Interview with Brian May
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Brian May
Guitarist and songwriter for Queen who wrote songs including "We Will Rock You" and "Who Wants to Live Forever", and who built his own guitar with his father.
Source: Rick Beato 2 on YouTube
These answers are taken from The Brian May Interview on Rick Beato 2's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with making music?
I come from a generation before you, and we didn't have 8 gauge strings. The Fender and Gibson sets were 10s or 11s, and that's what I started off with. But then the rumor went around that if you went down to Clifford Essex in Cambridge Circus, you could get a banjo string which you could put on your guitar and use as the top string. That was the key to everything, because suddenly you could move all the strings over and you could start bending strings. That was the most fantastic thing that happened to us as kids, watching Eric Clapton at Eel Pie Island or the Crawdaddy and thinking, yeah, that's what he's done. I wanted to do what James Burton did on the "Hello Mary Lou" solo. That's what got me going.
There wasn't much around to listen to when I was a kid in terms of pure guitar playing. I had a Segovia record, Julian Bream, and I started to try and learn classical stuff. I had Charlie Byrd playing jazz stuff, and Chet Atkins, who was a phenomenon.
What do you enjoy most about making music?
Partly you're in it and it's a kind of little industry, but partly it is exciting. It's wonderful to hear stuff developing and to be a part of it. So I think we were always excited, actually. It's like, will that do? Yeah, I think that'll do. No, that's great, we'll have that, and why don't we try this? It was a lovely sort of continual updating process, chucking things in to see if they work.
The trick, as we saw it, was to get yourself in the space where you actually felt you were alive. So it wasn't, this is another take. It was, I am on stage, this is it, this is the only chance I get. If you're playing along and you imagine that you're on stage at Madison Square Garden, it's going to feel right and it's going to sound right. You're just going to be in it with your body and your soul. We talked about a live performance in the studio rather than a studio performance.
What was a great moment for you as a musician?
The first time you hear your record played on somebody else's radio is an enormous thing. It's like suddenly you've become part of the fabric of society. I remember when we were mixing A Night at the Opera, I'd been working all night on "The Prophet's Song," trying to get all these delays working, trying to mix it. And I woke up and I could hear it, and I thought, am I imagining this? But no, my neighbor upstairs was playing it incredibly loud on his radio. So that's what I woke up to, and it was horrible, but it was also wonderful, because I thought, oh my God, what we're doing is actually in the world. It's part of what people are experiencing right now. This is being welded into their lives at this moment. What an amazing thing that is.
How do you keep communication clear with the band and the people you record with?
I think we're all a bit that way: I've got this thing, I don't know if it's any good, but I've got this riff and it's kind of about this. So you feel some trepidation, but you quickly get over it, because then you want to get people involved. In the case of myself, I'd pretty soon be telling people what to do. I have to kind of stop myself doing that, because the group situation benefits from having an equal input from everybody. I guess there was an unwritten law that the author of the song, the guy who brought it in, would have the final say in the mix, but along the way I think we trained ourselves to step back and let the band possess it and develop it, and I think everything benefited from that.
We were a powerful interactive force with each other. Very critical with each other, quite horrible with each other sometimes. You can't do that, it's naff, it's crap. Yeah, I can. But then you come to the point where, okay, this seems to work, this is good.
Who is your favorite musician, and why?
Steve Vai is one of my favorite people in the whole world. An extraordinary musician, and the nicest guy in the world.
I learned this from Rory Gallagher, who's the master of sound, that I used to go and see when I was a kid. He told me in person, when I was still at college, not a rock star at all. He said, Brian, I have this AC30 amp which has a particularly beautiful sweet sound like nothing else, and I had this little box, which was the Rangemaster treble booster. That's what sits in the middle. That's what makes it speak, that's what gives me my sound. So I went off the next day, bought myself two AC30s, found a Rangemaster, plugged it all in, and that was my sound, and it hasn't really changed in the 40, 50 years since.
I got hold of some Les Paul records and tried to figure out what he was doing. A lot of the time he was speeding things up, of course, but at the same time he was a very dexterous player. Years later I played with him, and he was phenomenal. Grumpy old sod, but phenomenal. A bit like me, really.
Describe your style.
I could hear it in my head. I come from a strange place. I come from a world where Mantovani and "The Laughing Policeman" were in the hit parade, so my melodies are not really rock melodies as such. I could just hear something very sweet and melodic, which seemed to be a continuation of what Freddie was doing, telling his story in the vocal. I always hear the solo piece as part of the vocal. It's just like the vocalist hands over to somebody momentarily who's going to continue the story and then give it back.
It's 11, it's as loud as it goes. It's very Spinal Tap. Everything's always full up, not all the time, but for the bits where you're trying to go for it. I had a little trick, which was to turn everything up full but not play, and I'd have it in headphones, and I could tune it by moving the mic around until it sounded like what Ed Van Halen would call a brown sound. That's what I was looking for: the sound that would act like a voice.
Tell me about a record or a part that was hard to get right. What was it and why was it challenging?
The end of "Bohemian Rhapsody," everything's coming toward the conclusion and the guitars are going in harmony, and then the piano comes back in: nothing really matters. I remember soon after we'd done it, listening to it on the radio and thinking, the piano has gone out of key. What's gone wrong? Why is the piano sounding weird? It sounds flat. The reason is that I'd pushed those guitars too hard and edged them up, so the guitars were a little sharp, and so your perception is that the piano comes in too low. It bothered me for years, and I didn't talk about it to people because it's a bit embarrassing. I'm not embarrassed now.
When we came to remix it for the 5.1 surround, which I'm hugely proud of, we sat there for days mixing everything, redoing "Bohemian Rhapsody," and when it came to that bit I thought, I'm not standing for this. So I got in and I tuned all the guitars, and they're spot on, and now when the piano comes in it sounds perfect. So that was a sort of circle that I had to complete.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your credits.
Deacy was a bit of a genius, really. He was very clever with electronics, and he found a piece of electronic equipment, I think a piece of a radio, a printed circuit board, and he thought, oh, that's a nice little amp, I'll hook it all up. He found some speakers which were also in the skip, I think, and he put the two together, and this is the Deacy amp. It saturates in a particular way which is almost impossible to reproduce. All that stuff in "Good Company," where I'm pretending to be a clarinet and a trumpet and a trombone, that's all the Deacy. It can sound like a violin or a trumpet depending on where you put the mic. Deacy has been kind enough to let me have it in perpetuity, because I did fall in love with it.
One of its great moments is the solo in "A Winter's Tale," on the very final album that we made, when Freddie had already passed away. I had that solo in my head for about a year and a half. We were in such grief after losing Freddie. I started playing it through this amp and it spoke to me. It was just like the sound of the mountains in Switzerland, where the song was written.
Brian May's Full Biography
Brian May is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential, innovative, technically gifted and recognizable guitarists in the history of rock. He is also a prolific songwriter, responsible for writing or co-writing many international hits with Queen. He was educated at Hampton Grammar School in London. He then graduated with a degree in Maths and Physics from one of Britain's top universities, Imperial College London.
As a child, May built his own guitar with his father, partly out of an old fireplace. Unusually, the guitar was designed to feedback. He formed the band Smile while at university with drummer Roger Taylor. They were later joined by flamboyant singer and pianist Freddie Mercury, who renamed the band Queen. The addition of bass player John Deacon completed the line-up of a band which would go on to become one of the most successful in the history of popular music. May's guitar playing would become an integral part of Queen's sound.
May was influenced as a guitarist by the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, who had dazzled audiences with their technical skills and volume, but he was also an admirer of the melodic skills of George Harrison of The Beatles and the original British rock and roll guitar hero, Hank B. Marvin of The Shadows.
What made May stand out as a guitarist was his combination of virtuoso technique but also melodic awareness. Unlike some virtuosos, who only play to showcase their ability, May always played to serve the songs. If a song only required minimal soloing, that's all he would do. His multi-tracking of guitar solos has also made him one of the most unique sounding guitarists in the world. Nowhere was this better exemplified than on Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", the song which came to define the band more than any other and has become one of the most celebrated recordings in the history of rock music. May's solos are a big part of what gives the track its enduring appeal and emotional power.
May's legacy in music history is assured. He will be remembered along with the likes of George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page as one of the most important and influential guitarists to come out of England. His songs for Queen were often their harder rock tracks, such as "We Will Rock You", "Tie Your Mother Down" and "Hammer to Fall", but he also wrote emotional songs such as "Save Me" and the symphonic "Who Wants to Live Forever", which proved his versatility as a songwriter.