“Beautiful”: the guitar performance Brian May will never forget
It’s quite hard to stand out in a band when you’re playing alongside an artist like Freddie Mercury.
It doesn’t matter how good a guitarist you are, if you’re playing with the greatest frontman to ever take the stage, your skill is going to be somewhat overlooked, and while this makes sense, it does also feel a little unfair, as May is one of the most talented guitarists in rock – yet, people rarely talk about his contributions when they talk about Queen.
The truth is, Brian May knew what made a good piece of guitar music. Whether we’re listening to his riffs, his chord structure, different licks or elongated solos, he was able to pack emotion into every single note, and all of this helped elevate the song. He was a key asset to Queen, and the band simply wouldn’t have become the major rock ‘n’ roll force that we know them as without someone like May on the six-string.
And it doesn’t stop at his playing style either. He has an intricate knowledge of the guitar and what makes a good guitar player, which allows him to pick out musicians who are onto something well and truly special. One of his favourite guitarists was David Gilmour, as the Pink Floyd musician was able to take the psychedelic elements of the band and raise them to a whole new height. You’ve never heard music more layered than that of Pink Floyd.
Of course, it wasn’t always easy for the band, it took them a while to work out how they wanted to sound. When David Gilmour first joined Pink Floyd in 1967, the band were very experimental and were trying to play psych rock during a time when psych rock wasn’t really a thing yet. It led to the creation of some music which was out there for the sake of it, and a lot of members of Pink Floyd look back on that period and roll their eyes.
Roger Waters said he hated the album Piper At The Gates of Dawn, as it felt like they had no direction. “I don’t want to go back to those times at all,” he noted.
“There wasn’t anything ‘grand’ about it. We were laughable. We were useless. We couldn’t play at all, so we had to do something stupid and ‘experimental’.”
Roger Waters
As the band developed, they were able to continue to enjoy being experimental, but channel it in a way that was a lot more comprehensive. One of Brian May’s favourite performances by Gilmour was a reflection of this, when he saw the guitarist play live but use a glass bottle to provide a sliding sound on the strings. It’s an odd choice of implementation, but it certainly had the desired effect, which helped elevate the band’s sound.
“A beautiful player. I love him. I have an enormous respect for him. I saw one of his first shows with Pink Floyd, which I’ll never forget,” recalled May. “He was doing crazy things with a bottleneck, which fitted right in with their kind of chaotic performances at the time. He’s always been a great favourite of mine. A beautiful player.”
Gilmour has continued to make exceptional music and push the boundaries of guitar playing in ways that other artists can only dream of.
