The one guitarist who gave Brian May his sound and “could do anything”
Brian May gets a tough ride. He is, without doubt, one of the most commercially viable guitarists of all time. He has filled stadiums, bolstered airwaves and enraptured the nation with his riffs and solos. The Queen guitarist should be considered one of the best of his generation, but, in general, he isn’t.
Instead, thanks to this success, May is more often thought of as a bit of a nerdy cash cow. But his influence is huge.
When Johnny Marr was a boy, there was one guitarist he hoped to emulate. In the hopes of doing so, he took a blowtorch to the six-string that he had slaved through hundreds of paper rounds to afford. Still, it wasn’t beat up enough. So, he decided to set it on fire four times in total, and only then did it approach the dogeared look that Rory Gallagher had mastered.
Brian May might not have been so fussy about copying the aesthetic, but it was from the same laidback master that he took his “sound”.
The first instrument that Gallagher taught himself while growing up in Ireland was the ukulele. You could argue that this is why he was nuanced with melody and treble when he eventually graduated to the guitar. So, when he did buy himself a Fender Stratocaster in 1963, his snapping-on and snapping-off technique was already largely established. He then practised rigorously, so much so that in no time, he could become a star at London’s hip Marquee Club and the only evidence that he was a newbie came from just how beat-up his axe was.
As a young lad growing up in the area and becoming fascinated with the guitar, May picked out Gallagher as an early hero, and that turned out to be a great choice. “His playing was incredible,” the Queen guitarist recalled in What’s Going On – Taste Live At The Isle Of Wight. “He’s one of the very few people of that time who could make his guitar do anything. It just seemed to be magic. I remember looking at this battered Stratocaster thinking how does that come out of there? How does he do that?”
In many ways, the humility of this magic helped to inspire a generation of young English guitarists. There was so much buzz around the scene, and Gallagher made things seem possible. “We were boys and we hung around and hid whenever when the Marquee was at turning out time, and then we kind of strolled over as if we ought to be there, and we’d say, ‘Oh hello, Mr Gallagher. Can we chat to you?'” May recalled.
“He was incredibly patient. He was packing up his own gear, that’s the kind of man he was. He was packing up his guitar and his amp and everything, and he had the grace to speak to us. He didn’t go, ‘Get out of here!’ or ‘What are you boys doing in here?’ I said, ‘How do you get the sound? What is it?’ and he said, ‘Oh it’s very simple, I have this guitar, and I have this little AC 30 amp, which is like nothing else, and I have this little treble booster, a little Range Master treble booster, and that’s where the sound comes from’,” Gallagher explained to May.
“So I went straight out and got the AC 30 and the treble booster and my own homemade guitar, thinking ‘I wonder if this is going to work?’ But, basically, it did as soon as I plugged in. I went to a place called Take Five on Wardour Street, not far from the Marquee, and found a battered old AC30 which was for sale for 50 quid, I think. I plugged a Range Master treble booster into it with my guitar and it gave me what I wanted. It made the guitar speak. So, it was Rory that gave me my sound and that’s the sound I still have. That’s my voice. So, I have so much to be thankful to Rory for,” May earnestly admits.
However, he was also impactful in another way beyond the musicology. “I’ll tell you what else I learned from Rory: don’t be an ass,” May adds. “So many people, you got them and say, ‘Can I talk to you?’ And they’ll be, ‘Oh, I’m too busy’. Whatever, Rory was always a gentleman.”
May has taken up that mantle. The guitarist is far from your ego-driven lead guitarist; it’s part of what gives him the air of affable nerdom that seems to dog, or bless, his career. “He always had time for his fans. Many, many times, I bumped into him, and he was always the same. I think the last time I bumped into him was in some studio in Shepherd’s Bush. It was exactly the same.”
This set up a friendly kinship between the pair. “He said, ‘Oh, hello Brian. How are you going?’ He had such a gentlemanly, gentle way about him, Rory. I thought, ‘Well, he’s treating me like that because we know each other now, but it went through my mind that he treated me exactly the same when I was a kid and he was a star in the Marquee. He was always polite, he was always caring, and always had time to speak to you. So, that’s what I took from Rory. He’s a gentleman and he had time for people. And my god, could he play that guitar.”
