“It was wild”: Brian May picks out the perfect pop rock song
There’s a certain art to creating the perfect power pop song. The whole point behind rock and roll was music for people to dance to, and while many of the biggest names in the genre have been taken over by other styles as of late, there are always those few moments where someone can be screwing around with a couple chords and walk away with some of the greatest melodies that anyone ever thought of. Although Queen had their music down to a natural science, Brian May always came from a somewhat unconventional angle when making his pop masterpieces.
There was no one else who would write something as outlandish as the space journey in ‘39’, and even though ‘We Will Rock You’ has gone into the history books as one of the greatest rock songs of all time, it’s hard to take it that seriously when over half of the song is dominated by clapping and stomping and no other instruments.
But that was all a part of May’s mindset. He wanted to make something that defined what the pop single was meant to do, since that’s what all of his inspirations did. The Beatles and Led Zeppelin never catered to the pop market by making filler songs, and even if there were tunes that had less energy than others, they were well worth working on if they had a specific quirk to them.
If Zeppelin shied away from releasing singles, though, Deep Purple were practically allergic to the charts. They were still dominating album sales thanks to their fantastic live shows and ripping solos, but ‘Smoke on the Water’ was the kind of song that managed to get momentum over time rather than arriving at the top of the charts.
Even when the band did start seeing their first tastes of success, Ritchie Blackmore had already come to the conclusion that he didn’t need that anymore in Rainbow. This was him staking his claim as the next Renaissance artist, but as it turned out, hardly anyone in the era before disco wanted their hits to be full of characters and goblins that could be found in a Dungeons and Dragons game.
“You never knew what you were gonna see when you went to see Deep Purple when Blackmore was in it, but also Rainbow.”
Brian May
Blackmore wasn’t getting the results he wanted, but he knew getting a change of scenery would help when Graham Bonnett joined him. All he needed was a radio hit, and ‘Since You Been Gone’ is a classic example of why Blackmore’s guitar worked so well on the radio, always cutting through the mix like a knife with those ripping chords.
They are the same four chords that all pop music is built on, but May knew that few had perfected what he heard Blackmore do, saying, “You never knew what you were gonna see when you went to see Deep Purple when Blackmore was in it, but also Rainbow. This was his own thing, and it was wild and dangerous. This is a good pop record, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that is great Rock music in my opinion. I think it’s perfect.”
And for all the guitar hero moments that Blackmore has had over the years, the solo is about as tasteful as a pop song could be. He could have easily ripped out those same scalar runs that he used on tracks like ‘Highway Star’, but here he seems more in control of his instrument and knows he doesn’t need to play 1000 notes when the tune calls for only 20.
Both Blackmore and May have created musical symphonies when they strapped on their guitars, but what they were doing was more than making pop-rock songs. They wanted to challenge people’s preconceptions of what a pop tune could be, and in doing so, they helped open people’s minds to what could be done.
