Brian May
Sir Brian Harold May is an English musician, animal welfare activist, and astrophysicist. He achieved global fame as the lead guitarist and backing vocalist of the rock band Queen, which he co-founded with singer Freddie Mercury and drummer Roger Taylor. His guitar work and songwriting contributions helped Queen become one of the most successful acts in music history.
May previously performed with Taylor in the progressive rock band Smile, which he had joined while he was at university. Mercury joined to form Queen in 1970, and bass guitarist John Deacon completed the line-up in 1971. They became one of the biggest rock bands in the world with the success of the album A Night at the Opera and its single "Bohemian Rhapsody". From the mid-1970s until 1986, Queen played at some of the biggest venues in the world, including an acclaimed performance at Live Aid in 1985. May wrote numerous hits for the band, including "We Will Rock You", "I Want It All", "Fat Bottomed Girls", "Now I'm Here", "Headlong", "Flash", "Hammer to Fall", "Save Me", "Who Wants to Live Forever" and "The Show Must Go On". Queen entered a general hiatus after Mercury died in 1991—exceptions include the 1992 tribute concert, the release of Made in Heaven and the 1997 May-penned tribute single to Mercury, "No-One but You ". May and Taylor eventually reconvened Queen for further performances featuring other vocalists.
May is regarded as a virtuoso musician with a distinctive sound created through his layered guitar work, often using a home-built electric guitar called the Red Special. In 2005, a Planet Rock poll saw May voted the seventh-greatest guitarist of all time. He was ranked at No. 33 on Rolling Stone 2023 list of 250 greatest guitarists of all time. In 2012, he was further ranked the second-greatest guitarist in a Guitar World magazine readers poll. In 2001, May was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Queen and, in 2018, the band received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
May was appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2005 for services to the music industry and for charity work. May earned a PhD degree in astrophysics from Imperial College London in 2007, and was Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University from 2008 to 2013. He was a "science team collaborator" with NASA's New Horizons Pluto mission. He is also a co-founder of the awareness campaign Asteroid Day. Asteroid 52665 Brianmay was named after him. In 2023, May contributed to NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, the agency's first successful collection and earth delivery of samples directly from an asteroid. May is also an animal welfare activist, campaigning against fox hunting and the culling of badgers in the UK. May was knighted by King Charles III in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to music and charity.
Early life
Brian Harold May was born on 19 July 1947 at Gloucester House Nursing Home in Hampton Hill, near Twickenham, Middlesex. He is the only child of Ruth Irving and Harold May, who worked as a draughtsman at the Ministry of Aviation. His mother, who was Scottish, married his father, who was English, at Moulin in Perthshire, Scotland, in 1946. May attended the local Hanworth Road state primary school, and at the age of 11 won a scholarship to Hampton Grammar School, then a voluntary aided school. During this time, he formed his first band, named 1984 after George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, with vocalist and bassist Tim Staffell.At Hampton Grammar School, May attained ten GCE Ordinary Levels and three GCE Advanced Levels in physics, mathematics, and applied mathematics. He studied mathematics and physics at Imperial College London, graduating in 1968 with a BSc degree in physics with honours. After his graduation, May was invited by Sir Bernard Lovell to work at the Jodrell Bank Observatory while continuing to prepare his doctorate. He declined, choosing instead to remain at Imperial College to avoid leaving Smile, his London-based band.
In 2007, May earned a PhD degree in astrophysics from Imperial College London for work started in 1971.
Musical career
1968–1970: Smile
May formed the band Smile in 1968. The group included Tim Staffell as the lead singer and bassist, and later, drummer Roger Taylor, who also went on to play for Queen. The band lasted from 1968 to 1970, when Staffell left, leaving the band with a catalogue of nine songs.Smile would reunite for several songs on 22 December 1992. Taylor's band The Cross were headliners, and he brought May and Staffell on to play "Earth" and "If I Were a Carpenter". May also performed several other songs that night.
Their final performance was during their European tour in London's All Points East on 28 August 2022.
1970–1995: Queen
In Queen's three-part vocal harmonies, May was generally the lower-range backing vocalist. On some of his songs, he sings the lead vocals, most notably the first verse of "Who Wants to Live Forever", the final verse of "Mother Love", the middle eight on "I Want It All" and "Flash's Theme", and full lead vocals on "Some Day One Day", "She Makes Me ", "'39", "Good Company", "Long Away", "All Dead, All Dead", "Sleeping on the Sidewalk", "Leaving Home Ain't Easy" and "Sail Away Sweet Sister".May wrote many songs for the band, including hits such as "We Will Rock You", "Tie Your Mother Down", "I Want It All", "Fat Bottomed Girls", "Who Wants to Live Forever" and "The Show Must Go On" as well as "Hammer to Fall", "Flash", "Now I'm Here", "Brighton Rock", "The Prophet's Song", "Las Palabras de Amor", "No-One but You " and "Save Me".
After the Live Aid concert in 1985, Mercury rang his band members and proposed writing a song together. The result was "One Vision", which was basically May on music ; the lyrics were co-written by the four band members.
For their 1989 release album, The Miracle, the band had decided that all of the tracks would be credited to the entire band, no matter who had been the main writer. Interviews and musical analyses tend to help identify the input of each member on each track. May composed "I Want It All" for that album, as well as "Scandal". For the rest of the album, he did not contribute much creatively. However, he helped in building the basis of "Party" and "Was It All Worth It" and created the "Chinese Torture" guitar riff.
Queen's subsequent album was Innuendo. May's contributions increased, although more in terms of arranging than actual writing in most cases. He did some of the arrangement for the heavy solo on the title track. He added vocal harmonies to "I'm Going Slightly Mad" and composed the solo for "These Are the Days of Our Lives", a song for which the four of them decided the keyboard parts together.
Two songs May had composed for his first solo album, "Headlong" and "I Can't Live With You", eventually ended up on the Queen project. His other composition was "The Show Must Go On", which he coordinated and was the primary composer. In recent years, he has supervised the remastering of Queen albums and various DVD and greatest hits releases. In 2004, he announced that 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. Billed as "Queen + Paul Rodgers", the band played throughout 2005 and 2006 in South Africa, Europe, Aruba, Japan, and North America and released a new album with Rodgers in 2008, titled The Cosmos Rocks. This album was supported by a major tour.
Paul Rodgers left the band in May 2009. It was not until 2011 that another vocalist, Adam Lambert, was recruited. Queen + Adam Lambert toured Europe in 2012 and toured the world tour over 2014 and 2015. Their most recent outing was the 2016 Festival Tour. They also played the Big Ben New Year concert on New Year's Eve 2014 and New Year's Day 2015.
1983–1999: Side projects and solo works
During 1983, several members of Queen explored side projects. On 21 and 22 April in Los Angeles, May was in a studio with Eddie Van Halen, with no intention of recording anything. The result of the two-day session was a mini album titled Star Fleet Project, which was not originally going to be released. In 1986, May contributed to former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett's album Feedback 86, playing guitar on the track "Cassandra" and providing guitar and vocals for "Slot Machine", which May co-wrote. Although produced in 1986, the album was not released commercially until 2000. Another song co-written by May and Hackett during this period, "Don't Fall Away from Me", was eventually recorded by Hackett in 1992 for release on his The Unauthorised Biography compilation album. Also in 1986, May worked with actress Anita Dobson on her first album, most noted for the song "Anyone Can Fall in Love", which added lyrics to the EastEnders theme tune and reached number four on the UK Singles Chart in August 1986. May and Dobson married in 2000. In 1988, May contributed guitar solos to the song "When Death Calls" on Black Sabbath's 14th album Headless Cross, and the Living in a Box track "Blow The House Down" on the album Gatecrashing. Both albums were released in 1989.In the aftermath of the November 1991 death of Mercury, May chose to deal with his grief by committing himself as fully as possible to work, first by finishing his solo album, Back to the Light, and then touring worldwide to promote it. He frequently remarked in press interviews that this was the only form of self-prescribed therapy he could think of. According to Def Leppard lead singer Joe Elliott, "It was undoubtedly an enormous and terrible blow to lose someone he was so close to. Personally, I know it ripped the heart out of Brian, but having said that, he was in great spirits after the album was finished." Back to the Light featured the single "Too Much Love Will Kill You", on which he collaborated as a songwriter with Frank Musker and Elizabeth Lamers. A version with Freddie Mercury's vocals was later released on the Queen album Made in Heaven and won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically & Lyrically in 1996.
In late 1992, the Brian May Band was officially formed. May had loosely formed an earlier version of the band for 19 October 1991, when May took part in the Guitar Legends guitar festival in Seville, Spain. The line-up for his performance was May on vocals and lead guitar, Cozy Powell on drums and percussion, Mike Moran and Rick Wakeman on keyboards, and Maggie Ryder, Miriam Stockley and Chris Thompson on backing vocals. The original line-up was May on vocals and lead guitar, Powell on drums and percussion, Michael Casswell on guitar, Neil Murray on bass, and Ryder, Stockley and Thompson on backing vocals. This version of the band was together only during the South American support tour on five dates.
May later made significant changes, feeling the group never quite gelled. May brought guitarist Jamie Moses on board to replace Mike Caswell. The backing vocalists, Ryder, Stockley and Thompson, were replaced by Catherine Porter and Shelley Preston. On 23 February 1993, this new line-up of The Brian May Band began its world tour in the US, supporting Guns N' Roses and headlining a few dates. The tour included dates in North America, Europe and Japan. On 15 June 1993, the band did a show in London that would end up as The Brian May Band's only release as a collective, namely Live at the Brixton Academy. At the show, May would sing a few lines of "Love of My Life", and then, as Mercury used to, let the audience join in. After the tour ended on 18 December 1993, May returned to the studio with fellow surviving Queen band members Roger Taylor and John Deacon to work on tracks that became Made in Heaven, the final Queen studio album. The band took Mercury's solo album demos and last recordings, which he managed to perform in the studio after the album Innuendo was finished, and completed them with their additions both musically and vocally. After Mercury's death, work on the album by Deacon and May began originally in 1992 but was left until a later date due to other commitments.
In 1995, May began working on a new solo album of covers tentatively titled Heroes, in addition to working on various film and television projects and other collaborations. May subsequently changed the approach from covers to focus on those collaborations and new material. The songs included Another World, and featured mainly Spike Edney, Cozy Powell, Neil Murray and Jamie Moses. On 5 April 1998, Cozy Powell was killed in a car accident on the M4 motorway near Bristol, England. This incident caused an unexpected disruption to the upcoming tour for the Brian May Band, which now needed a new drummer on short notice. Steve Ferrone was brought on to help May finish recording the drum tracks and join the band for the early stage promotional tour of five dates in Europe before the world tour. Following the early promotional tour, Eric Singer replaced him on the 1998 world tour.
The 1998 tour saw the brief introduction of a 'support act' known as T. E. Conway. Conway would play several 1950s rock and roll standards before May's 'arrival'. A bonus T. E. Conway EP titled Retro Rock Special was attached to some pressings of the Another World album. The Conway character was retired at the end of the tour.
In May 1999, May recorded lead guitars for the Guns N' Roses song "Catcher in the Rye" on Chinese Democracy, but his performance was removed from the album by the time it was released in 2008.