Every musician has a moment in their young life when they connect with music in such a powerful way that they know this is what they were born to do. For Dan Hawkins, guitarist in The Darkness, it happened at the age of seven when he heard a Queen album for the very first time.

Hawkins recalls to MusicRadar: “My dad had gone to buy an MG sports car and I went with him. The car was a wreck but it had this amazing top-of-the-range Blaupunkt stereo – and on the journey back home, my dad played a cassette of A Night At The Opera and it blew my mind.”

He adds: “At that point, even at that early age, I decided pursue a career and a life rocking!”

More than four decades later, Hawkins is still living that dream. In addition, since 2015 he’s had Rufus Tiger Taylor, son of Queen legend Roger Taylor, alongside him as the drummer in The Darkness.

And the Queen connections don’t end there. The Darkness’s second album, 2005’s One Way Ticket To Hell... And Back, was produced by Roy Thomas Baker, who worked with Queen on A Night At The Opera and four other albums – Queen, Queen II, Sheer Heart Attack and Jazz.

Hawkins says of A Night At The Opera: “It’s the best album ever made! It’s so diverse, it transcends any sort of rock boundaries – even within the first two songs, from Death On Two Legs, an awesome rocking romp, to Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon, which is like a 1930s ode to boating! You’re thrown straight into the unknown.”

Hawkins picks two songs written by guitarist Brian May as highlights from this album.

“The Prophet’s Song is amazing,” he says. “Knowing a fair bit about production and having been friends with Roy Thomas Baker, I realise that the work that was put into that one song was more than most bands put into their whole albums.

“Obviously Bohemian Rhapsody is on there too, and it’s nice when a band’s biggest hit is on their best album, but I don’t think of A Night At The Opera as the album with Bohemian Rhapsody on it, I think of it as the album with 39 on it, which is my favourite Queen song.

“39 is one of those songs that grabs me emotionally, although for years I didn’t realise it was about travelling through time in deep space – quite obviously a song written by Brian May!

“When The Darkness were planning to play at Hyde Park with Queen and Paul Rodgers, just before the 7/7 London bombings [in 2005], I was going to play 39 with Brian. That would have been a dream, because that song, and the whole album, means so much to me.”

However, Hawkins did eventually get to jam with his hero. In 2011 May joined The Darkness on stage at London’s Hammersmith Apollo to perform a three-song encore of two Darkness songs, Bareback and I Believe In A Thing Called Love, plus Queen’s Tie Your Mother Down.

“That song is a very important part of the Queen canon,” Brian May said. “It’s perhaps our biggest song ever in terms of sales.”

The legendary guitarist was talking about Another One Bites The Dust, the disco-influenced track from 1980 that hit the top 10 in the UK and all over the world and became the band’s second US No 1.

It was also Queen’s first No 1 to be written by someone other than Freddie Mercury. The singer’s magnum opus Bohemian Rhapsody was the band’s first No 1 in 1975 – in the UK and across Europe. And his rock ’n’ roll throwback Crazy Little Thing Called Love was their first US No 1 in 1979.

But it was bassist John Deacon who composed funk-powered Another One Bites The Dust – a song influenced by Chic and loved by Michael Jackson.

Deacon had been at New York’s Power Station Studios when Chic were recording their 1979 album Risqué, which featured the classic Good Times, itself a US No 1 smash.

Inspired by that song and especially the contribution of bassist Bernard Edwards, Deacon began playing around with the simple bass riff that became the backbone of Another One Bites The Dust.

In an interview with Bassist & Bass Techniques, Deacon recalled: “I listened to a lot of soul music when I was in school and I've always been interested in that sort of music. I’d been wanting to do a track like Another One Bites The Dust for a while, but originally all I had was the line and the bass riff. I could hear it as a song for dancing but had no idea it would become as big as it did.”

By 1979, Deacon had already proved himself as a songwriter with the singles You’re My Best Friend and Spread Your Wings.

However, when sessions for Queen’s eighth album, The Game, began at Musicland studios in Munich, there was resistance to Deacon’s new song – mainly from drummer Roger Taylor.

As Brian May recalled in a 2024 interview with Total Guitar: “Roger actually didn’t want to have it on the album. Didn’t like it. It was much too funky and not enough rock for him.

“I was a bit on the fence. I kind of enjoyed it. But it obviously wasn’t the rock that I would have been creating.”

He also confirmed that Deacon – whom he affectionately referred to as Deacy – played the funk rhythm guitar on the track, while May provided the rock licks.

“I don’t think I was on it at all to start off with!” May said. “Because he [Deacon] was hell bent on getting what he wants. So it’s his rhythm guitar playing – it’s not mine. That very funky style, that’s John.

“And he wanted Roger to have a sort of disco-type sound. And it’s all done on a loop, so Roger reluctantly put loads of tape on his drums and played very stiff, and Deacy made a loop out of it. So it starts to be unnatural at that point. It’s a damn good loop, though, and it’s beautiful. And Deacy did the bass, Deacy did the rhythm.”

For the rhythm guitar parts, Deacon played an E minor chord rooted on the seventh fret of the fifth string, an A minor rooted on the seventh fret of the fourth string and another variant of same the chord in fifth position, sliding up from a fret down at the end of the phrase.

“This track is very much John Deacon world,” May said. “That’s what he was into. He was much more into funk than we were, and he brought that into our workings. It’s very Deacy and it’s very much influenced by Nile Rodgers.”

May revealed that Mercury was Deacon’s chief ally and cheerleader in the creation of this song.

“Deacy didn’t sing, so he would tell Freddie what the words were, and play the tune on the guitar,” May said. “You can imagine it was quite a strange process. Freddie absolutely adored it. He just stepped into it with a vengeance. And he sang it until he bled! He was forcing himself to get those high notes and he loved it. Freddie really was such a driving force.”

May said of his own contribution to the song: “I remember saying, ‘Look, it needs a little bit of something a bit more dirty on it.’ So I started playing these little bits of the more grungy guitar.

“I don’t think the word ‘grungy’ existed in those days. But the distorted guitar is obviously me, and that punctuates it and gives it another dimension, takes it to a slightly more rocky place.”

May, of course, played these parts on his Red Special. And Deacon’s choice of guitar?

“It was a Strat I think,” May said. “I’m pretty sure of that. My memory is telling me it was a brand new Strat. At least that’s the way I remember it. I think I can remember him playing it.”

Another One Bites The Dust was released as a single on 16 August 1980.

In an interview on Absolute Radio in 2011, Roger Taylor admitted: “I didn't think that would ever be a single. We were playing in the Forum in Los Angeles, and Michael Jackson used to come and sit in the corner and watch. And he said, ‘You guys have got to release this.’ I said, ‘No, you're mad, that won't be a hit.’

“And then it was actually taken up by the black radio stations in New York and Detroit, and they were playing the hell out of it. And the next thing I knew that they put it out, and... I think it’s the biggest ever record on Elektra/Asylum, it sold four million copies in America. Great, we’ll take it!”

May told Total Guitar: “I remember Michael Jackson hearing it and saying, ‘That’s where I want to be. That’s what I want to do.’ And I think his whole album which followed [Thriller] was deeply influenced by Another One Bites The Dust and the fact that it straddled funk and rock. Michael came to the same place from a different direction. Very interesting!”

May went on to describe how this song presents unique challenges when performed in concert.

“When we do it live, that’s one of the more difficult things I have to do,” he confessed. “I have to not try too hard, because it has to roll off the wrist in a very natural way. And you have to get the sound exactly right.

“It can’t be too burned out or it doesn’t work. It can’t be too turned down or that doesn’t work either. It’s tricky to get that sort of real clean funky sound. It comes and goes with me. Sometimes I just do it my way. And ometimes I veer back more to the way of John’s playing.

“I always think about John when I’m playing it – always. I can’t be John, you know, nobody can be someone else. So I do it my way.

“And the song, it’s actually still evolving, which is quite something after all these years. So every time we do it, it gets a little bit of a different drift. And I enjoy it a lot more these days.”

Looking back to those heady days of 1980, May recalled the huge impact of John Deacon’s classic song on Queen’s career:

“I think it’s still the biggest record we have ever had,” he said. “We kind of became the biggest band in the world at that moment.

“It’s a fleeting moment, cause someone else will come in and take over. But for that moment, we kind of owned the world.”

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.”

The Queen heritage industry is gearing up again with the announcement of another big reissue.

Following hot on the heels of the 50th anniversary reissue of Bohemian Rhapsody comes another excavation from the band’s archives. This time it’s the band’s second album, Queen II, that’s being given the repackaging treatment.

The album – first released in March 1974 – will come out next month in a “lavish” 5-CD or double vinyl collector’s edition. It will include a brand new 2026 mix, as well as previously unheard studio outtakes, live tracks, demos, BBC sessions and a 112-page book of photos, handwritten lyrics and memorabilia.

The works, in other words (though not The Works – that was ten years later…)

The remixing has been done by the same team that worked on the Queen I reissue a while back: Justin Shirley-Smith, Joshua J Macrae and Kris Fredriksson, with Roger Taylor and Brian May acting as executive producers.

In a statement, Shirley-Smith that: “The idea was to reveal more of the clarity of the songs. Rather than add anything, we wanted to reveal more of what was there and get that desired sound.”

“The lengths the band went to achieve what they achieved with the technology they had at the time was incredible,” says Joshua J Macrae. “Some of it is so ahead of its time. Working on this was like entering a room of fabulousness.”

Queen II was a breakthrough in many ways for the band, who even at this early stage were adeptly straddling the barriers between glam, prog and pop. It was their first album to go Top Ten, reaching Number 5 on the UK album chart, and it contained their first hit single, the closing track Seven Seas Of Rhye. Intriguingly, the original vinyl was divided not into an A and B side, but a ‘White’ and ‘Black’ side.

It also came with that iconic Mick Rock sleeve, which the band recreated for the Bohemian Rhapsody video, and a decade later for the promo for One Vision.

“Queen II was the single biggest leap we ever made,” said Brian May in a statement. “That’s when we really started making music the way we wanted to, rather than the way we were being pushed into recording it.”

“With Queen II, I couldn’t believe how much work we put into it,” added Roger Taylor. “I think we felt we were evolving our own sound. We were pioneering this sort of multitracking thing. It gave you a tremendous pallet, massive choral effects with just three of us singing.

“I don’t think the album sounds like anyone else. We gained a mental identity, a group identity and we were just doing what we did.”

Queen II: The Remixed, Remastered & Expanded Collector’s Edition will hit record shops on March 27.

Queen made so many great albums in the ’70s – Sheer Heart Attack, News Of The World, Jazz, A Day At The Races and, most famous of all, A Night At The Opera. But for Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, the best of them is Queen II.

“I love Queen,” Smith said, “and for some reason I just love that second record.”

Released on 8 March 1974, Queen II was described by esteemed British rock critic Malcolm Dome as “arguably the heaviest Queen album”.

It was recorded in August 1973 at London studios Trident and Langham 1, and co-produced by the band with Roy Thomas Baker and Robin Geoffrey Cable.

Beginning with the instrumental track Procession and ending with the hit single Seven Seas Of Rhye, the album had its two sides of vinyl named ‘Side White’ and ‘Side Black’.

The first, ‘Side White’, was comprised of songs written by guitarist Brian May, save for one track, The Loser In The End, written by drummer Roger Taylor, while ‘Side Black’ featured six tracks composed by singer Freddie Mercury, including a hard-rocking number in Ogre Battle and an early example of the band’s flamboyance in The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.

In a 2009 interview with Classic Rock, Chad Smith named Queen II as not only his favourite Queen album but his favourite album, period.

“It’s a little more off the wall for Queen,” Smith said, “and I love how the record starts, with Procession – it creeps in, fades up, and I always turn it up and that’s a good trick. You crank the shit out of it, so by the time Father To Son kicks in, that’s the volume they want you to hear it at.”

He continued: “I don’t know if they toured so much with the first record, but the second one sounds more cohesive as a band. They had a sound!

“It says on the record: ‘No synthesizers’. That’s so cool. And I love Ogre Battle – danga-danga, ‘Waaaaah!’

“Queen II has a lot of power, it has wonderful orchestration, and it has incredible playing. Brian May is a genius!”

Smith also recalled how was introduced to this album as a teenager.

“I lived in Chicago,” he said, “and my friend’s older brother, we used to hang out in his basement, and he had Queen II. He was like, ‘Hey, these guys are supposed to be the next Led Zeppelin!’ So I was like, ‘Oh shit, I gotta hear that!’

“I hadn’t heard the first Queen album. And when I saw the cover of Queen II – these guys looked like they’re dead! It was very mysterious.

“I have great memories of smoking pot and playing pool and listening to Queen II over and over.”

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.”

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.

A prototype Warwick bass guitar that was co-designed by the late Who bassist John Entwistle is headed to auction, 22 years after it was originally sold, but this time its value has sky-rocketed after some analysis of its woodgrain revealed it to have also belonged to Queen’s John Deacon.

This isn’t the kind of bass that you would miss, or easily forget. The Warwick Buzzard is a real vibe, a big mood, a shape that looks more metal than ‘80s Queen, and yet it somehow managed to be auctioned off via Sotheby’s in 2003 for just £3,500 (approximately $4,629).

It was later discovered that this bass is a super-rare prototype, and the current owners unearthed the connection with Deacon after getting all CSI with the instrument. The natural finish on the zebrano body shows up all the grain and they were able to make a positive ID.

“The wood grain of a guitar is like a fingerprint so thank goodness the bass wasn’t painted,” says Luke Hobbs, auctioneer at Gardiner Houlgate. “If it had been, the current owners probably wouldn’t have been able to prove the connection to Queen.”

You can see this bass in action. If you are a Queen fan, as Hobbs is, you most likely already have, as it was played by Deacon at the band’s 1986 performance at Montreaux, and it was used in the promo video for Friends Will Be Friends.

“I’m a Queen fan and the 1986 Montreux Pop Festival was one of their high points,” he says. “They were at the peak of their powers and had just released their classic album A Kind Of Magic.”

As to the value? Well, it has tripled. Gardiner Houlgate now puts it up there between £20,000 to £40,00, after initially valuing it at £10,000. It could go more.

There is a lot of attention on it now, and it is available for public viewing at Gardiner Houlgate’s Wiltshire HQ on Friday 28 November and Monday 1 December, between 9am and 5.30pm. It goes under the hammer on the 2nd.

“Bass guitars generally aren’t seen as being as cool as regular guitars so tend to attract lower prices,” says Hobbs. “However, this instrument with its history with The Who – and now Queen – is pretty special. These were both huge British bands with international followings so we’re expecting considerable interest.”

Whoever picks it up is getting a heck of a bass. It has a pair of split-coil EMG active pickups, gold hardware, a wenge through-neck topped with a wenge fingerboard, inlaid with Arabic numerals. And it has a heck of a headstock…

It ships in a fitted flight case, and you can check it out at Gardiner Houlgate.

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.”

Today marks 50 years – half a century! – since Queen first released Bohemian Rhapsody. To celebrate the occasion they are to upload a special five-part series of their The Greatest YouTube series looking at the track and its parent album, A Night At The Opera.

Because we’ve all heard it hundreds, probably thousands, of times, it can be hard these days to place Bohemian Rhapsody in its original context, but in the interviews for the episode, Brian May and Roger Taylor have attempted to do so. The song, they explain, wasn’t the first time that the band had attempted a multi-part epic.

“It’s interesting,” said May. “Bohemian Rhapsody is viewed as a giant step for Queen creatively, but from the inside, it didn’t feel that way. It’s one of the threads of Queen in our development. You’ve only got to look at the first album, with My Fairy King.”

Roger Taylor picked out another track: “On the second album, Queen II, there’s a monumentally long and complicated track called March Of The Black Queen. It’s a lot more complicated in many ways than Bohemian Rhapsody.

“It involved a lot of rehearsal, a lot of singing and so many different little sections. It’s a track I like to listen to because of the complexity of it. I can’t believe we learned it all; it was so bloody long and laborious but satisfying.”

Meanwhile, May picks out another track from the Queen II album. “Now The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke is incredibly complex, and ought to be just as shocking to people as Bohemian Rhapsody, because it's unique. No one's ever done anything like that, and all these little pieces that come in and go out and tings and contrapuntal things, and he's doing something over here, I'm doing something over here. We just remixed it all, and it's fascinating to make it all work.”

Taylor agrees: “It’s incredibly complicated. There are swooping, counter six-part harmonies here, there, coming in and crossing. It's very bloody complicated that song – and rather wonderful in its eccentricity, I think. Yeah. It's a nice, interesting track. It didn't come across as big as we thought it would, but it's an interesting exercise in eccentric over-elaboration.”

It should be remembered that all those tracks on the road to Bohemian Rhapsody were recorded in 1973 and 1974; in other words, the golden age of prog rock, when multi-part epics with unusual time signatures were par for the course. Again, context.

The difference with Queen is that unlike, say, Genesis, they released their prog meisterwerk as a single, an incredibly brave move for a band who at that stage had only three Top 40 hits to their name. But as we now know, Bohemian Rhapsody became pop, even if in retrospect it can be seen as the final flourish of the progressive era.

Anyway, the first episode of the series is live now. And if you still can’t get enough Bohemian Rhapsody, it's also been reissued in an array of physical formats, including a special 50th anniversary edition vinyl with gold labels.

As Bad Company get set to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame next month, lead singer Paul Rodgers has been discussing his plans for the event and reflecting on his time fronting another even bigger band: Queen.

Rodgers was talking to Rolling Stone: “I’m going to be there for sure, yeah. And I believe Simon (Kirke, drummer) is, too,” he said. When asked if they were going to perform, he replied: “Well, they want us to, and I may. I haven’t decided what songs to sing at this point in time. But it could be Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy.”

The singer is now 75 and still recovering from a series of strokes. And with guitarist Mick Ralphs having passed away earlier this year (original bassist Boz Burrell died in 2006), it could well be that any performance at the Hall Of Fame will be the last time Bad Company play live. Certainly, Rodgers says that he doubts very much whether the band will ever tour again.

He also spoke about his time fronting Queen during the '00s. “It was fun and it was challenging,” he said. “It was like learning a new language for me because I had to learn so many songs so quickly, and I don’t think I ever really did learn them properly. But that’s another story. But it was one of those things where they tried.”

“They hadn’t toured for a long time. They’d done one-off shows. They did one-off shows with Elton John, with George Michael. It was great people, but they didn’t tour together. And with myself, we actually got out on the road. Ostensibly, it was only supposed to be for a couple of shows in Europe for fun, but it turned into four years.”

The group – billed as Queen + Paul Rodgers – recorded one album, 2008’s The Cosmos Rocks, before winding up the collaboration amicably. Rodgers said that it was he who made the decision to quit. “Eventually, I got to the point where I thought, ‘I’m not really the singer for Queen for the rest of my life,’ so I’ve got to get back to my own music. And that’s why I left in the end. But it was an exciting time. We played in places I basically never heard of in Eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up. And they all knew all the songs. It was crazy.”

1975 was a good year for Queen. It started with the four band members feeling broke and somewhat desperate – but ended with their single Bohemian Rhapsody at No.1 on the UK chart as part of a nine-week reign at the top.

In a new interview with Classic Rock, guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor tell the story of Queen’s landmark year and their celebrated album A Night At The Opera.

The album is widely regarded as Queen’s masterpiece, featuring not only Bohemian Rhapsody but other key songs in the band’s catalogue such as Love Of My Life, Death On Two Legs, You’re My Best Friend, May’s epic The Prophet’s Song and Taylor’s tongue-in-cheek I’m In Love With My Car.

But before the success of A Night At The Opera, money was tight for the four musicians in the band – May, Taylor, singer Freddie Mercury and bassist John Deacon.

By the start of 1975, Queen had made three albums and had three hit singles with Seven Seas of Rhye (UK No.10), Killer Queen (UK No.2) and Now I’m Here (UK No.11).

But according to Deacon, there was just £1500 in the band’s coffers.

“We were in a bad state financially,” May tells Classic Rock. “We owed everybody money. We knew that if the next album didn’t succeed, the ship would sink.”

Salvation arrived in the form of a new manager, John Reid, who extricated Queen from their previous management contract before the band headed to Rockfield studios in Wales to record A Night At The Opera with their trusted producer Roy Thomas Baker.

In Classic Rock’s covert story, May and Taylor discuss the various tracks on the album, most notably the two epic numbers.

May suggests that the six-minute suite Bohemian Rhapsody, Mercury’s magnum opus, was simply an extension of what the band had created on previous albums.

“People have a hard time understanding how unsurprising Bohemian Rhapsody was to us,” he says. “If you look at the first album you’ve got My Fairy King, which is very complex and goes all over the place.

“And then you’ve got March Of The Black Queen on the second album, which is enormnlousky complicated. It’s way more complicated than Bohemian Rhapsody.”

May says of his own grandiose composition, The Prophet’s Song: “Even now, I can see this strange man, this prophet, that I dreamed about. But I had a hell of a job translating it all into music.”

By the time the recording of A Night At The Opera was completed in October 1975, it was rumoured to be the most expensive album ever made to that point – the total budget approximately £40,000.

But at the end of the following month, Bohemian Rhapsody was the biggest selling record in Britain, and it held that position all the way into 1976.

As Roger Taylor recalls: “You’d get the chart positions. ‘Oh, were Number One again!’ It almost got boring after a while.”

And after that, they never had to worry about money ever again.

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So who do you think is the most played rock act of the 21^st century in the UK? Oasis? The Killers? AC/DC?

No, wrong wrong wrong. The answer is Queen, a band who have essentially been defunct for over 30 years.

That’s according to PPL, who know about such things – they license recorded music for use on TV and radio as well as public spaces such as bars and shopping centres. According to their data, over the last 25 years Queen have amassed over 400 million seconds of radio and TV airplay – that’s the equivalent of 12 and a half years of continuous music.

It might also surprise you to hear that the most popular Queen song in all that time isn’t Bohemian Rhapsody or even Don’t Stop Me Now, but A Kind Of Magic, a mid-paced song that doesn’t even have a chorus.

Brian May, as you might expect, seemed delighted by this. In a statement, the guitarist said: “Astounding news! Bearing in mind that most of Queen's major works were done in the 20th century, it's amazing to top a 21st-century list. Big thanks to all our fans."

The rest of the PPL Top Ten of most-played rock acts is interesting. Coming in behind Queen is David Bowie at Two and U2 at Three. The rest of the Top Ten is: Oasis, Fleetwood Mac, Stereophonics, The Rolling Stones, The Police, The Killers and Kings Of Leon.

The presence of most of those isn't unexpected – Fleetwood Mac are arguably more popular now in the UK than they were during their supposed ‘classic’ period. Mr Brightside by The Killers (477 weeks on the UK charts and counting) is the 21^st-century song that refuses to die and The Stones, Oasis and The Police have never lost popularity even though their respective heydays are long behind them.

More curious is the presence of the Stereophonics, but then their 2001 hit Have A Nice Day has soundtracked countless adverts, films and travel documentaries during its quarter-century lifetime.

What PPL haven't revealed is how they have defined ‘rock’? Though Bowie’s glam era output fell within the broad rock genre, the same couldn’t really be said of the jazz-influenced material from his final album Blackstar. And what of the band who are conspicuous by their absence from the list: The Beatles. Are they rock? Well… sometimes, but more often not.

Anyway, the PPL chart is being released to coincide with National Album Day which takes place on Saturday 18 October. The theme to this year’s event is, well, rock. Hence the chart.

Peter Leathem, PPL’s Chief Executive said in a statement: “This chart underlines how rock music across the decades continues to thrive on UK airwaves. Congratulations to Queen on this great accolade in such a significant anniversary year for their first number one album. It’s a testament to their expansive and much-loved music catalogue that they continue to mean so much to UK audiences to this very day.”

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.

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.”

Roy Thomas Baker, the producer best known for his work with Queen, has died aged 78.

In a long career, London-born Baker produced some of the most influential and successful rock albums of the ’70s and ’80s.

He co-produced the first four Queen albums, from the self-titled debut to the 1975 masterpiece A Night At The Opera — the latter featuring the all-time classic Bohemian Rhapsody. He also co-produced the band’s 1978 album Jazz.

Queen guitarist Brian May paid tribute by posting stereoscopic images of Baker from 1973 and commenting: "Very sad to hear of the passing of Roy Thomas Baker. Roy played a huge part in the production of so much Queen music in the early days.

"Roy was a part of our production team from the very beginning up to and including the album A Night At The Opera. We then parted company for A Day At The Races, but reunited for the Jazz album."

May continued: "Roy's production contribution along with Mike Stone's engineering for Bohemian Rhapsody will never be forgotten.

"I regret slipping out of touch latterly with Roy. I suppose life moves at such a pace these days that we imagine there will be plenty of time to rekindle a friendship, and then suddenly one day it's too late.

"Thank you, Roy for all the great work you did for us, and all the fun we had. Rest in Peace. Bri."

Baker made four albums with The Cars, including the group’s self-titled debut, which included the classic hits Just What I Needed and My Best Friend’s Girl.

In addition, he produced albums for Journey — including 1978’s Infinity, their first record with singer Steve Perry — and many other major acts including Foreigner, Ian Hunter, Ron Wood, Cheap Trick, Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne and The Darkness.

The album that Baker produced for Alice Cooper was 1980’s Flush The Fashion.

It wasn’t a big hit, but when Cooper spoke to MusicRadar in 2011, he was full of praise for the producer.

Alice recalled: “It was one of those things where you don’t worry about chasing the charts, but you also don’t ignore what’s going on with radio.

“We weren’t going to give up Alice Cooper or hard rock, but it was like, ‘We’ve heard My Sharona, we’ve heard The Cars – what would happen if we got the producer who does that type of thing?’ And that was Roy Thomas Baker.

“Roy Thomas is a very hands-on producer, especially with songwriting, which I really like.

“I always think that a producer should be a musician who is also an arranger. You don’t just bring a song to him and expect him to produce it; you want him to be part of the writing of the song.

“Roy Thomas came in and asked me what I was looking for, and I said, ‘I want Alice Cooper, but I want it in the style of what’s being played on the radio now.’

He continued: “I didn’t want to give up Alice’s edge, but I saw that it could be twisted.

“We did the song Clones, which was a Top 10 hit. It was different for me, but I think the twist was that it was Alice doing that song.

“I went through the National Enquirer, and I said, ‘Every headline is going to be the name of a song.’ Aspirin Damage, Grim Facts – stuff like that.

“It was very artsy, songs like Leather Boots. I told Roy Thomas that I wanted to cover Talk Talk by the Music Machine – he slowed it down.

Alice also commented on Baker's larger than life personality: “I don’t mind saying this: If they were ever going to do the story of Nero, probably the most decadent of all the emperors, they would have to use Roy Thomas Baker.

“He would call me up and say, ‘Alice, darling, I’ll be a little late today. I seem to be handcuffed to my bed.’ I would go, ‘What?’ And he’d say, ‘Yes, two girls I picked up at the Whiskey last night; I woke up, handcuffed to my bed, and they ran off with my wallet and my Rolls-Royce.’

“I’d laugh, like, ‘That’s funny.’ And he’d go, ‘No, no, I’m quite serious.’ He was, too

“This was a daily routine with him. I went, ‘Wow! They call Alice Cooper decadent. I’m nothing compared to Roy Thomas Baker!’

“But you know, he’s an amazing character, and he’s so good in the studio. He would never say anything was good or great. He did this with Queen, he did this with The Cars. It was always, ‘That’ll do.’”

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!”

13 July 2025 will mark the 40th anniversary of Live Aid, the biggest live music event in history.

It was an event that raised a huge amount of money for famine relief in Africa - and showed how the biggest stars in music could come together for a good cause.

But on that sunny day at Wembley Stadium, it wasn’t all smiles in the backstage enclosure - as Status Quo’s Francis Rossi would reveal.

Quo were chosen as the opening act for Live Aid by organiser Bob Geldof, who felt that Quo’s 1977 hit Rockin’ All Over The World was the perfect start for a show with a global TV audience of two billion.

In a 2019 interview with Classic Rock, guitarist/vocalist Rossi recalled how Geldof had persuaded Quo to perform at Live Aid.

“You’ve got to give Bob Geldof his due,” he said. “He got everybody to do it.

“When he asked us, I said: ‘Look, Bob, we’re not getting along, we’re not rehearsed, we’ll sound like a sack of shit.’ He said: ‘It doesn’t matter a fuck what you sound like, you’re the ones!’

“Subsequently I found out he said the same thing to The Who, to everybody.

“The funny thing was, everybody was jockeying not to open. But when we felt the vibe coming off that audience, I thought: ‘Oh, hang on, I get it!’ It was the most euphoric gig.”

Rossi agreed with the consensus that Queen stole the show at Live Aid.

“They were the donkey’s knob that day,” he said. "Everyone said: ‘Jesus, they’re on it.’ But they would be, they’d been out touring.”

Rossi had fond memories of hanging out with Queen singer Freddie Mercury and David Bowie backstage at Live Aid.

“Near the end of the show, I was sitting at a table with Bowie,” he said, “and as Geldof was trying to get everyone up for the big finale the lights went out and the table collapsed!

“I did go back up on stage [for the all-star finale], but I didn’t want to. It was embarrassing. So I stayed as far back as I could.

“I always got on all right with Bowie, though. That mysterious image he had, that was not the man he was. He was just a nice guy.”

Rossi said of Freddie Mercury: “As everyone was decamping out of Live Aid, Freddie bent me over a desk, in a half-nelson, held me down and I couldn’t move. Fuck, he was strong!”

But there was one star at that show that Rossi didn’t get on with.

“I remember getting the hump with Declan – Elvis Costello,” he recalled.

“I said: ‘Alright?’ And he looked at me like: ‘I can’t talk to you, I’m a proper musician.’

“Get over it, son. I’m over it. You’re up your own bottom, aren’t you?”

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.

Only a few rock drummers are known for their songwriting. Phil Collins is one. Don Henley is another.

But Queen's drummer Roger Taylor wrote some great songs for the band over the years - some of which he sang himself, others he left to the band’s legendary frontman Freddie Mercury.

So which Queen song does Taylor think is his best?

“That’s hard to say,” he told Classic Rock magazine. “But I like Radio Ga Ga. It was a nice fusion of synthesizers and… what can I call it… epic pop.”

In the same interview, Taylor admitted that there are “a few” Queen songs that he dislikes, and there is one, from the band’s 1991 album Innuendo, that he really can’t bear.

“I hate Delilah,” he said. “That’s just not me."

Taylor also talked about the songwriters he most admires.

“Dylan, Lennon… and Springsteen is fabulous.”

Taylor covered songs by both Dylan and Springsteen on his 1984 solo album Strange Frontier.

“Springsteen always did Racing In The Street so slow,’ he said. “I thought it needed to be done mid-tempo. But better, probably, if it that was done by somebody else, like an American.”

He named Dylan as his favourite lyricist.

“You can’t really touch him. I love a lot of his old stuff. But then there’s something like Not Dark Yet [from Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out Of Mind]. As somebody who’s getting older, he summed it up in a phrase: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

Taylor chose two songs of his own that he felt were strong lyrically: These Are The Days Of Our Lives, from Innuendo, and Heaven For Everyone, recorded first by Taylor’s side project band The Cross, and later by Queen.

"Heaven For Everyone had some good stuff about love and dignity, the usual anti-war thing,” he said. “These Are The Days Of Our Lives was quite nice in a reminiscing, rather old-fashioned kind of way.”

The latter song took on a greater meaning after the death of Freddie Mercury.

“At the time I wrote it, we knew Freddie wasn’t well,” Taylor said. “So yeah, it took on a resonance.”

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.

Slash has revealed his surprise new project - producing and co-writing the music for a murder mystery TV series.

The series is The Crow Girl, which is adapted from a Nordic-noir novel and set in the city of Bristol.

As producer, Slash was involved in the script and casting and was present during filming in Bristol.

Speaking to The Sunday Times, he said of this new role: “Having a name helps get a meeting, but that can overshadow the project. I need people to stop looking at me as the guitar player. It’s great for a foot in the door, but harder to get people to take you seriously.”

He added that TV executives had requested selfies with him. “There’s a lot of that.” He described how he co-wrote the music for The Crow Girl in various hotel rooms while on tour with Guns N’ Roses, joking: “It keeps me out of trouble.”

Slash also revealed how he ended up befriending Robbie Williams, with whom he shares a birthplace - Stoke-on-Trent.

“I was in LA at the Sunset Marquis [hotel], which is a favourite haunt of musicians,” he recalled. “I was walking by the pool and this guy yelled out, ‘You’re Slash! From Stoke! I’m from Stoke!’ I didn’t know who the fuck he was.

“But that night I got on stage with this all-star covers band to do Queen songs and somebody started singing the lyrics so well. I turned around and it was that fucking guy. And that’s how Robbie and I got to know each other.”

And the Queen song that united them?

“Fat Bottomed Girls.”

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."

On 31 July 1968, The Beatles walked through the doors of Trident Studios, situated down a narrow alleyway in the heart of London’s Soho, to begin sessions for recording Hey Jude. This was a rare departure for the band, who by then had virtually colonised the spacious environs of Studio 2 at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios.

The band had been lured to Trident by its defiantly creative ethos and its eight-track Ampex recorder. In an era when even The Fab Four had to still sometimes adhere to regimented sessions overseen by engineers in white lab coats, the easygoing ethos of Trident proved hugely appealing.

Trident Studios had been established in 1967 by brothers Barry and Norman Sheffield. The brothers were known for their relaxed attitude to engineering and for using the newest and most innovative equipment.

The band spent 31 July and 1 August 1968 recording Hey Jude at Trident. The piano played by McCartney on those sessions was the Trident house piano, a handmade 1898 C. Bechstein grand, installed in 1967 and rented from London music shop Jaques Samuel on Edgware Road, before being eventually bought by the studio in 1986.

With the tape running, The Beatles laid down Hey Jude, working on a carefully layered rhythm track that featured McCartney playing the Bechstein grand and singing a guide vocal. They recorded four takes, opting to use the first one. Producer George Martin warned the band that, at seven minutes and eleven seconds long, no DJs would play the new song on the radio. “They will if it’s us,” snapped John Lennon.

In the years that followed, the list of songs that the Trident Bechstein was used on came to read like a roll call of some of the finest music of the last 60 years: Hey Jude, Martha My Dear and Honey Pie by The Beatles; Changes, Life On Mars, Oh! You Pretty Thing, Lady Stardust and Aladdin Sane by David Bowie. Seven Seas Of Rhye and Killer Queen by Queen; Your Song, Candle In The Wind and Tiny Dancer by Elton John; Perfect Day and Satellite Of Love by Lou Reed; Without You by Harry Nilsson, You’re So Vain and The Right Thing To Do by Carly Simon. It’s a hugely impressive cv for any instrument and a testament to its rich, distinctive sound.

Surprisingly, this piano was notoriously difficult to play because of its stiff hammers, so musicians had to really hit the keys to get something out of it. But its bright and crystal clear sound held huge appeal.

“I have heard many pianos in my time but I have never heard a better ‘rock’ piano than that one,” wrote Ken Scott in 2006. An in-house engineer at EMI Abbey Road Studios, Scott joined Trident Studios in late 1969, where he moved into production, co-producing David Bowie’s Hunky Dory (1971), The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (1972) and Aladdin Sane (1973), as well as landmark albums for artists such as Elton John, Lou Reed and Supertramp.

“It had a tremendously bright sound that unfortunately was lost when the sound board had to be replaced. Because of its inherent sound it was remarkably easy to record. Two, maybe three microphones and just a little EQ.”

As the ’70s dawned, the Trident piano became a selling point for artists, particularly the new wave of singer-songwriters such as Elton John. His eponymous second studio album, featuring the breakthrough single Your Song, was recorded at Trident from November 1969 to January 1970. He returned for the follow-up, Tumbleweed Connection and in 1971 for his fourth studio album Madman Across The Water. He continued to use the studio and its piano on later albums including Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

The early 70s were a golden era for Trident Studios, as its growing reputation lured artists from across the Atlantic. When American singer Harry Nilsson undertook his seventh studio album Nilsson Schmilsson (1971), Trident was the chosen studio. In an interview with Radio 1 in 1992, Nilsson said. “Trident Studios was the most important singular studio in the world when music was the most important singular subject,” he said. The Trident Bechstein, played by Gary Wright, is the sole instrumentation on the intro and first verse of Nilsson’s soaring epic, Without You.

One year later, Carly Simon was seated at the same piano for her third album No Secrets, which yielded the hit single You’re So Vain. Then in August 1972, Lou Reed recorded his seminal album Transformer, with co-producer Mick Ronson playing the Trident piano on Satellite Of Love and Perfect Day.

Ronson’s piano playing and his flawless skills as a strings arranger are often overlooked. Ronson worked on the album as he and co-producer Bowie simultaneously undertook rehearsals at the Theatre Royal East Stratford, for two landmark shows on 19 and 20 August on the Ziggy Stardust tour, at London’s Rainbow Theatre.

Ronson’s piano and arranger skills were evident on Bowie’s own material. It was Ronson who sat down at the Bechstein and guided a talented young session player called Rick Wakeman through his iconic piano parts for Life On Mars. “He was a tremendous human being with oodles of talent,” recalled Wakeman in Guitar Player magazine.

Bowie first recorded at Trident in 1969 and chose to revisit the studio for his breakthrough album Hunky Dory. The Bechstein features throughout. Wakeman, then an in-demand session musician, played much of the piano on the album, while Bowie – in his own words on the sleeve notes – tackled the “less complicated piano parts”. Tracks such as Changes and Oh! You Pretty Things are defined by the Trident Bechstein piano, but it is arguably Life On Mars that remains its true masterpiece. By the end of 1972 Bowie had become a household name.

Queen, meanwhile, were just getting started. For the cash-strapped band, the only way to make their debut album was by recording at Trident in off peak hours, an opportunity that drummer Roger Taylor described as “gold dust”.

The Sheffield brothers arranged for the band to record there for free, during downtime, in the middle of the night when all the big league paying artists had left. Roger Taylor recalled seeing David Bowie coming down the stairs while they were going up. “We were very pleased to be there,” Taylor said, “But when we were there we’d arrive at three in the morning and then go on for all the hours that we could grab. It was just a grind.”

Freddie Mercury played the Trident Bechstein from the outset, the most notable early example being the intro of their first single Seven Seas Of Rhye. The piano also featured on the Queen II and Sheer Heart Attack albums, both released in 1974.

It’s often been claimed that Trident’s Bechstein piano was used on Bohemian Rhapsody. “Vocals, vocals, Bechstein debauchery and more vocals," quipped Freddie Mercury in the liner notes for the band's platinum-selling 1975 album The Night At The Opera.

But according to the same liner notes, the album was recorded in five different studios and none of them were Trident. So unless the liner notes are incomplete, the possibility of it being the same Bechstein seems doubtful. That said, online forums have been awash over the years with anecdotes supporting both viewpoints.

From the outset of the 70s, Trident’s Bechstein piano featured on tracks by bands who would soon become defined within the emerging prog rock scene. Genesis used Trident Studios and the C. Bechstein grand on their albums Trespass (1970) and Nursery Cryme (1971), while the piano’s distinctive tones grace Supertramp tracks Crime Of The Century and Bloody Well Right.

T. Rex used the piano when they recorded their eponymous album at Trident in 1970 and the instrument also featured on Ringo Starr’s 1971 single It Don’t Come Easy, with the piano part played by American musician and composer, Gary Wright, whose keyboard skills graced Nilsson’s Without You that same year.

Over half a century on, the ultimate fate of the instrument has taken on almost mythical status. The piano was badly damaged when it fell two floors in the move from Trident’s Soho premises to a new building in 1974. But that didn’t seem to diminish its perceived value.

Trident Studios was sold in December 1981 and reopened as Trident 2 at a new location in 1986. Its Bechstein went up for auction in New York in May 2011 with a guide price of £300,000 – £400,000. Neither the purchaser or eventual price have been publicly revealed, but online forums have buzzed with speculation.

On 15 June 2017, a British Plaque Trust permanent blue plaque was unveiled outside the building at 17 St Anne's Court, London in recognition of the numerous iconic David Bowie albums and songs that were recorded there.

Trident and its engineers and producers were fundamental in helping artists such as The Beatles, Bowie, Elton John and Queen realise their creative visions. In its own way, the C. Bechstein grand piano that sat in the studio at St Anne’s Court for over 20 years played its own integral part.

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.”

Could Queen make one more album, more than three decades after Freddie Mercury’s death appeared to have ended the band?

That’s the tantalising prospect that was teased by Roger Taylor in a fan-led interview in this month’s edition of Uncut magazine. It was in answer to one questioner who asked if they’ll ever hear new Queen music again.

Taylor responded with: “Well, I think you might! Brian and myself were talking the other day, and we both said that if we feel we have some good material, why not? We can still play. We can still sing. So I don't see why not."

The two remaining members of the band – bassist John Deacon retired from public life in the late '90s – have spent the decades since tending the legacy and keeping the Queen name in the public eye via the media of jukebox musicals (We Will Rock You), biopics (Bohemian Rhapsody) and regular touring.

The latter has been undertaken with substitute lead singers stepping into Mercury’s shoes. Between 2004 and 2009 this was ex-Free vocalist Paul Rodgers and this collaboration brought about a new album, 2008’s The Cosmos Rocks.

But the album was a critical and commercial flop and in a 2015 interview with Classic Rock, even Taylor seemed to admit that the collab hadn’t hit the mark: "I just think that Paul's more blues and soul – one of our favourite singers, ever, but, when it boils down to it, he wasn't the perfect frontman for us.”

Since then Taylor and May have undertaken several lengthy tours with American vocalist Adam Lambert, but as yet there has been no new material. Unless you count the slightly re-written, erm, You Are The Champions, which was released as a one off single in aid of the Covid Solidarity Response Fund in 2020, and we don’t.

Elsewhere in the interview the drummer debunks the urban myth that one particularly riotous back-in-the-day Queen party featured dwarves with bowls of cocaine on their heads.

"It's rather funny,” he admitted. “But it is a myth - I didn't see any, anyway. But there was a man who moved under meat. He lay on a table covered in cold cuts, and when somebody approached the table, he would wobble, and all the meat would move and freak people out."

He added, "I think that's much stranger than a dwarf with cocaine on his head."

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’s We Will Rock You has become a fixture at sporting events around the world, and now US hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion has released a new version of the song to mark the return of the NFL.

Used to soundtrack a Gladiator-themed Pepsi ad that also features NFL players Travis Kelce, Josh Allen, Justin Jefferson and Derrick Henry, this new recording includes elements of Queen’s original song, but adds trap drums and Stallion’s vocals.

The ad riffs on research indicating that a lot of men - presumably ones who also watch the NFL - frequently think about the Roman Empire. It quickly transports two fans - played by actors Lamorne Morris and Jake Lacy - from their bar stool bantz to the colosseum, where Emperor Megan Thee Stallion presides over a battle between the aforementioned NFL stars and some angry-looking CGI tigers.

As the music plays, the football players manage to tame the big cats, before the fans are transported back to reality to be greeted by Travis Kelce on TV. “Are you not entertained?” he asks.

It’s not just We Will Rock You that’s being covered here - the whole ad is a homage to the 2004 Pepsi commercial that featured Gladiators Britney Spears, Beyoncé and Pink performing their version of Queen’s song.

"I'm honoured to follow in the footsteps of the legends who appeared in this Gladiator campaign 20 years ago and proud to have carved my own new legacy," said Megan Thee Stallion. "Pepsi really brought the worlds of music, sports and entertainment together in a powerful way to set off the new NFL season. It was fun putting my creative flip on such an iconic Queen song and I can't wait for the Hotties to hear it!"

The ad also takes inspiration from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, the upcoming sequel to the original Gladiator, which starred Russell Crowe and was released in 2000. A lot of cultural bases being touched here, we think you’ll agree.

And who forget that, also in 2000, we had the Five + Queen covering We Will Rock You, which includes the immortal lines, “Bring the feedback and let it drop/As long as Five bring the funk, Queen bring the rock”.

Are you not entertained?

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."

He might not be an official member of the band, but keyboard player Spike Edney has been part of the Queen live line-up since 1984. He began his stint on The Works Tour, and was also part of the subsequent The Magic Tour, which would turn out to be Freddie Mercury’s last.

Edney’s association with Queen continues to this day, and he recently spoke to Korg about the keyboard setup he uses in the current incarnation of the band’s live show, which is fronted by Brian May, Roger Taylor and singer Adam Lambert. 

As you might expect, the rig has changed a bit over the years; where Edney used to have to take multiple keyboards on stage, he can now handle everything with just one: the Korg Nautilus.

“Back in those days, in 1984, I had three keyboards,” Edney recalls. “I had an analogue keyboard [at the bottom], then I had a sampler keyboard in the middle and on the top I had a vocoder.”

Today’s workstations, of course, have huge sample memory, but back in the ‘80s, limited storage capacity meant that you had to switch between samples by loading them up from floppy disk.

“If I wanted to have a string sound, I had to change, unload and reload while I was playing, and that led to all kinds of problems.”

Edney also explains how he discovered that having the vocoder could help him to thicken up Queen’s backing vocals, which were always crucial to the band’s sound on record.

“Queen are famous for their multi-layered studio vocals,” says Edney. “Very difficult for them to do on stage as there’s only four of them. And I’m the extra person - five.

“So Fred [Mercury] is the lead singer, Brian [May] and Roger [Taylor] can do backing vocals. Brian is often running around the stage, though, and he doesn’t. John [Deacon] doesn’t sing, the bass player.

“And so Roger and I do the backing vocals so that’s two voices. Well, that’s not multi-layered, but in certain songs I could use help.”

Edney goes on to demonstrate how the vocoder provided that help in song’s such as Now I’m Here, enabling him to give the backing vocals some “depth and texture”.

In A Kind Of Magic, meanwhile, Edney reveals that the opening samples he plays are taken directly from the recording of the song and that he also triggers a sample of Freddie Mercury’s voice singing the eponymous opening line. Some judicious use of the vocoder and pitchwheel, meanwhile, enables him to recreate the vocal ‘slides’ that appear towards the end of the song.

There are studio samples in use during Another One Bites The Dust, too - the backwards piano and cymbal, for example - and Edney says that he also calls on some of Korg’s own samples that are built into the Nautilus. 

“Of course, you have to use things like this sparingly,” says Edney, as he fires off what sounds suspiciously like a helicopter sample (thankfully, there’s no sign of the ‘dog bark’). “You can’t have them going on all the time.”

Elsewhere, Edney discusses how he splits and layers his keyboard in Under Pressure, before ending, inevitably, with a rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody and that trademark final ‘gong’.

“I suppose what I think is that Queen is quite a demanding musical adventure, and there are lots of things that can be done to make their sounds more realistic for the audience,” he says. “You can’t make it exactly like the record - that’s impossible - but what you can do is give it something that gives people the impression, and if you make it close enough, the brain will do the rest.”

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

Jared James Nichols is one of the biggest Leslie West fans out there and he's keeping P-90-driven blues alive. He's covered Mountain's classic Mississippi Queen multiple times onstage so who better to break down the song's classic solo for the Gibson app, via our pals at the Gibson Gazette?

It just so happens Jared is a great teacher and he has the best tool for the job; a Gibson Les Paul Jr. There are some big bends and call/response dynamics in the song's second solo that Jared hones in on, and it's a great workout for your vibrato. 

Jared takes the solo note-by-note so you can work through it at your own pace – and if you want the rest, check out the Gibson app on Google Play and iOS. You can also read more about the song in our story of Mississippi Queen feature, as told by the late Leslie West himself. 

Sony Music has acquired the Queen back catalogue for a cool $1.27 billion.

Sony has closed the deal for the rights to use the band’s music, including merchandising and other business opportunities. The only aspect it does not cover is revenue from live performances - not surprising given Brian May and Roger Taylor are both active musicians and have toured a version of the band with Adam Lambert on vocals for over a decade.

According to Variety's sources, Sony beat off competition from another bidder, who stopped short at the asking price of $900 million. There’s no word on who this party was and Sony Music has so far declined to comment on the deal.

The deal is slightly complicated in that the band’s North American recorded music rights were acquired by Disney in the Noughties after an initial $10 million licensing deal that was struck in 1991. 

Those rights will remain with Disney in perpetuity, although some of the band’s remaining royalties from them will go to Sony once the deal closes. Similarly, the group’s distribution deal, which is currently with Universal, will transfer to Sony in all territories outside North America when that expires in a couple of years.

When it goes through it will be the largest back catalogue acquisition yet. A number of ‘classic’ artists have gone down this route. With Bruce Springsteen selling his back catalogue to Sony for $500 million in 2021 and the David Bowie estate selling his to Warner Chappell for $250 the following year, there has been a stampede by music industry giants to secure the rights to songs, which in these troubled times are seen as more secure investments as many more traditional commodities. 

Even younger artists such gone down this route, including John Legend, Cardi B and Bruno Mars.

The huge figure for the Queen back catalogue is a reflection of the band’s status, more than three decades after Freddie Mercury death in 1991. 

The jukebox musical We Will Rock You is still popular nearly a quarter of a century after its initial West End opening and the 2018 Bohemian Rhapsody biopic was hugely successful – making $900 million at the box office from an original budget of $50 million. And with Sony acquiring them it seems certain that We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions will be reverberating around sports stadiums for decades to come.

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.