The 1977 guitar solo Brian May always struggled to play live: “A bit too stiff”
The very notion that Queen guitarist Brian May would struggle with any riff, lick, or novel playing technique is hard to wrap one’s head around.
One of the most celebrated axemen for one of the most lauded rock groups of all time, May’s guitar virtuosity has inspired everybody from Steve Vai to Justin Hawkins with his expressive style and firm melodic core centring his solos.
While one of rock’s biggest names following 1975’s A Night at the Opera and its chamber pop epic ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, a rapid shift in the music world from stadium theatre to punk’s insurrectionary bulldozing and the developing heavy metal nearly threatened Queen’s relevancy. One guitarist set to grab May’s crown as rock’s premier shredder was Pasadena’s Eddie Van Halen. He formed his namesake band with older brother and drummer Alex, plus acrobatic frontman David Lee Roth, and their unabashed party rock and flashy production was scored by Eddie’s novel and electric double-tapping dexterity.
While the two guitarists approached their instruments in very different ways, both shared a desire to push beyond conventional rock playing. Their innovations helped redefine what audiences expected from a lead guitarist during an era when technical ability was becoming increasingly celebrated.
While a technique that had existed since the 1960s, the two-hand tap became defined by Van Halen. A novel style of playing whereby both hands hammer the fretboard for a melodic counterpoint, the tap method had actually been heard a year before the Van Halen debut, May flexing his tap skills for the solo on a little-known cut from 1977’s News of the World. “I stole it from a guy who said that he stole it from Billy Gibbons in ZZ Top,” May told On the Record in 1982. “He was playing in some club in Texas, doing hammering stuff. I was so intrigued by it, I went home and played around with it for ages and put it on ‘It’s Late'”.
The anecdote highlights one of May’s defining qualities as a musician: curiosity. Despite already being an established player with a distinctive style, he remained eager to experiment with new techniques and incorporate fresh ideas into Queen’s evolving sound.
Having mastered the tap in the studio, deftly playing live proved tricky even for Queen’s premier guitarist, who rarely ever incorporated the technique into the live shows. “It was a problem to do onstage,” he confessed. “I found it was a bit too stiff… If I persevered with it, it would probably become second nature, but it wasn’t an alleyway which led very far, to my way of thinking. It’s a bit gimmicky”.
News of the World was a record that eschewed conventions and embraced new ideas. Moving away from the grand symphonic rock that had brought them stellar success, a soaking up of punk’s white hot ephemerality found its energy in the raucous ‘Sheer Heart Attack’, and smatterings of new wave electronic fizz coated the hyper-sexual ‘Get Down Make Love’.
Far from lapsing into irrelevancy, Queen would stridently enter the 1980s as a global powerhouse of aband, embracing the pop trends of the day yet keeping a firm grasp on their effortless command for anthemic stir. While the tapping technique stretches as far back as Niccolò Paganini’s 19th-century violin works, Genesis‘ Steve Hackett has credited himself with pushing the technique to the fore in the modern age, explicitly stating he’d influenced Van Halen and implicitly May way back in 1971. “It’s there on many recordings, as well”, he told MusicRadar in 2012.
Concluding, “Eddie is a fine player, of course, and he’s the one who named the technique. The important thing is that you play as fast as you’d like, but you do it all on one string—and you have to use a finger from your picking hand instead of the pick”.
Although Eddie Van Halen would become the guitarist most closely associated with tapping, May’s experience with the technique demonstrates how quickly ideas travelled through the rock world during the 1970s. More importantly, his decision not to rely on it reinforces what made him such a distinctive player in the first place: a commitment to melody, emotion and musicality over pure technical spectacle.
