The guitarist Brian May called a “master of invention”
Brian May blazed trails that didn’t even exist before he came along. Besides Eddie Van Halen, how many famous rock stars can say they built their own guitars? How many do you know that purposefully play with coins instead of picks? Through his work with Queen, May was a consummate tinkerer, playing with effects, phasing, and progressive technologies, unlike any other rockstar. What else could you expect from an astrophysicist?
May always had an appreciation for some of his peers in the rock world, but who could possibly match May’s own level of innovation? According to May himself, that would be Jimmy Page, the legendary lead guitarist for Led Zeppelin. May and Page both attended the same primary school, as May recalled to Chris Bird in 2020, and always looked up to the older guitar god.
“He’s almost my generation, but a little bit older, and we went to the same primary school, although he was, I think, two or three years above me,” May recalled. “And that’s a lot when you’re small. So I always looked up to him, I gotta say, because he’s kind of a local boy to me.”
“Strangely enough, we live quite close to each other at the moment,” May observed. “To me, he’s a master of invention, that’s what I would say. He’s a major, major force in defining what heavy rock became as it was being born. I never get fed up of listening to those Zeppelin albums. I never will.”
May’s opinion was echoed during a 2019 interview on BBC Radio 2. May chose to listen to ‘Communication Breakdown’ and gushed about the track. “An amazing and earth-shattering piece of work,” was how May described it. “So, in 1969, Led Zeppelin released Led Zeppelin I and Led Zeppelin II. They played five shows at the Lyceum Ballroom in London in October 1969. I was there with Rog [er Taylor]. Seeing Zeppelin, for us, was kind of exquisite torture because they were what we wanted to be.”
Check out ‘Communication Breakdown’ down below.
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