But with May a long-standing fan of Ovation acoustics it seems unlikely that he would be developing a signature acoustic and leaving it at that. A more tantalising prospect would be a partnership that saw May’s Red Special manufactured under license by Gibson in the USA, offering it as a complementary high-end option to his current range of Red Specials, presently made under his own brand, Brian May Guitars. 

May’s BMG Specials are all made in South Korea, and are sensibly priced for amateurs. A US build, particularly if it involved the Gibson Custom Shop, could offer a something extra special (the Gibson x Brian May Red Extra Special?) for the collector’s market, and the Queen super fan with deeper pockets. Time will tell. 

What is for sure is that May enjoyed Gibson’s new hang out space and offered his stamp of approval, describing it as a dream guitar shop.

“The new Gibson Garage London will be just what we all used to dream a guitar shop should be,” he said. “A place where a young player can feel welcome and mix with the finest instruments, amps, and ancillary gear – and NOT be told to keep their hands to themselves! It's a new era in Rock – and the Twang is still the Thang!”

The Gibson Garage London opens tomorrow, 24 February. We'll let Gibson president and CEO Cesar Gueikian tell you what guitarists can expect inside.

• Brian May on 9 Queen guitars that aren't his Red Special

Queen legend Sir Brian May breaks down his playing on some of the band's biggest songs in the new issue of Total Guitar magazine. And amongst the classics including Bohemian Rhapsody and We Will Rock You is the Roger Taylor-penned track with the 'shreddy' guitar breaks May likes to have fun with live – and it involves a lot of improvisation and rocket fire. 

"I don’t usually play them these days!" says May of the fast runs on the recorded versions of A Kind Of Magic – a song that's also tabbed in full in the new issue of Total Guitar. "I just like to go off and do my own thing, really. It’s an opportunity to have some fun with it. And if I was actually going to play those licks, it would be like being in a straitjacket because they’re difficult to play and I would be worried about my fingers being in the right place – and I don’t enjoy that! I’d much prefer to just do what comes into my head. 

"And that’s one of the places in the show these days where I have no idea what I’m going to play when I get to that solo," he adds. "And I like it to be that way, so it can go anywhere."

One of the added ways May has fun with the song on tour with singer Adam Lambert is with some added rocket power.

"I also have an extra weapon, which is the rocket I use," he explains to Total Guitar. "You know, we fire rockets during this song. I fire the rocket. It’s a childish toy, but it means that I can fire rockets in the air exactly the way I always dreamed of doing it when we made the video for that song."

In the song's video from 1986, May has animated fireworks coming out of the headstock of his Red Special. Now he can do it for real thanks to a modification on a designated guitar with the pyro-launching equipment built onto it. 

"Yes, it is childish, but it gives me such a lot of pleasure," says the guitarist. And I can do it whenever I want. It’s a surprise for the audience. And the solo builds itself around that.

"So, those are the little peaks where the rockets come out," he adds. "And I kind of fill in the gaps and try to lead the audience towards wondering what’s going to happen next. I have a lot of fun with it really. To me, it’s a lot better than kind of showing off and doing the fast stuff. There is a little bit of fast stuff still in it, but it’s basically playing with the audience. That’s what I like to do at that point."

May's improvisational runs on the song are in stark contrast to his approach to recreating his memorable solo on Don't Stop Me Now live.

"I’ve had years and years to live with it, and every time the solo comes up live, I think, well, actually I can’t do much better than that!" says May. "So I tend to play it more or less as it is on the record – with little variations. But it just works as a counter melody for the main melody."

• Buy the new issue of Total Guitar with the full Brian May interview, a lesson on the essential techniques behind 13 of Queen's greatest songs, plus full tab for A Kind Of Magic here. 

Brian May has revealed that Under Pressure originally sounded like the Who until David Bowie removed all of his heavy electric guitar, much to the Queen guitarist’s disappointment.

In a recent interview with Total Guitar, May looked back on the 1981 collaboration between Queen and Bowie with mixed feelings. 

There was no questioning the success of the track. It was a UK number one single. It found two of rock’s greatest vocalists, Freddie Mercury and David Bowie, at the peak of their powers. Its pop-cultural legacy is assured, and it would remain a staple of Queen’s live set.

The problem was that May really liked how the track was shaping up and Bowie didn’t share that vision. The end result was very different to how May imagined it.

“And I was beaming because I liked The Who,” says May. “I remember saying to David, ‘Oh, it sounds like The Who, doesn’t it?’ He says, ‘Yeah, well it’s not going to sound like The Who by the time I’ve finished with it!’ You know, in a joking kind of way. But he didn’t want it to be that way.”

This was a more innocent era. The sessions for Under Pressure began in the best possible way – an after-hours session in the studio following a night out. Nothing helps the digestion better. And May had hit his straps with some big rhythm guitar parts that Pete Townshend would have been proud of.

“It was all done spontaneously in the studio very late at night after we had a meal and a lot of drinks,” said May. “And it was a pretty heavy backing track. When it gets to ‘Why can’t we give love’, we were all working on it together, and it sounded like The Who. It sounded massively chord-driven.”

It was also closer to how Queen would perform it live, with May playing rhythm guitar on electric, but all that remained was acoustic guitar, and the sense of a chance missed.

“Even the main riff, I played that electric, pretty much in the sort of arpeggiated style which I do live now,” says May. “But that never made it into the mix. What they used was the acoustic bits which were done first as a sort of demo.”

But May was not going to pick a fit. Not on this occasion. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valour, and he could see the tension rising before his eyes. A storm was coming in the shape of the “awesome creative forces” of Mercury and Bowie.

“I think it’s probably the only time in my career I bowed out, because I knew it was going to be a fight,” he says. “So basically it was Freddie and David fighting it out in the studio with the mix. And what happened in the mix was that most of that heavy guitar was lost.”

“I never liked it, to be honest, the way it was mixed,” May continued. “But I do recognise that it works. We we play it quite a bit different live… it is a lot heavier and I think it benefits from it.” 

You can read the full interview in the latest issue of Total Guitar, available now from Magazines Direct.

Of all the bonafide rock guitar heroes, none are as open and willing to be vulnerable in the public sphere as Brian May. It's made him more heroic in ways few could have expected, and while he's been open about his mental health in recent years, the Queen legend revealed he still has feelings of imposter syndrome during a recent appearance on classical guitarist Rosie Bennet's Fret Not podcast. It's a reminder that our psychological struggles don't just fade away in response to perceived success.

"All the time," May confirms when Bennet asked if he's ever suffered from the feelings of not belonging, or being worthy enough that 'imposter syndrome' summarises. "I always walk into a room even now, and I'm supposed to be Sir Brian May, and I think, 'Ooh, what do people think? Maybe I shouldn't be here.' Yeah, I get that a lot and until people start speaking to me I always assume that A) they don't know who I am and B) they wouldn't be interested anyway, and C) I'm gonna bore them to death. I get that a lot."

It's an incredibly candid admission in a revealing interview, one that many of us can surely relate to in our own ways. The guitarist goes on to explain that those feelings haven't gone away with time, even though he's more acclaimed as an artist, and as the world's foremost guitar icon in the science world, than ever. But for him at least, it has an upside. 

"I don't think it ever really goes away, and then logic tells you, 'Oh, ok I'm that person and people will expect this, they won't expect me to be a 16-year-old anymore, they expect me to know what I'm doing. In a way, it's a healthy thing because it stops you from getting too arrogant and making assumptions. So it doesn't bother me that much. 

"I feel it even more in scientific circles I think, because I went away from science and then I came back. And I did get my PHD [in 2007] without any jigger- pokery – they were really hard on me, I know that for a fact. I didn't get it easy. But nevertheless, I feel like I went away from that community and then came back, so I do think, am I justified in calling myself an astronomer and an astrophysicist? Sometimes I think I'm not but I have my own niche that I do. And the niche that I have in astrophysics is the stereoscopic niche, so I do astro-stereo photography, and there ain't many people in the world that do that so I can kind of hold my head up in that little tiny area."

 Check out the full interview above.

• 5 songs guitarists need to hear by… Brian May

Brian May is a man of simple pleasures. He likes Vox AC30 tube amp combos and treble boosters. He likes volume. And he gets results, with an electric guitar tone that is reference quality for generations of players. But even the Queen guitarist gets plagued by RF noise on occasion, and his long-time tech Pete Malandrone has revealed they are trialling a secret weapon to cut it out.

In a recent rig tour segment with The Red Special Guitar Podcast, Malandrone says they have added a rack-mounted Bettermaker mastering EQ unit to May’s rig for his upcoming dates with Queen and Adam Lambert in an afford to nix troublesome frequencies at source. 

“It enhance the sound. It doesn’t change the sound. But hopefully it will help me get rid of spurious, horrible RF noise, which is the scourge of every radio system in the world because of the amount of digital stuff that is floating around the world these days,” he says.

The Bettermaker has four stereo parametric filters with 15dB of boost and cut which can be used to help cut noise out. It is also equipped a scanner that allows Malandrone to look for any noise. 

Once he locates the noise, if it is outwith the guitar’s range of frequencies he can target it with the parametric EQ and adjust accordingly, taking it out of the signal. If the noise is outside of the guitar’s frequency range, 200Hz to 8kHz, it can be taken out without affecting May’s tone. 

But if it is within the guitar’s frequency range then Malandrone and – and May – have a decision to make, whether to duck the frequency entirely, or incrementally, affecting the guitar's tone, or ot just leave it be.

One of the biggest problems with noise is that the conditions are always changing. No two nights will be the same. Some venues are worse than others. The problem frequencies change, and on some occasions there is no getting around it. In a worst-case scenario, Malandrone will mute May whenever he stops playing.

Malandrone says deploying the Bettermaker is “admitting defeat” but it might just be able to help them disguise noise and take an ad hoc approach to cleaning it up.

“This is a tool just to try, really,” he says. “I’d say it is a bit of an unknown quantity. But we’re going on tour with it and if he doesn’t like it we take it out. We take it out and use it as a tool when we need it.”

That signal is sent via a buffered, transformer-isolated path to May’s main rig, into the wah, then back into the rig to be split into a stereo signal. A lot of May’s gear has been custom-made by Nigel Knight, of Knight Audio Technologies (KAT) fame. He even converted May’s signature DigiTech Red Special pedal to a rack-mounted unit that is used solely for Tie Your Mother Down. 

Speaking to MusicRadar in 2020, Malandrone explained how the solo required May to execute a pickup change and play slide, and using this rack-mounted version of the pedal was a neat workaround.

“When he plays the slide solo he switches to another pickup setting but he’s always struggled to pick the slide out of the strap, set the pickups right and hit the note at the start,” he said. “So I suggested putting a DigiTech in and having it on the Tie Your Mother Down solo setting. That way I could do it so he didn’t have to fiddle about with the switches on the guitar.”

You can subscribe to The Red Special Guitar Podcast on YouTube, watch Malandrone walk through May’s 2023 live rig above, and compare it with his 2020 rig here on MusicRadar. With the notable exception of the Bettermaker, not much has changed. Brian May certainly isn't changing. 

As Malandrone noted in 2020, it's about making the rig work. Noise problems were part of the job.

"Absolutely, that’s my main responsibility... it’s my job to both keep it the same and make it more reliable,” he said. “He’s not going to use a Fractal rackmount, have all the gear under the stage and use in-ears, – he’s just not. 

"He wants to hear three screaming AC30s behind him thumping him in the back. He wants monitors and noise everywhere, he wants excitement, and he wants it to sound like it did in 1986. Hopefully it sounds better now than it did then!” 

Guitar solos – we love them. A great guitar solo can elevate a great song to the higher level. And many of us can learn a lot  the skills and styles of the idols that managed that rare combination.

In this lesson we’re going to be talking a look at 10 great electric guitar solos from artists including Queen and John Mayer, then discussing what we can learn from each of them. We’re not going to break down the solos note by note, but what we are going to do is consider the concepts behind the solos and how we can use those ideas in our own guitar playing to become better players.

Let’s dive right on in!

1. Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody

This solo features a bunch of cool tricks that we can learn from. Firstly, Brian May plays very melodically throughout, there are always strong melody lines that you can hook onto.

The way this solo is executed is also interesting. Brian plays with a slightly sloppy manner with lots of string rakes. This approach gives the melody a very vocal feel, it makes the notes feel slightly looser while still being on time.

There are also various fast picked runs which Brian plays in his usual 'orchestral'-style approach. 

The solo sits in the C natural minor scale throughout and makes use of exploring the higher registers of the fretboard. When learning this solo be sure to apply lots of Brian’s trademark fast vibrato and don’t be afraid to dig into the notes.

2. Guns N Roses – Welcome to the Jungle

This solo from the opening track to Appetite For Destruction is not really a 'typical' guitar solo. This appears during a short break in the front half of the track and actually focuses more on some rhythmic elements to start off.

The first few bars of this are a series of double stops and dyads played with some muted notes. 

This is interesting because it shows us how we can make use of rhythm inside a guitar solo. Guitar solos don’t always need to feature single note scale runs.

This solo does then break out into some regular Slash-style licks, including some slinky string bends and some laid back phrasing.

The original track was recorded in Eb, but for the purpose of this video, the version you hear me play has been re-pitched to standard tuning.

3. Cream – Sunshine of Your Love

This Eric Clapton solo from '60s supergroup Cream is jam-packed full of great licks to learn from. The solo is very blues-based and has a very loose feel throughout. Clapton was a disciple of the blues and many of the tricks he employs in this solo come from that school.

It has a lot of great things you can learn but two elements are particularly worth honing in on.

Firstly, his use of fast slurs. This is not a fast solo in the conventional sense, but there are a few passages where Clapton introduces some speedy lines where the notes slur together. The slurs make it verge on sloppy, but in this context it works great.

His use of overbends is also interesting. There are a few instances where you’ll see tone and a half, or even two tone bends used throughout the solo.

It sits mostly in the key of D minor, leaning heavily into the pentatonic shapes, but there are a few outside notes thrown in here and there for good measure.

4. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Californication

This solo from Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante is a masterclass in just how a few simple notes can make a great solo.

This solo doesn’t contain all the usual flashy scale runs that you expect from a guitar solo. It’s a very understated solo that follows a simple melody line throughout, never losing sight of the song that underpins it.

This solo is also played completely clean. This means, the focus is really on playing the notes correctly and pitching the string bends right. Even though there aren’t a lot of notes, playing something even slightly wrong with this tone would be very revealing.

This is a great example on how to build a great guitar solo without overplaying.

5. The Eagles – Hotel California

When it comes to iconic guitar solos, Hotel California is very high on most peoples lists. This is a monster of a solo which can teach us so many things.

This is actually a twin guitar solo where two players trade off, but for the purpose of this, we’ll view it as a single solo.

This solo, played by Don Felder and Joe Walsh, has some great phrasing which switches between rock and country style playing. While this solo is not the most difficult to learn, it has some challenging phrases and technical sections inside it. 

Firstly we have a lot of country style staccato playing, keeping notes and string bends short and snappy. This is a great way to add some urgency to your licks.

Secondly we have lots of string bending. For this, your bends need to be very accurate. The Eagles were always very precise and meticulous in their approach to soloing and it was rarely sloppy. There are some challenging bending licks in this song. Check out the lick that starts at 10:14 on the video below with a bend on the High E and release the note on the B string mid bend!

If the first few minutes of licks wasn’t enough, there is also a twin guitar harmony section to finish!

6. Led Zeppelin – Stairway to Heaven

This solo often ranks high on Greatest Guitar Solos lists, and sure, it’s an iconic track, but what can we learn from this track?

Sure, it’s banned in pretty much every guitar store in the world, but it’s jam packed full of useful tricks and tips that we can use in our own playing.

The track is centred around the key of A minor, with Jimmy Page using his preferred scale of choice, the A natural minor scale. The reason this scale choice is interesting is because it’s a minor pentatonic with an addition 2 and b6 interval, two intervals that Page leans into a lot in this song.

The open lick itself ends on the b6 which is not the note we’d typically finish a pentatonic looking run on.

The solo is great for showcasing how repetition can be used to great effect and it also shows you how to get the most out of exploring the entire fretboard inside a single guitar solo. It also allows you to throw all your tricks on the table. It’s packed with great phrasing, fast rock licks, overbends and legato sections. 

7. Metallica – Nothing Else Matters

Metallica guitar solos are often faced paced, high-octane solos, but in this tender Black Album metal ballad, frontman and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield takes over lead duties for a solo that is jam packed with melody.

This solo sits in the key of E minor and uses the natural minor scale. 

It’s a fantastic showcase for writing a guitar solo with a strong melody line. It’s the sort of solo that once you’ve learnt it, you can sing it in your head every time. It’s got plenty of emotive string bends and soaring melodies.

Inside the solo you’ll see plenty of familiar looking licks and scale shapes, but the focus here is on the phrasing and how the notes are played.

8. John Mayer - Gravity

This solo is becoming a great reference point for modern guitar players and when you listen to it, you might instantly think it sounds pretty straightforward. It’s got a strong melody that you can sing, and there aren’t any fast licks needed here.

The two biggest takeaways from this are playing with the correct emotion, and thinking outside the scale shapes.

John Mayer actually lays out a lot of the G major licks in this solo along a single string, which allows access to all the same notes, but with a wider movement needed. Now this may seem more difficult on paper, but it allows for a very different style of articulating and moving in and out of notes. You’ll notice a lot of small, almost accidental slides inside this.

Learning to solo along a single string really makes  you focus on the melody that you’re playing.

There is also plenty of room in this to ensure that you’re playing each note with the intended emotion. Focus on your pick attack and your vibrato, nothing should sound forced.

9. The Beatles – Let It Be

The Beatles knew a thing or two about catchy melodies, and the solo from Let It Be is no exception. The entire solo remains faithful to serving the song and keeping a strong melody throughout.

It’s very easy for guitar players to get side tracked when building solos and this track shows you that you can play a lot of notes but still serve the song in the right way.

Technique-wise, most of this solo is based around some simple pentatonic shapes and patterns that you have no doubt used a hundred times already. 

There is one small section with some string skipping and a country style bend which is also fun skill to bring to your own solos. But, for the most part, this solo teaches us to use our ears and listen to what the song wants us to play.

10. AC/DC – Highway to Hell

This solo is pretty straight ahead. It’s jam packed with Angus Young’s favoured rock 'n' roll guitar licks from his idol Chuck Berry. Think lots of double stops and lots of string bends.

This solo starts in A minor, but actually switches to major halfway through. 

The main thing to take away from a solo like this is that sometimes, simple is best. This solo is very primitive and the whole aim behind it is to play some simple, but cool sounding licks, aggressively. It doesn’t feature anything flash and it doesn’t feature anything the song doesn’t need.

Technique wise, you’ll want to focus on the double stop and string bend combos that crop up throughout as well as the country style bends that happen when the song switches to major.

When playing in this style, the vibe of how you play is more important than the precision in which you play it.

The 10 essential guitar riffs for beginners to learn

Brian May has joined the chorus of musicians who have raised concerns over generative AI and the future of the music industry, with the Queen guitarist warning that the technology will have transformed society within the year.

AI might not have the imagination nor the wherewithal to construct a homemade electric guitar out of a fireplace, as May and his father did with the Red Special, but its capability to replicate the sound of established artists and create new music in that style has the potential to disrupt the music business as we know it. 

In a recent interview with Guitar Player, May admitted he was “apprehensive” about how the issue of authorship will play out in the era of generative AI. 

“My major concern with it now is in the artistic area. I think by this time next year the landscape will be completely different. We won’t know which way is up,” he said. “We won’t know what’s been created by AI and what’s been created by humans. Everything is going to get very blurred and very confusing.”

May is no luddite. He is a man of science, with a PhD in astrophysics from Imperial College London. May acknowledges that there will be great benefits from AI, specifically its capacity for problem solving. But there are dangers, and May believes we will soon see what implications generative AI has for the music industry.

“I think we might look back on 2023 as the last year when humans really dominated the music scene,” he said. “I really think it could be that serious, and that doesn’t fill me with joy. It makes me feel apprehensive, and I’m preparing to feel sad about this.”

If it’s any consolation, the music business will be the least of our worries. 

“The potential for AI to cause evil is, obviously, incredibly huge… nobody dies in music, but people can die if AI gets involved in politics and world domination for various nations.”

May’s words on authorship echo similar sentiments shared by Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid. Speaking to the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast in July, Reid said we had created a technology that is challenging our uniqueness as humans, and just as no one has an idea where this is heading exactly, there is no going back – just as there is no going back from a streaming model that creates a hostile financial environment for aspiring pro musicians.

“The concern for me is what would stop a music streaming service from creating a completely artificial artist, give that person a name and a biography just to see what happens – see if they get likes?” he said. 

As for replicating a guitar player’s soloing style, rendering that from scratch, Reid struck a more optimistic note. The nuances in how a player touched the guitar would be difficult to model.

“This is where it's tricky,” said Reid. “Because it's not just about playing super-fast notes. It will have to do things like bending a note and doing a vibrato – that’s a physical activity. I’m talking about sliding your finger on the fretboard, not even talking about using an actual slide. 

“Those are very particular and very personal signature things… I would like to think it can’t be modelled. I would like to think so, but [already] now there are plenty of bands that don’t have amps onstage.” You can check out the full conversation with Reid above.

• "It's always going to be very biased towards the data it's trained on" – Red Hot Chili Peppers and Adele mixing engineer Andrew Scheps shares his views on AI machine learning, and his tips

"Queen was very much more than what you hear on the Greatest Hits album," Brian May tells Vulture.com in a new interview. Indeed! We all love the anthems but some of Queen's most fascinating music lies deeper in the catalogue – we love a bit of Ogre Battle from Queen II ourselves, but May's pick for an overlooked gem comes from a later album. 

"All those billions of streams are from the Greatest Hits," adds the grand wielder of the Red Special. "That’s a separate thing. We have a whole career of creating music in the album format. There’s a lot of depth there, which you don’t generally hear unless you go into it as a devotee, if you like."

That means there's a lot of material that May would have liked to have seen get more attention. He's certainly not bitter about it, but there's one song that highlights in particular – and it sits on 1975's A Night At The Opera alongside Bohemian Rhapsody, You're My Best Friend and Love Of My Life. 

"There’s a million things I wish, in a sense, had gotten a lot of attention. I suppose The Prophet’s Song prevails the most," May reveals. "It was the antithesis of Bohemian Rhapsody and on the same album. . Only a few people who are very into the depths of Queen through the years are really aware of what The Prophet’s Song means. 

"I’m not going to say I’m unhappy because it’s okay. It really is," he adds. "The people who are into that stuff are very into it. They understand it, and they get it. They would regard The Prophet’s Song as much of an encyclopedia of Queen as Bohemian Rhapsody was on the other side. That isn’t anywhere near a billion streams. It just sits on an album there, and people who really want to get into Queen are aware of what that was and what it is."

Dedicated Queen fans hold the Brian May-penned song in high esteem – the boldness of its acapella vocal harmony breakdown part overshadows any of that craft on Bohemian Rhapsody. Its ambitious complexity suggests the band would have swerved from playing the song live. But this is Queen - and Freddie pulled off The Prophet's Song's mid-section using vocal delay here at Hyde Park in 1976. It reminds us again just how progressive Queen were in their approach to rock. 

This 1977 Earl's Court footage is a wonderful showcase too – developing the vocal effects further. A full-blown vocal solo in a rock song.

"But by the time we get to A Night At The Opera, it’s a staple thing," May told Total Guitar about the use of delay. "There’s a lot of it in that album, and we’re doing it with the vocals as well in The Prophet’s Song – getting Freddie in there with the same kind of gear and encouraging him to experiment as well.”

For newcomers to Queen, The Prophet's Song is a treasure waiting to be discovered.

“With The Prophet’s Song, it’s kind of a light that got hidden under a bushel," May told Total Guitar. "But the positive is that it’s a deep side of Queen, which people get into when they start exploring. It’s a nice thing for them to discover and get excited about."

But for a lot of people, Queen are defined by their anthems, and May clearly understands this – and never loses his appreciation. 

"I’m getting all esoteric about the deep tracks of Queen, but you can’t knock having a hit," he admits to Vulture. "There’s an old saying from Tin Pan Alley, which goes, 'A hit is a hit is a hit.' You can’t argue with the fact that a hit gets to people, and it becomes embedded in their lives forever. Whenever they hear the strains of that song, a whole flood of emotions will come back into their body. That’s a precious thing. 

"We’re so privileged to have so many hits, which are bound up with peoples’ lives and always will be," he concludes. "We can play a concert and play the first couple of notes of any song and feel that emotional response right away. It’s amazing. What a wonderful thing to have in your quiver of arrows."

• Classic interview: Brian May on the guitar greats and the magic of The Riff – "It's a basic, primal need"

In a new interview with Vulture.com, Queen legend Brian May is reflecting on on his band's back catalogue with typical candidness, and when asked what he considers his personal guitar highlight on record he doesn't hesitate to focus in on the highlight of 1974's Sheer Heart Attack album.

"The first time I felt there was a shining moment on something was a song I didn’t organically fit into that well in the beginning," he admits. "That would be “Killer Queen. I was ill in the hospital when the band started laying it down. They had already recorded some harmonies for it and some chorus vocals. I felt they were very harsh, and it didn’t quite fit the song. So Freddie said, 'That’s okay, darling. We’ll do it again when you come out. We’ll scrub it all, and we’ll start again,' which they did. We started singing the harmonies — and again, realized this was a monumental song."

It was when May started to piece together the guitar arrangement for Freddie Mercury's song that things went to a whole new level. May was emerging as a guitar hero with Queen, but one who seemed to bring a whole new approach to the way the instrument was used and perceived in rock.

"I got into this business of using the guitar as an orchestral instrument," he notes. "It was always part of my dream. But it happened more and more as time went on. The solo for Killer Queen is a three-part thing. I don’t think anyone else had ever attempted something like that. 

"There’s three parts not just paralleling each other in harmony, but, as a counterpoint, working off each other," describes the newly-knighted guitarist. "There’s this little bell effect, which I stole from a traditional jazz group called the Temperance Seven. That’s something in my DNA. I love the business of adding instruments in and building up harmonies. 

"So it came out of my head, and I was able to translate it into the guitar very quickly in the studio, even though it’s fairly complex. For the first time, I had a real exposition of the way I wanted guitars to work. I could take things to the next level of the guitar — not just being something you could play or put a harmony line on. It could be a place where you’re treating the guitar like Glenn Miller would treat his brass, by giving each a voice and a chance to express itself."

Tonally it's a signature moment too, and we included it our rundown of 25 landmark guitar tones – the short room delay and hot-rodded Vox AC30 goodness is the fire at the heart of May's visionary composition. 

"Each of those parts is played with my kind of passion, and it all fits together," he tells Vulture. "I love that track. I think it’s a perfect example of my guitar playing. It’s not wildly exciting and heavy and explosive, but it fits the song really nicely. I love that song as a work of art. I think it’s one of Freddie’s masterpieces. It’s a triumph of having lots of stuff in it but having lots of space, which is hard to do. It’s like a painting. Imagine a Baroque painting. Everything has its space and can be enjoyed in an uncluttered kind of way."

Read the full interview at Vulture.com 

• Brian May of British rock band Queen in concert in London, 1974