Total Guitar (Christmas 1998)
BRIAN MAY ON THE ROAD
It's been five years since his last tour, but our cover star's on the
road this month - to promote his solo album, 'Another World.' The dates
are:
October 24th, Nottingham Royal Concert Hall, October 25th, London Royal
Albert Hall, October 27th, Bristol Colston Hall, October 28th, Birmingahm
Academy, October 30th, Newcastle City Hall. Will Brian be able to resist
the opportunity to paly 'Tie Your Mother Down'?
As he says: "'Tie Your Mother Down' ... never left the live set and
never will. Certain songs just have that chemistry ... you want to play
them 'til you die."
Learn the hit for yourself in this issue!
B R I A N M A Y
(Interview)
From the excessive majesty of Queen to his solo career successes, Brian May's irrepressible desire for pushing the boundaries of melodic rock is unrivalled. JOE BENNETT gets the low-down 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 siting 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 year. 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: his 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 mind 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 lace, 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 realised 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 giving experience as much more tan simply copying the original recording.
"You're supposed to be finding new moments with the audience, so each gig should be unique. With the recognisable 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 sue 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 the '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 he done 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 won 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 and 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 tings.
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 (ion 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'nor' was a television programme about a bare-knuckle boxer
in the original script, but it worked as 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 rally 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 to 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, rally. 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 I intuition more than anything. I mean I know something about
the techniques of inversions and everything, bur 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 AC30's?' 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 bot 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 HEROS
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 u 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 - that's fair enough. I go to see Joe Satriani or SteveVai --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 as 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 …
ASTRONOMY AND THEN SOME
And so the time comes when we have to leave 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 time to pick up his guitar… TG.