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INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN MAY - GOLD COMPACT DISC (VOL. 1 NO. 7) 1992

When Queen’s charismatic frontman Freddie Mercury died last year, it was the end of an era in rock music in general, as well as a personal tragedy for the three surviving members of a band that had become one of the most successful in the history of British rock. It also heralded the dawn of new solo careers for Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon, who performed Queen with Mercury back in 1970.

Brian May has just released his first post-Queen solo album, Back to the Light, while the first single from it, Too Much Love Will Kill You, has already been a top 10 hit. Now May is adjusting to life outside the musical perimeters of one of the UK’s best-loved rock bands – “a challenge which is quite nerve-racking – I feel as though I’m starting out all over again.”

The amiable May is chatting in the comfortable Queen management offices, in London’s Notting Hill. A handful of ever-loyal Queen devotees are sitting patiently outside the unimposing front door, happy just to be in close proximity to one of their heroes. There are many reminders of Queen, and in particular Freddie, to be seen within the building: huge gig posters, from all over the world, plus photographs and awards. There is also a slight flamboyance about the place which brings back the memories of Freddie.

Brian May is reflecting on the death of his long-time musical colleague… the effects on the group, the recording legacy they’ve left behind, but most importantly of all, the positive aspect that came out of Freddie Mercury’s tragic demise – bringing home the message about the dangers of Aids, the killer disease that claimed his life.

“Aids is literally walking the streets, and yet there is this amazing public complacency about it. there are people writing opinion columns in national newspapers, saying ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s a gay disease’. As long as there are still people coming out with statements like that, we must continue to shout out about the dangers. I think that Freddie’s death has made a huge difference to people’s attitudes and conceptions about Aids, which can only be for the good.

“It’s amazing how many people felt so close to Freddie, even those who didn’t actually know him… all kinds of people, all ages, different cultures and sexual persuasions, everything… so many people have told me that when they heard he’d died, they cried, and yet they hadn’t realized until then just how much feeling they had for him. Freddie had this amazing ability to get his personality across to people, he was really quite unique.”

May continues, “I’m glad that we did the Concert for Aids Awareness in his memory, it was done on a big enough scale to give him the great send-off that Freddie deserved. A lot of people have suggested that we should do something like it again, but that would take away from the specialness of the occasion, and anyway, it was a massive strain on our (Queen’s) shoulders because we weren’t just performing, we were also organizing everybody else.

“It was difficult enough just choosing the acts who would appear, we argued a lot among ourselves about the bill, but the basic criteria for the acts finally selected was their relevance to Freddie – either they were artists that he had been enthusiastic about, or those who had been keen on Freddie and his music, and had something to say about him.”

The death of Freddie Mercury was a personal bereavement for May, and his two other Queen colleagues, John Deacon and Roger Taylor. “It was truly awful for us, just like losing a member of the family. I’d known Freddie for 25 years, we’d spent our adult life until now together. It has been hard accepting reddie’s death but perhaps the personal thing that has come out of it for Roger, John and myself, apart from the deep sense of loss, is that there is now no option but to move on with our individual careers.

“As a band, we had an incredibly lucky and successful span of 20 years, and being able to perform at that level of success was very rewarding. However, we fought to build up our own protective shell, and once that was there it was like a little egg that saved us from having to be individuals in the true sense, so it’s good for us to be put in a situation where we have to be individuals from now on. We have no option but to move on to the next phase… I know that I wouldn’t have attacked this solo album with the same passion, if it hadn’t been for the way things turned out with Freddie’s death.”

Back to the Light, Brian’s new album for Parlophone, is actually his second solo album offering. Back in 1983, he teamed up with several rock musician mates, including Eddie Van Halen, for a ‘jam session’ which resulted in a mini-album, Star Fleet Project. He also had a top 10 single last year with Driven by You, which featured in a television commercial campaign for Ford cars.

“I’m very excited about the new album, it’s like starting out again in a way. I want to know what people think about it, and I certainly wouldn’t have put the album out, if I didn’t think that it had something special. Back to the Light is a little different, and I hope that it gives people a jolt when they hear it.

“I don’t know what the reviews will be like, but if they’re not so good, well I’ll be philosophical about it – the things I’ve been most proud of, during my career, have usually been the one’s that got slated the most! But even if Back to the Light doesn’t sell masses of records, well I’ll just be happy if it gets to the right people, to whom it will mean something.

“The Starfleet album was just a quick one-off thing, it didn’t sell that well, but then it wasn’t commercially conceived. The great thing, however, is that all those people who did buy it seem to have treasured the album over the years. Aspiring musicians, in particular guitar players, have told me that it was quite influential to them, and that means much more than just appealing to the mass market. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t like a huge hit – that would bring a great feeling of reward – but if the album is appreciated by people who are into what I’m into, then that will be reward enough, and everything else will be a bonus.”

The rather modest May adds: “I have to make it clear though that I’m not setting myself up as a great vocalist… I know for a fact that I’m not, and that comes from having worked with Freddie. If you look at Bob Dylan or Eric Clapton, they’re proficient, but they’re not great singers… people have sung Dylan’s songs a lot better than he has, but if you listen to his interpretation of his own songs, there’s a massive amount of meaning and feeling that only he can put across. The point is, you can write a song, and someone else can record it, but even if that someone is the best singer in the world, something is usually lost in the translation. The things that you, as the writer, personally feel about the song don’t necessarily get into the final performance. With my new album, I wanted to say what I wanted to say in my own way, using the vocal and the guitar as two voices.”

He continues: “I’m not a songwriter as such, I can only function if a song means something to me regarding human relationships. I like to write about things that are personal, rather than about politics and other wider issues. Also a song should always be about the vocals, and it was certainly that way with Freddie. No matter how good the accompaniment is, and the production, if the vocal doesn’t work, then you haven’t got a song. Back to the Light isn’t a guitar virtuoso album, it is built around the voice, and it is an album of songs, some of which are designed to feature a lot of guitar. I worked on the vocals more than anything else on the album – I needed to, because I’m not that great at doing that kind of stuff!”

Despite his comments about other artists’ and musicians’ interpretations of songs they haven’t written themselves, May admits, “It’s great when other artists bring different approaches to Queen songs, I wish more people covered out stuff, they certainly shouldn’t be afraid to do so… I don’t care how they cover a song, to me it’s a great compliment that they want to do it in the first place. I’m not over-protective about our copyrights, it’s good if other artists and musicians want to bring their own selves into our songs. After all, music is a continuous process, you don’t create it in a vacuum, anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong. When we were starting out, we used to do other people’s songs, every group did in those days, and that’s how we learnt our trade, covering the Motown stuff, as well doing Hendrix and Cream songs.”

Similarly, he has a philosophical view about the Queen back-catalogue. There’s not a great deal of unreleased material because we tended to use up everything as we went along, but there are a few tracks left over from the Innuendo sessions. We never thought we’d finish that album, Freddie had been told by his doctors that he probably wouldn’t get to finish it, but he was determined to get through. There are a few songs sitting there that need finishing, I’m not sure how many, but certainly not enough for an album. I guess there has been a certain amount of reluctance between Roger, John and myself to go back into the studios and finish them… we needed to get away from the recording studios for our own sanity’s sake, rather than locking ourselves in, with the last Queen tapes, and trying to finish them.”

May adds: “Queen as a band doesn’t exist anymore, it can’t without Freddie, but the amount of time we spend on Queen matters is still enormous… there’s the catalogue to consider, and the whole recycling process of it, then there is the Queen business side which has many offshoots. There’s also the material that we didn’t quite finish, which we’ll have to do something about at some stage – we’ve guarded the quality of our record release very carefully over the years, and we don’t want standards to start slipping now.”

Back to his own solo career: “Most of all, I would like to play live again… it’s six years ago since Queen were last out on the road, and you need to strike a balance. Live work gets the juices going, and certainly makes me creative, a lot of my better stuff has been conceived on the road. I was very nervous at the Freddie Wembley tribute though… I get like that if it’s an unfamiliar situation, and I was worried about forgetting to introduce people. When you’re on tour in a band situation, you know what you’re doing, you know your partners, you know that you basically have something to offer, and it’s just a question of playing some good notes.

“I’ve got both Cozy Powell and Neil Murray playing on the new album, and we’re talking about doing some live dates, maybe at the end of the year of early next. I’d like to start in some smaller venues, just to get the feel of performing live again, but preferably in Outer Mongolia where not too many people can see or hear us! However, I don’t want to go out on tour and pretend that I’ve got a show worked out, when it’s just experimentation, it wouldn’t be fair to either the audience or me.”

Would he perform any Queen songs? “I don’t feel shy about doing them, but I wouldn’t be comfortable performing something like We Are the Champions because that’s so personal to Freddie. Even for the Wembley tribute, we racked our brains about who should do the song… there was some talk of us performing it ourselves, which we could have attempted, but it wouldn’t have meant anything. I fought tooth and nail to get Liza (Minnelli) because I knew that she was the only person who could perform the song with the same kind of feeling that Freddie use to put into it.”

He reflects: “It would be a shame though if the Queen catalogue could no longer be performed, so we mustn’t be paranoid about any of us doing the songs live. When Paul McCartney started his solo career, he wouldn’t do any of The Beatles stuff at first, but he does now, which makes sense because people want to hear those songs. I guess though that there’s always a fear that people are going to say, ‘You’re living in the past’, so we’ve got to strike a balance.

“I hope my album will get me some new fans as well as being enjoyed by existing Queen fans. A lot of people did find Queen’s gloss rather off-putting and strangely, since Freddie died, many have been able to look at the band a lot more clearly. Some of those who couldn’t quite swallow Freddie, or the band itself, can now… they can see the reality of what Freddie was doing. With Queen there was a very high level of production, and this huge sieving process went on, so that every recording became very rounded, which I think on the whole is a good thing.

“But I think that my solo stuff is much more directly me because it hasn’t gone through that process. I’ve been very painstaking with the album, and I haven’t had people interfering. I’ve said exactly what I wanted to say. I guess if people hate the results, then I can only blame myself…”

May recorded most of his album in the studio he has at his home in the country. “I’ve always resisted the idea of having a studio there because I’ve always felt that you should be able to get away from your work… but it never worked out like that anyway. The reason I did my own album at home was because of the feeling of pressure that you can get working in one of the major recording studios.

“It’s often a case of, ‘Well here I am, standing in this studio, just playing about, and it’s costing more than £1,000 a day’. It just seems so wasteful, so I thought, ‘Well why not do the album at home?’ And anyway, I wanted to get back to basics. It meant that I could do things the way that I wanted to do them, and not the way the studio wanted it doing… even just little things like miking up the drums in a particular way. Unless you’re careful, it’s so easy to get locked into other people’s way of working. It worked so well that I’m now wedded to the idea of recording more at home.”

May actually started working on his solo album a long time ago. “Bits of it go back to ancient history, particularly the songs. I started the recording work about five years ago, but most of it was done in little blocks, because Queen were so busy. I had a rough idea of what the album was going to be like, round about that time, but I didn’t get down to the serious work until about a year ago, when Driven By You happened.”

He admits that he had previously been reluctant to become involved with writing music for commercials. “The advertising agency approached me, and asked if I’d ever done anything for that medium, and I said, ‘No – I’ve never wanted to’. I had this idea at the back of my mind that it was all a dirty word, pure commercialism… selling out, really. I was persuaded to give it a try though, and discovered that it was all really very much above board!

“I worked on the song and advert in parallel, and the interesting thing is that the song meant one thing to me, and another thing to the agency people. I was really stimulated by the way that advertising people work… I mean, they’re so quick. I delivered them a version of Driven by You, and it was on the television commercial the next day!”

May’s new album has been given a major boost by the success of the single, Too Much Love Will Kill You, and he’s been gearing himself up for the inevitable round of press and radio interviews. He says he shies away from personal publicity, but is happy to talk about music, although may himself has been the victim of unwanted attention from the tabloid press, primarily when it was revealed that he and former EastEnders actress Anita Dobson were going out together, at a time when he was married with a family.

“This personal publicity the tabloids give various people… at its best, it’s intolerable, I hate the way that journalists are allowed to do that, making somebody’s life a total misery. There’s no justification, for example, for the way the newspapers seem to have set out to destroy Michael Jackson, he’s a person who has given pleasure to millions of people, so why should certain people in newspapers destroy his image and credibility in the most vile way?

“Free speech has been wrongly interpreted to mean that newspapers can destroy anyone they like, and yet it’s so difficult for the victims to have any comeback. Michael Jackson is suing The Daily Mirror, but he’s still providing all the papers with a feast… they will sell more newspapers because of the fact that he’s suing. What most of us have to do is just to ignore what is being written, because if you deny the allegations you just provide them with more ammunition.”

#brian may #interview

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INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN MAY - TOTAL GUITAR CHRISTMAS 1998

From the excessive majesty of Queen to his solo career successes, Brian May’s irrepressible desire for pushing the boundaries of melodic rock in unrivalled. Joe Bennett gets the lowdown from one of rock guitar’s greatest innovators.

You’d think people like Brian May could take it easy, wouldn’t you? With 18 Queen albums under his belt and two of his own, he could be forgiven for sitting back and feeling at least slightly pleased with himself. Not a bit of it. The words ‘perfectionist’ and ‘workaholic’ seem scarcely adequate for a man who has taken six years to record his latest album, and doesn’t plan to take any time off from touring for the rest of the years. And his enthusiasm for gigging is obvious:

“We’re touring Japan, by way of Russia, and that takes us up to the middle of November and then I’m not sure how long I want to be out for. The temptation, once you’ve started, is to keep going ‘cause you’re all geared up, you’ve got all the right people and you’ve rehearsed.”

Tragically ‘all the right people’ lacks one individual. Drummer Cozy Powell died in a car accident earlier this year. “Cozy was such a great guy and a close friend – it’ll be really strange to look behind me on stage and not see him there. For a time we even did a few gigs without a drummer but after a lot of thought and heart-searching we all thought we should use one. We found Eric Singer; he’s blinding, but it’s tough to fill Cozy’s shoes. I’d built a lot of my style round him – he’d been a hero of mine for years. I judged my writing by how it sounded when Cozy played it. The idea is not to replace him though, just to move on. Eric comes from the right place, you know?

“Somebody once told me when we started out that a band is only as good as its drummer. I thought that was crap but over the years I’ve realized it’s true. You can get away with a crap guitarist quite easily – and a lot of people do! – but you can’t get away with sloppy drumming. It makes the whole thing sound really amateurish. The level of energy the upper limit, is set by the drummer.”

Playing Live

Brian crafts his gig set lists very carefully, and he sees the gigging experience as much more than simply copying the original recording. “You’re supposed to be finding new moments with the audience, so each gig should be unique. With the recognizable Queen stuff, I do tend to settle for something that sounds a lot like what I did in the first place – some audiences want that. You’re always treading that line between keeping yourself fresh and giving people something they want to hear.”

And Queen, of course, had an additional practical problem to deal with when playing live – how to recreate the band’s heavily-produced sound in a guitar/bass/drums format. “We tried out a lot of songs two or three times and they just weren’t made for the stage – stuff from Flash Gordon springs to mind. We also didn’t do stuff that Roger or I sang on the albums because we wanted to use Freddie as the frontman as much as possible. I mean, when you have the greatest frontman in the world you don’t want to waste his time!

“Some of the rock songs stayed in the live set just ‘cause they were cracking played live. Tie Your Mother Down, for example, never left the live set and it probably never will. Certain songs just have that chemistry… you want to play them ‘til you die.”

But despite the sadness that Brian associates with the end of the band, the last few years have given him freedom to explore new areas. “After Back to the Light tour I made the decision to head towards the second album, but on the way I would try and get out into the world and interact more. From the beginning of Queen there was such momentum that I never had any time to do anything else. My energy was 95% focused on the band. Then there was all that time when we knew Freddie was on the way out, we kept our heads down again. When he’d gone, my way of dealing with it was to get busy.”

One of these projects was the posthumous work to be one on Freddie’s final recorded tracks. “We had promised Freddie – and ourselves – that we would finish the album after he’d gone. He’d wanted us to give him as many vocal lines to record as we could, but even though we’d made that commitment, actually doing it was really hard. We only had scraps, sometimes vocals without anything else, to work on. It was an enormous task and it took literally two years out of my life. You can imagine the frustration because I had ideas in my head, but this was a labour of love because it was for Freddie. It was enormously exciting but enormously sad as well. And all this time my next album was gathering dust because I was pretty much focused on the Queen album.”

The three remaining members of the band still get on well, but they haven’t collaborated with Brian on his solo work; “I consciously wanted to avoid my second album being connected with Queen – that’s why Roger and John don’t appear on it. We have our own separate paths, we always did have, and I think that was part of our strength. It was a very strong partnership but we were always having to give something up and compromise. Four songwriters in a four-piece band – what can I say?”

Roger, John and Brian did, however, record one last song as a band. “The original plan was that we’d finish the last Queen album and then I’d get back to my own work. Then the Queen Rocks compilation came up. The record company wanted to put out a compilation album ad we thought it’d be a good idea to encourage people to remember the heavy stuff that Queen recorded – I’ve always had a fondness for the rockier side of things. Roger and John heard a track I’d done called No-one But You, which was originally going to be on my own album. Roger loved it and thought we should do it as Queen. I knew that the lyric was very much about Freddie, but Roger wanted to make it more general, change the tempo – so I lost a song, and Queen gained one!”

Brian and Beck

The songs which did eventually make it on to Brian’s latest solo LP, Another World, are a mixed bunch indeed. As well as covers of Brian’s own favourites – Hendrix’s One Rainy Wish and Mott the Hoople’s All the Young Dudes to name but two – he’s included material based on outside projects he’s been involved in. Cyborg (on this month’s CD) was originally written as a soundtrack to a computer game, and The Guv’nor was the theme to TV series which never made it to the small screen.

“The Guv’norwas a television programme about a bare-knuckle boxer in the original script, but it worked as a metaphor, and I started thinking – in our world, the world of guitar players, we have people like that, who we think of as our Guv’nor. Jeff Beck is like that, he’s great but he’s really unpredictable, spiky and frighteningly original. You feel small next to him, kind of wary. So I began to think the song was about him and I rang him up – which took a moment of courage from me! I asked him to play on it, and he turned up and did a recording session here at the house. Being the caring, professional player that he is, he wasn’t satisfied with his own guitar parts – although I loved them – so he took it away to work on it. I didn’t get it back until a year later!”

But apart from this one guest slot, all the other guitar parts on the album are Brian’s own, including the ubiquitous layered harmony parts that are his trademark. “I grew up with an obsession about harmony. Every record I heard I would wonder why certain harmonies and chords had certain effects on me. So it’s a habit I had of letting something wash over me, and then figuring out afterwards why it had moved me. I learned that the lines and the crossing points are the key points, really. I never studied harmony formally – it was mainly done by listening. I picked up a book on harmony once, but it just gave me the names for things, which I wasn’t really interested in. I believe in intuition more than anything. I mean I know something about the techniques of inversions and everything, but mainly it’s like, “What happens when I do this?”

May Gear

Suitably enough, this brings the conversation round to the inevitable subject of guitars and amplifiers. The question ‘Are you still using AC30s?’ is rendered pointless as we turn a corner and walk into a room literally filled with Vox combos. And Brian’s Red Special, affectionately known as the ‘Old Lady’ is still going strong, thanks to some fairly major repair work by guitar surgeon Greg Fryer. “The guitar was getting dangerously worn from 30 years of gigs, but I could never retire it. It’s a link with my dad, we made it together in the late ‘60s, and I don’t play anything else – apart from the excellent copies that Greg’s made for me, of course.”

Brian’s passion for his instrument was never faltered, and he’s happy to find that many TG readers still look to classic rock material for their inspiration; “I’ve always lived in that guitar world. I have noticed kids that I come across being more into the real essence of guitar music now. I walked into my friend’s son’s bedroom a couple of years ago and there were posters for Led Zeppelin and Hendrix all over the walls – I was expecting hip hop, rap and all that.”

“With all of that early rock stuff – and I suppose I can include Queen – there’s a certain directness and passion about it. It has that emotional intensity and unfettered quality. You’re always trying to capture those moments, and not always successfully… there are times when I’ve been feeling something and played a solo that I’ve never been able to repeat.”

Transcription Troubles

Perhaps surprisingly, Brian is unaware of the massive amount of Queen guitar tablature available, and he is far from up-to-date on recent developments in transcription quality. “I never took sheet music seriously. I remember getting some for The Shadows’ stuff, then realising it was nothing like the record and that I could do better myself just by listening to other people and using my own intuition.

“For example, I remember the first time I tried tapping, I actually got the idea from someone else in the early ‘70s. We were on tour in Texas, and a few beverages had been consumed while we were watching a bar band. The guitarist kept adding this high note as a single tap to his blues licks, and it sounded like a flute or clarinet or something. I told him I was going to nick it and he said, ‘fine’! He’d nicked it off someone else anyway. He said he’d heard Billy Gibbons do it on a ZZ Top album, but I’ve listened to all their stuff since and I still don’t know which track he means.

“So that’s how it happens – but it doesn’t always have to be a guitar that you get new ideas from. As a kid I listened to an arranged trad jazz band called the Temperance Seven, and they used a technique that they called ‘bells’, where every note is played on a different instrument and it’s all sustained, cascading with harmonic effects. Mantovani did it too – he was a great influence on me – and I did it on my first album. That’s the inspiration for the second half of the Killer Queen solo…”

Guitar Heroes

So how does he feel about players learning his own solos from transcriptions? “I think that’s really good. It’s great if players learn their craft by listening to how other people do it. Pick up everything that’s out there – there’s no shame in that at all. Individual style will emerge anyway, like Chinese whispers. George Harrison once tried to play Apache by The Shadows and he couldn’t remember it, so it came out as something completely different – and that’s fair enough. I go to see Joe Satriani or Steve Vai – those guys are way ahead of me and I pick up something new every time. I’m lucky in that I can talk to them because I’m in a privileged position. They say they listen to my stuff too, which is great but I’m under no illusions!”

“Ultimately, I think if I’ve got anything to say a s a guitar player it’s because I’m open and I listen, and I find my own way – but in the full knowledge of what other people are doing. How can you learn a language if you don’t listen to people speak? This magazine of yours would have helped me if it had been around when I was starting out, I can tell you!” Ah, thanks Brian…

The Deacy amp

Although Brian’s main amp is the Vox AC30, most of his harmony parts have been recorded using a home-made transistor amp, constructed out of cannibalised circuitry and an old hi-fi speaker by Queen bassist (and electronics graduate) John Deacon.

“How that amp works is a mystery to us,” admits Brian with a laugh. “John says he found the pre-amp circuit on a skip and that he just threw it all together, but then he’s a modest guy – he knows what he’s doing. It’s on loads of recordings. I remember definitely The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke from Queen II, God Save the Queen and Good Company from A Night at the Opera – most of the layered stuff. All those trombone and clarinet sounds on that album, they’re just a combination of pickups, selection, treble booster, wah-wah and technique.”

Astronomy and Then Some

And so the time comes when we have to leve Brian to his schedule (with a couple of gratis copies of Total Guitar, natch). This afternoon he’s got a telephone interview with the local radio station. Then he’s got a meeting with his publicity person about cover artwork.

This coming weekend he’ll be on BBC Radio 4. Of course, Greg will be at the house tomorrow to continue working with Brian on the live rig. And there’s the radio mix of the new single to mix. Oh, and still he’s working on his book about 19th century stereo photography. Plus he’s got his PhD to finish too. Makes you wonder how he finds the time to pick up his guitar…

#thank you for sharing #interview #brian may

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