Profile of Brian May on Famous Like Me

Brian Harold May CBE (born 19 July 1947 in Hampton, London, England) became famous in the 1970s and 1980s as the guitarist of the rock group Queen and composed many of their hits, including "We Will Rock You", "Hammer to Fall", "Tie Your Mother Down", "Who Wants to Live Forever", "I Want it All", and "The Show Must Go On".

He was also known for creating harmonious guitar riffs and solos, and in studios would often overdub his guitar leads in an orchestral style, adding to the harmonies.

He remained an active musician in the 1990s, after Freddie Mercury's death, publishing two solo albums and taking part in special events like Pavarotti and Friends, Montreux Jazz Festival, 46664 at Cape Town, and Party at the Palace for the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2002.

May has played a range of guitars, most often the Red Special, which he designed with his father, Harold May, and built with wood from a most unlikely source — an old fireplace. His comments on this instrument, from Queen In Their Own Words (ed. Mick St. Michael, Omnibus Press, 1992, p62) are:

"I like a big neck - thick, flat and wide. I lacquered the fingerboard with Rustin's Plastic Coating. The tremolo is interesting in that the arm's made from an old bicycle saddle bag carrier, the knob at the end's off a knitting needle and the springs are valve springs from an old motorbike."

In addition to using his homemade guitar, he prefers to use coins (especially sixpenny pieces) instead of a more traditional plastic plectrum, on the basis that their rigidity gives him more control in playing. He is known to constantly carry coins in his pockets specifically for this purpose.

May's early heroes were Cliff Richard and The Shadows, whom he says were the most metallic thing out at the time. Many years later he gained his opportunity to play on separate occasions with both Cliff Richard and Shadows lead guitarist Hank Marvin. May was proud upon hearing that Cliff Richard had mentioned in an interview that he would have Brian May in his personal fantasy band. As well as recording with Hank Marvin, May also contributed to the 1996 album "Twang!: A Tribute to Hank Marvin & the Shadows," playing FBI. The album featured other greats such as Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath, Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, and Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt of Status Quo.

May, unlike fellow bandmates Mercury and Roger Taylor, and in contrast with many rock stars, never recreationally used drugs, was not sexually promiscuous, didn't smoke and rarely drank. He was known for being rather quiet and reserved at parties. When he does drink, his favorite beer is Guinness.

May has stated in interviews that he suffered from depression in the late 1980s, even to the point of contemplating suicide, and that drug use would have exacerbated any problems he faced. At the time, during the recording sessions of the Queen album The Miracle he was leaving his wife, Queen was not playing any live shows, and his father died.

May also wanted to be sure all of his experiences were completely real, and he felt that was impossible under the influence of any narcotics.

May's father Harold had been a longtime cigarette smoker, and this likely contributed to his early death. As a result, May dislikes smoking, even to the point where he specifically prohibits smoking indoors at his more recent concerts.

His avoidance of alcohol can be traced to an early concert where Queen played with the band Aerosmith, and May had a conversation with fellow guitarist Joe Perry backstage. Perry brought out a bottle of whiskey, which the two drank between themselves. May felt so unpleasant during the concert that he promised himself never to have more than one drink before playing.

In Queen's three-part vocal harmonies, his was generally the mid-range backing vocal, sounding not unlike Mercury's, albeit not quite as strong. On some of his songs he sings the lead vocal, such as "Some Day One Day", "All Dead, All Dead", "Leaving Home Ain't Easy" and "'39".

He was the tallest member of Queen, and at 6' 1", the only member over 6 feet tall.

May attended Hampton School and the prestigious Imperial College London and had been part way through a Ph.D. course there when Queen became successful, and never completed his astronomy doctorate. He had written most of his thesis but never submitted it, although his professors claimed it was strong enough to earn him the doctorate. He was a coauthor on at least one scholarly publication . He was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science in November 2002 by Hertfordshire University, although it is not typically customary in the United Kingdom for honorary doctors to be called "Doctor".

Throughout the last several years, he has overseen the remastering of Queen albums and various DVD and Greatest Hits releases. In 2004, he announced he and drummer Roger Taylor were going on tour for the first time in 18 years as "Queen," along with Free/Bad Company vocalist Paul Rodgers. The tour is being billed as "Queen + Paul Rodgers Spring 2005." In the Queen's birthday honours list of the same year, he was made a Commander of the British Empire "for services to the music industry".

He has been quoted throughout the years as saying: "I live in my head too much."

May has also been a vegetarian for a number of years.

Highlights

Brian May began composing in 1968/1969. He covered a wide variety of styles, but basically he wrote ballads and hard rock. From the first group perhaps the most respected piece is Who Wants To Live Forever, which has been covered by artists like Seal and Sarah Brightman. His most popular rock number is We Will Rock You, a very simple ABABAB composition with pentatonic melody and ostinato percussion. Among his most ambitious works were Procession (Queen II, 1974), a pseudo-baroque short piece for guitar octet, and The Dark (1980-1991).

Through the years he wrote some songs with other people, the most memorable being Too Much Love Will Kill You, composed with Frank Musker and Elizabeth Lamers, which won Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically & Lyrically in 1996. As a meticulous arranger he focused on multi-part harmonies, often more contrapuntal than parallel — a rarity for rock guitar. Good examples are found in Queen's albums A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, where he arranged a jazz band for guitar mini-orchestra (Good Company), a vocal canon (Prophet's Song) and guitar and vocal counterpoints (Teo Toriatte).

As a performer, he was primarily respected as a guitarist. May explored a wide variety of styles in guitar as well. Playing lead some of his best works include sweep picking (Was It All Worth It), tapping (Bijou, Resurrection, Cyborg), Hendrix-like licks (Liar, Brighton Rock) and melodic parts (Bohemian Rhapsody, Killer Queen, These Are The Days Of Our Lives). Some of his solos and orchestral parts were composed by Freddie Mercury, who then asked Brian to bring them to life (Bicycle Race, Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon). May also performed notable acoustic works, including the fingerpicked solo of White Queen (Queen II, 1974) and the skiffle-influenced '39.

Brian didn't restrict his abilities to one instrument. During his Queen days he performed ukelele (Good Company) and sometimes piano, detaching on a soft and gentle style (All Dead All Dead, Save Me, Dear Friends). He recorded some other instruments here and there (maracas, banjo, etc), including the harp on Love Of My Life, which was recorded in overdubs and mixed to sound as one performance.

May was an excellent singer too. His wide vocal range went from notes around low A (110 Hz) to very high tenor Ds and Es (mostly in his solo career). Occasionally he contributed falsetto parts as well (Ogre Battle, Why Don't We Try Again). In some Queen songs, such as Good Company or She Makes Me, he sang all the vocals.

Gear

Most of Brian's guitar work was played with the Red Special. Still, he used some other electric guitars, including a Burns Double Six (Long Away), a Fender Telecaster (Crazy Little Thing Called Love) an Ibanez (Nothing But Blue) and a Flying V (One Vision).

In early Queen tours he had a Stratocaster as spare guitar, replacing it with a Les Paul Deluxe in 1974, then a John Birch replica of his Red Special the next year. In a concert in the States on the 1982 Hot Space North American tour, he got frustrated with that instrument and smashed it, thereafter using a Gibson Flying V until he got more suitable replicas of his beloved Red Special.

For acoustic guitars, mostly he used Ovation 12-Strings, Martins and a Gibson Chet Atkins for nylon-string parts. His ukelele was Aloha. Pianos he recorded include Bosendorfers, although in concerts he relied on Mercury's Steinway. May used Yamaha DX-7 synths for some of his most memorable inputs: the opening sequence of One Vision and the backgrounds of Who Wants To Live Forever, Scandal and Show Must Go On.

Brian was keen on using some toys as instruments as well. Some of his early acoustic works were done on a cheap Hairfred he had conserved from his childhood. He also used a Yamaha plastic piano in Teo Toriatte, a mini-banjo in Bring Back That Leroy Brown and a toy mini koto in Prophet's Song.

Brian has used Vox AC-30 amplifiers almost exclusively since a meeting with his long time hero 'Rory Gallagher' at a gig in london during the late 60s/early 70s. He always used a 'treble booster' of some kind which with the AC-30 went a long way in helping create many of his signature guitar tones. Live, he used banks of AC-30 amplifiers keeping some amps with only guitar and others with all effects such as delay, flanger and chorus.

Brian May's Input In Songs Credited To Queen

After the famous Live Aid concert in summer 1985, Mercury rang his band mates and proposed to write a song together between them. The result was One Vision, which was basically Brian on music (the Magic Years documentary shows how he came up with the opening section and the basic guitar riff) and Roger on lyrics, with Freddie being more a producer and arranger than a proper co-writer, and John Deacon mostly absent.

For their 1989 release album, The Miracle, the band had decided that all of the tracks would be credited to all the band, no matter who had been the main writer. Still, interviews and musical analyses tend to identify the input of each member on each track.

May composed I Want It All for that album (recent releases credit the song to just him), as well as Scandal (based on his personal problems with the British press). For the rest of the album he didn't contribute so much creatively, although he helped building the basis of Party and Was It All Worth It (both being mostly Freddie's pieces) and came up with the guitar riff of Chinese Torture, an unreleased track of those sessions.

Queen's next album was Innuendo, on which May's contributions increased, although more in arrangements than actual writing in most cases; for the title track he did some of the arrangement for the heavy solo, then he added vocal harmonies to I'm Going Slightly Mad and composed the solo of These Are The Days Of Our Lives, a song for which the four of them decided the keyboard parts together. He changed the tempo and key of Freddie's metal song The Hitman and took it under his wing, even singing guide vocal in the demo. May also co-wrote some of the guitar lines in Bijou.

Two songs that May had composed for his first solo album, Headlong and I Can't Live With You, eventually ended up in the Queen project. His other composition was The Show Must Go On, a group effort in which he was the coordinator and primary composer, but in which they all had input — Deacon and Taylor with the famous chord sequence, Mercury with the first verse.

Albums

• Star Fleet Project (Mini Album, 1983), featuring Eddie Van Halen
• Back To The Light (1992)
• Live At The Brixton Academy (1994)
• Another World (1998)
• Furia (Soundtrack) (2000)

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