Brian May reveals his favourite guitarists of all time
Brian May rose to fame in the 1970s as the lead guitarist of Queen, playing on some of the most famous classic rock songs of all time, like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘We Will Rock You’, ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ and countless others. As a result of his efforts, May has been cited as the greatest guitarist of all time in a recent debate among rock music fans.
Recently appearing on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show, May shared his reaction to fans labelling him as the number one axeman before revealing his own personal favourite guitarists. He explained: “I take everything like that with a pinch of salt, really, ’cause you can’t say who’s best. The nice thing about guitar playing is that everybody’s different. You can’t really rank people.”
May continued: “I’m not in the first million guitarists in the world; I know that. There’s people I listen to every day that do things that I could never do.”
The Queen guitarist detailed his favourites, beginning with Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt, stating that his skills are “so beautiful” and “so way out of what I could ever do”. May further elucidated: “It doesn’t bother me, ’cause I don’t feel in competition. I just love the guy and I love what he does. Same with Jeff Beck. Same with Eddie Van Halen. We worked together, and it was the most wonderful experience. My jaw dropped every time he touched the strings. It was just beautiful.”
He added: “Steve Vai is just colossal, beautiful.” May also referred to Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton as his heroes before praising Beck some more: “Jeff Beck, to me, is something so exceptional and outside anything you could have imagined.”
The musician described how Kurt Cobain wasn’t the most technical of players, but he gave us “a legacy of some of the greatest guitar music of all time. So it’s not about technique. It’s about what you put into it and what you feel and how that feeling gets across in your guitar playing.”
May summed up his own playing by saying: “All I ever did, really, was play the way I feel and make the guitar my voice. I play like I would like to sing. I’m not the world’s greatest singer. I’m not the world’s greatest guitarist either, but thank you for saying so. But I can speak with the guitar; I can make it sing; and that’s all I do. It just comes inside.”
Brian May’s favourite guitarists:
- Nuno Bettencourt
- Jeff Beck
- Eddie Van Halen
- Jimi Hendrix
- Eric Clapton
- Steve Vai
- Kurt Cobain
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