Brian's Song
Brian May reflects on his days with Queen, life and
music with Freddie, and his long-awaited solo album.
BRIAN MAY Is not your average guitar hero.
Never was. In an era when flashy blues-based leads were worshipped, May spun stately
guitar lines that swelled and twined in majestic orchestrations, rather than frantic
little bursts of ego. His symphonic guitar playing helped make Queen's 1973 debut album a
landmark event. In the years that followed. Queen charted a highly original course between
glam rock and progressive rock; while flirting shamelessly with both, they never got
pulled under by either. Queen's rudder was Brian's trusty Red Special guitar, the
idiosyncratic axe he built when he was just 17. Designing and building an electric guitar
from scratch was a piece of cake for a kid who went on to take a degree in physics and
math and later pursued a doctorate in astronomy. But the real wizardry began after the Red
Special was constructed and Brian started to play the thing.
May's passionate but methodical creativity found a perfect foil in Freddie Mercury,
Queen's flamboyant lead singer. It often seemed that Freddie's voice could soar as high as
Brian's guitar. The singer's recent death from AIDS put an abrupt and unkind halt to a
20-year musical partnership. It's not surprising that May deals with Freddie's loss on his
new album. Back To The Light. But this tragedy is only the latest in a long series of
personal misfortunes that May says almost led him to suicide. Fortunately, his music
served him well in times of crisis, and continues to do so. His new record documents his
triumph over tragedy. Back To The Light's walls of velvet-toned guitars harken back to the
grandeur of classic Queen albums like A Night At The Opera and News Of The World. But the
singing, songwriting and arranging on May's solo effort announce a new chapter in May's
life. His struggles behind him, the soft-spoken guitarist seems willing and even glad to
discuss his long night's journey into day.
GUITAR WORLD: Why has it taken until now for you to record a solo album? Had you ever
wanted to do one prior to this?
BRIAN MAY: I continuously wanted to, really, but there never was the time. That's the main
excuse. Queen was always a very time - consuming thing - it took up all of our lives for
20 years. So if ever I had an idea that didn't fit the group format, it would always get
put away someplace on a piece of paper or a piece of tape. But it wasn't until about five
years ago that I decided it would be a good thing to use some of these ideas in a solo
album. I really started it as a form of therapy. I was very depressed at the time; at one
point, I was really very suicidal. At such moments, it's only the fact that I've got kids
that stops me from driving off bridges. During this time. Queen was doing the Miracle.
There were only a few days during that time when I managed to play guitar solas. It's
really a miracle that I did anything on that album at all.
GW: What brought you so low?
MAY: Purely personal things. I think most people reach that point through too much drugs
or alcohol. But for me it was just too many problems in life that I couldn't deal with.
Basically, I had an image of myself which was based on my relationship with my parents and
then on my wife and children and me. And also I had an image of myself as this person who
romped around on a stage. All those things got taken away from me at once. My dad died,
which I found very difficult. And I was going through a time when I realized I couldn't
live with my wife, which meant that I couldn't be with my kids. And also - this may sound
trivial in comparison - the group had decided not to tour at that point. So suddenly here
was a great hole in my professional life, too. I couldn't have any outlet on stage. And I
think the balance of my life just got completely destroyed. I didn't know who I was
anymore. So some of these songs - like "Too Much Love Will Kill You" - are about
a man who feels very sorry for himself. It's not so much the problems he has, as the fact
that he can't deal with the problems, because he hasn't grown up, you know. In retrospect,
that's the way I see it. In fact, my darling therapist tells me that the song should be
called "Too Much Unhealthy Dependence May Lead To Psychiatric Symptoms." I'm
rewriting it, but I'm having a problem with the meter. [laughs] The rhyme scheme just
won't fall into place.
GW: Some of your vocals on the album sound very much like Freddie.
MAY: That's interesting. Of course, we sat doing vocals together for 20 years. And I did a
lot of writing for Freddie to sing, in common with all of us. So I guess there are things
we evolved together that I can't escape from.
Sometimes I feel good: I feel like Freddie is still around. Very often, if I'm at a sticky
point, I can hear what Fred would say. [small laugh] And I can also see him psyching
himself up and gathering the strength and determination to reach certain notes, which I
apply to myself.
GW: How do you feel about people comparing your solo record to Queen?
MAY: I suppose it's inevitable. There's bound to be similarities. I've got to carry some
trademarks away from Queen, because I can't help being me. In my opinion, there are
superficial similarities to Queen, but I think what is underneath on this album is
actually pretty different. It's much more of a personal statement.
GW: It's great to hear you doing thunderous heavy stuff like "Love Token."
MAY: Yeah, I enjoy that. I have an outlet for that now. Whereas sometimes the band had to
be a bit more broad, stylistically. Now I can get more into the heavy stuff. And I do
enjoy it, I must admit.
GW: It's also a funny song.
MAY: Yes. That's one of my mamma/poppa songs. I've got a few of those. I'm gonna have a
little anthology of mama vs. papa songs one day.
GW: Many times down through the years, you've written about family situations, even going
back to a song like "Good Company," on A Night At The Opera.
MAY: That's right. It's very helpful for me. I find it nice to get outside of it - as
though I were an observer looking at it through a telescope from another planet, you know.
Make sense of what is actually going on. The humor helps too.
GW: Did a lot of Queen's hard rock direction come from you?
MAY: I do like the harder stuff. Each of us had a preference. Roger [Taylor, Queen's
drummer] is into good-time rock and roll. And John [Deacon, Queen's bassist] is into funk.
And Freddie was into really different areas, particularly the operatic thing. Strangely
enough, we all have a bit of that in us, because it was around us when we grew up. It's
part of our English upbringing; we absorbed a lot of classical music subliminally from our
parents. Same as we were lucky enough to absorb the early beginnings of rock and roll -
Elvis, the Everly Brothers.Buddy Holly and the Crickets.
My basic training was very broad, 'cause there weren't many guitar records to get hold of.
So you would grab anything there was: Chef Atkins, Django Reinhardt, old blues things, Bo
Diddley, Chuck Berry, even vaudeville and traditional jazz. And this thing called skittle
- which Lonnie Donegan brought in-which was really an antecedent of the birth of the blues
in England. People tend to think it started with the Rolling Stones, but really Lonnie
Donegan was bringing Leadbelly songs into the country quite a few years earlier, and we
were all very taken with that. I think every kid in England at that time was strumming a
guitar and singing Lonnie Donegan skittle songs.
GW: "The Rock Island Line...."
MAY: That's right. That was the first record I owned. My dad bought it for me. Along with
our first record player, which he brought home from a place called Tottenham Court Road,
where they sold spare parts. My dad built everything. He built our telly; he built our
radio. I first plugged my guitar into the amplifier that he made for the radio.
GW: So by the time you built your first guitar when you were 17, you already knew guitars
and guitar playing pretty well.
MAY: Yes. I figured out how to wind a pickup for myself, and stuck it on this acoustic
guitar that I had, and I was off.
GW: Did the unique sonic qualities of the Red Special guitar play a role in developing the
orchestral approach you forged with Queen?
MAY: It was more the other way around. In my head, I knew what I wanted. I knew I wanted a
guitar that would sing and have a lot of warmth to it, but also a nice articulating edge.
When we designed the guitar, my dad and me, we had that in mind - so that it would feed
back nicely through the air. We tried to make it so that it would have the benefits of a
hollow body - so that it would feed back through the body, but not in the uncontrollable,
nasty way earlier hollow - bodies do. I don't know if we were skinful or just lucky, but
it did seem to work. And I found this Vox AC30 amplifier that just goes beautifully into
distortion if you drive it hard. So the sound was there. And it suited very well the sort
of violin effect that I wanted to use to build those orchestras. The childhood. That was a
dream from childhood. I could hear it in my head.
GW: In '73 or so, when you first came up, the emphasis was really on hot leads, not
orchestral work. Did you feel like you were bucking a trend?
MAY: I suppose so. We were very much into our own world, even early on. We knew what was
going on around us, but we were much more into our own stuff. We didn't pay that much
attention to anyone else. Except our heroes. Which were really the Beatles, as regards
production. And for me, Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck for guitar playing. And Erie Clapton. I
would have to say Clapton also. 'Cause the album he made with John Mayall and the
Bluesbreakers was our Bible.
GW: You said you were into your own thing in the early days of Queen. But did you feel
like you were part of the glam scene that was happening at that time?
MAY: Well, it's funny. Things very often tend to be triggered off in different places at
the same time. When we started this thing, no one else was standing on a stage and putting
a lot of time into the costumes and the lights and the dramatic appeal of a show. But by
the time we'd spent two years banging our heads against the wall, trying to get ourselves
heard, it had become a trend. Not because other people copied us. They were just at the
same point at the same time. I remember feeling so frustrated when David Bowie and Roxy
Music were out there really breaking down barriers. We thought, "God, we're still
stuck trying to get our album released. It's been 18 months!" So we didn't
necessarily feel we were part of a trend. We just suddenly found we were in the midst of
it. The glam tag tended to hold us back, in a way. Once you get put into any kind of box,
there's a temptation for people to want to keep you in it. And glam wasn't what we were
about. We were about making music that meant something and about using dramatic effects to
heighten the experience. It was always a problem for us to be associated with people who
were just into glam for glam's sake.
GW: Do you have any treasured memories of glam rock days? Any lingering recollections of
divine decadence?
MAY: Well, that first tour of the States was an incredible, mindblowing experience. At the
beginning of it, we were boys who were just starting to realize some of our dreams. And by
the end of the tour, we realized that most of it was beyond our dreams. It was just so
intense and so, kind of.... What's the word? It was kind of unsettling. You'd been
beavering away in your own little corner, doing your own thing, and suddenly the world
explodes in on you. And you find that there are people out there who are not only ready to
accept what you're doing, but are a part of it already. It's like finding your own family
after years and years of thinking you're on your own. We threw a lot of parties, even on
that first tour. And the people that would come were surprising, even to us. We thought we
were unusual, but there was a whole load of very creative and very fringe-type people, who
became attracted to what we were doing.
GW: Like who?
MAY: A lot of transvestite artists, for a start. I remember feeling mildly shocked, and I
never thought anything would shock me. I discovered that I was a lot more naive than I
realized. But I guess, over the years, we've always felt close to people who didn't feel
comfortable with the normal conventions.
GW: That was the first era when rock intersected with the gay world in a big way.
MAY: Yeah, we just met a lot of great people who were on the fringe of everything. Like
when we came into touch with the New York Dolls and Andy Warhol - people who were creating
in a very new way. In a way that appeared to trash everything that had gone before.
GW: That whole wave of glam bands was, in the States at least, the first big thing after
hippiedom.
MAY: It was a great feeling. It's hard to put all that stuff into words. I guess some of
it was associated with the drug culture. But personally I always felt like I was pretty
screwed up anyway. My mind is on a very delicate balance. So I never took any drugs. I
wanted to know that everything I experienced was real. And even so, it was very
disorienting.
GW: What do you make of the current "Queen Renaissance"? The songs are back on
the radio, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was in Wayne's World...
MAY: I really think we owe most of it to Wayne's World. We fought until our fingers were
bleeding to get back to the States. It had been wonderful for us around the time of 'Crazy
Little Thing" [1980] and "We Are The Champions" [1978} and "Another
One Bites the Dust." [1980] It was like we could do no wrong in the States. Then it
just trickled away. And I know it was one of Freddie's dreams to go back to the States one
day and restore that closeness we'd had with our fans. So he would have been very happy to
see this. And he would have laughed at the fact that we weren't able to pull it off, but
that these' guys called Wayne's World came along, put us in their movie, and suddenly
there it is again. But things do happen in these odd ways, you know. Pavarotti was a
little-known opera singer in England until they put one of his songs on a football series.
Things do happen for the wrong reasons. But if they happen, well that's fine. So not to
beat about the bush, I'm thrilled with the Queen revival.
GW: Getting back to your new album, were all the guitar parts done on the Red Special?
MAY: Ninety-five percent of them were. On a couple of tracks, I also used this wonderful
guitar that Joe Satriani gave me, which was a big departure for me. He gave it to me after
we did the Guitar Legends concert in Seville, which I was lucky enough to be asked to put
together. We all had a great time and I developed an even greater admiration for Satriani
than I already had. He's such an amazingly dexterous player, you expect him to be
technical and nothing else. But the fact is that he's got so much soul and feeling in what
he does. He's really a guitarist's guitarist. Plus, he's a nice guy. Anyway, he sent me
this guitar and I picked it up and was inspired. So I kicked in with it.
GW: Is it an Ibanez?
MAY: Ah.... yes, I think it is. It's his special model, and he had one made for me. It's
wonderful. I'll be taking that out on tour with me, I hope.
GW: How many tracks typically go into one of those trademark layered guitar parts of yours
that we hear on the album?
MAY: Up to 30, I guess. Sometimes more. I tend to lose count. The song that begins the
album, "The Dark," has a lot of Packs built up like a wall. At the beginning,
I'm trying to give the impression of a very frightened child faced with a very impossible
wall. So there's a lot of guitars on there.
GW: "I'm Scared" is an interesting one.
MAY: Yeah, that goes back a long way. I kept doing different versions of that, as I kept
finding out that I was scared of more and more things. And I figured that most of us are.
We just keep it inside. I think it's good to let all that stuff out sometimes. Do a bit of
screaming.
GW: Moving to another extreme, "Driven By You" was originally written for a Ford
commercial?
MAY: That's right. See, I thought advertising was a dirty word, and I didn't want much to
do with it. But these ad guys threw some slogans at me and I thought, "Well, I can do
it if I relate it to my own experiences and my own feelings." And the phrase
"Driven By You" immediately jumped out as a description of the way I saw the
power struggle between two people in a relationship. It just poured out. I wrote a version
for me, and I wrote a version for the ad people. And it worked out great. It was a good
kick up the backside for me too, because these people work quickly and do high quality
work. On English television, the adverts are a lot better than the programming.
GW: Did you write "Just One Life" after the tribute concert to Freddie at
Wembley?
MAY: No. Strangely enough, I wrote that after going to see a memorial concert for an
actor, a friend of my lady friend whom I'd never met. I'd never even seen his work, though
he was pretty well-known in England. But by the end of the evening, I felt that I knew the
guy. I wrote the song around that and realized that it related very closely to the stuff I
was searching for in my solo work. So it became another germ which grew into a piece of
the album.
GW: I perceived it as a song about Freddie.
MAY: There are many threads in the album. And one of them is Freddie, obviously. It had to
be. Because all through the making of this album I was becoming more and more aware that
Freddie was facing the end of his life. So obviously I was aware as I finished off this
song that in some way it was going to relate to Freddie, too. And also to my dad and also
to me. So there were a whole lot of link-ups there. But the song most directly concerned
with Freddie is really "Nothing But Blue." It was written around the time we
lost him, and I had this strong feeling that this was the end.
GW: Do you see much of Roger and John these days?
MAY: Yes. I'm in the studio with them at the moment. We're trying to sift through some
tapes of the Freddie tribute and do some mixes. We're going to put out a video of the
tribute, hopefully in time for Christmas. We're trying to get clearances from all the
musicians involved, which is a major task. But it looks good. I'm surprised at how good it
looks. I tend to shy away from looking at these things after we've done them, 'cause there
are always things you wish you'd done better. But this actually looks great. Looking at
it, I'm actually very cheered up.
GW: Do you think you'll go on to do more work with Roger and John?
MAY: We're talking about it. But it's very hard to see how we can be on a stage without
Freddie. To me, personally, it doesn't make much sense. One of the things that we've
agreed to do is finish off the tracks that Freddie sang after the end of the Innuendo
album. There's two or three or four pieces there which we can finish, and they should be
called the work of Queen. But after that, who knows? I don't think anybody knows.
GW: Tell us about your plans to tour behind Back To The Light.
MAY: Well me and Cozy Powell and Neil Murray - and hopefully my wonderful singers who
helped me out in Seville and also hopefully Spike Edny, who was a mainstay of many a Queen
show on keyboards-are gonna go down to South America and do a few gigs. Try to get
"played in." And if we come up with something that we think is a good show,
we'll be off on tour and we'll see you before too long. Personally, I can't wait. You're
talking to someone who's been off the road for six years now, and whose major love in life
was touring.
GW: That's interesting, because one associates you, in particular, with studio craft.
MAY: Yeah, but my favorite moments were always live. Definitely. You do the studio work so
that you can progress. But the best times are always on the road.
Brian May looks back at some of Queen's finest
moments.
"KILLER QUEEN" (1975)
SHEER HEART ATTACK
"I was always very happy with this song. The whole record was made in a very
craftsmanlike manner. I still enjoy listening to It because there's a lot to listen to,
but it never gets cluttered. There's always space for all the little ideas to come
through. And of course I like the solo, with that three-part section, where each part has
its own voice. What can say? It's vintage Queen.
"The first time I heard Freddie playing that song, I was lying in my room in
Rockfield [a residential recording studio in Wales], feeling very sick. After Queen's
first American tour I had hepatitis, and then I had very bad stomach problems and I had to
be operated on. So I remember Just lying there, hearing Freddie play this really great
song and feeling sad, because I thought, 'I can't even get out of bed to participate in
this. Maybe the group will have to go on without me.' No one could figure out what was
wrong with me. But then I did go into the hospital and I got fixed up, thank God. And when
I came out again, we were able to fin- ish off 'Killer Queen.' They left some space for me
and I did the solo. I had strong feelings about one of the harmony bits in the chorus, so
we had another go at that too."
"BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY" (1975)
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA
"Freddie used to come into the studio armed with sheets and sheets of paper with
notes scribbled all over them in his own particular fashion. It wasn't standard musical
notation, but A's and B's and C's and sharps in blocks - like buses zooming all over his
bits of paper. He had the song all worked out when he came in. We played a backing track
which left the gaps. And he would go, 'bum bum bum bmm, that's what hap- pens here....' He
knew exactly what he was doing all along. It was Freddie's baby. He had It in his head'.
We Just helped him bring it to life.
"We were stretching the limits of technology in those days. Because 'Bohemian
Rhapsody' was entirely done on 16 track, we had to do a lot of bouncing as we went
along; the tape got very thin. This 'legendary' story, that people think we made up.
Is true: we held the tape up to the light one day - we'd been won- dering where all the
top end was going- and we discovered was virtually a transparent piece of tape. All the
oxide had been rubbed off. It was time to hurriedly make a copy and get on with It.
"WE WILL ROCK YOU" (1978)
NEWS OF THE WORLD
"That was a response to a particular phase in our career when the audience was
becoming a bigger part of the show than we were. They would sing all the songs. In a place
like Birmingham, they'd be so vociferous that we'd have to stop the show and let them sing
to us. So both Freddie and I thought it would be an interesting experiment to write songs
with audience participation specifically in mind. My feeling was that everyone can stamp
and clap and sing a simple motif. We did that record at Wessex, which is an old converted
church that has a naturally good sound to it. There are no drums on there. It's just us,
stamping on boards many times with many primitive delay machines and clapping. A bit of
singing, a bit of guitar playing and that's it.
"At concerts, I discovered, people tend to do three claps rather than two stamps and
a clap. The amazing thing is to go to football matches, or sports events in general, and
hear people do it. It's very gratifying to find that it has become part of folklore, sort
of. I'll die happy because of that. "
"CRAZY LITTLE THING CALLED LOVE" (1980)
THE GAME
"The guys put down the backing track for that one when I was out doing something in
Munich, where we were working; Freddie said he wrote the song in his bathtub at the Munich
Hilton. I came back and thought, 'Oh my God, it's almost finished. Let me put some guitar
on It before they stick It out.' Fred plays the rhythm acoustic guitar. All I really did
was add a kind of ersatz rock and roll solo and some backing har- monies and it was done.
"ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST" (1980)
THE GAME
"John Deacon, being totally in his own world, came up with this thing, which was
nothing like what we were doing. We were going for the big drum sound: you know, quite
pompous in our usual way. And Deakey says, 'No, I want this to be totally different: it's
going to be a very tight drum sound.' It was originally done to a drum loop - this was
before the days of drum machines. Roger did a loop, kind of under protest, because he
didn't like the sound of the drums recorded that way. And then Deakey put this groove
down. Immediately Freddie became violently enthusiastic and said, 'This is big! This Is
important! I'm going to spend a lot of time on this.'
"It was the beginning of something quite big for us, because it was the first time
that one of our records crossed over to the black community. We had no control over that;
it just happened. Suddenly we were forced to put out this single because so many stations
in New York were playing it. It changed that album from being a million-seller to being a
three-million seller in a matter of three weeks or so." |
