by Mark Blake
In December 1966, while Freddie Bulsara was still some way off from living out any musical dream, May, then a nineteen-year-old physics student and part-time guitarist, was a little closer. But although they lived just a few minutes away from each other in Feltham, the two had never knowingly met. Later, Freddie would talk of ‘scouring the country’ to see Hendrix play, which suggests that he and Queen’s future guitarist may have even been in the same audience when Hendrix played London’s Saville Theatre on 29 January 1967.
For May, seeing Hendrix was a pivotal moment. ‘I was already playing, I was in groups. Then this guy came along who was so far in advance of everyone else it was frightening,’ he recalled in 1991. ‘He was on the same road but almost out of sight, ahead of us all. I thought I was pretty good before I saw Hendrix.’ By the end of 1967, his bandmates at the time had nicknamed him ‘Brimi’, such was his devotion to the guitarist.
May and Bulsara’s mutual love of Hendrix was the first step towards their paths crossing. But May’s upbringing in the same enclave of West London couldn’t have been more different from the singer’s.
Nearly a year younger than his future sparring partner, Brian Harold May was born on 19 July 1947 at Gloucester House Nursing Home in Sevenoaks, Kent. He was an only child to parents Harold and Ruth. His father was an electronics engineer and senior draughtsman at the Ministry of Aviation, working on the creation of blind-landing equipment for Concorde. Previously, Harold had served as a radio operator during the Second World War.
The May family home, in a small cul-de-sac at 6 Walsham Road, was barely a few hundred yards from the Bulsaras’ house in Gladstone Avenue. At the age of five Brian began attending Hanworth Road primary school; a year later he took his first steps towards learning music when his father, a fan of wartime entertainer George Formby, began teaching him a few chords on Formby’s trademark instrument, the ukelele. Piano lessons, which May always claimed to tolerate rather than enjoy, soon followed.
On his seventh birthday, Brian awoke to find ‘a Spanish guitar hanging off the end of my bed’. His hands were still too small to play it properly, so Harold set about carving down the bridge. May Senior was known for his resourcefulness and ingenuity. As money was tight, explained Brian, ‘my dad made everything. He was a technical civil servant. So he’d fix everybody’s equipment. Everything we had in our house was pretty much made by him; the radio, the TV, the record player …’
One evening, Harold came home with a Lonnie Donegan record. Donegan’s 1955 hit ‘Rock Island Line’ bump-started the skiffle boom of the mid-fifties, with homegrown musicians playing an amalgam of American folk, blues and pop, often on homemade instruments. Thousands of miles away in India, it was skiffle that prompted Freddie Bulsara’s school bandmate to make his own tea-chest bass.
Brian was hooked. ‘It was something about the sound of the guitar and the voice and that sort of blues feeling,’ he explained. ‘I used to lay under the bed covers with my little crystal set listening to Radio Luxembourg and all this stuff that seemed very exciting and dangerous and forbidden. First time I heard Buddy Holly, there was just chills up my spine.’ From here on, it was a short leap to The Everly Brothers, Brenda Lee, Little Richard and, his first crush, Connie Francis.
As an only child, Brian had the time and space to indulge his interests. He filed his records alphabetically and kept them in perfect condition. An ardent collector, he hoarded cheese labels, match-boxes, Dan Dare toys and Eagle comics (years later, a manager at EMI Records recalls May collecting hotel matchbooks while touring with Queen). The discovery of a book about astronomy by the scientist and TV presenter Patrick Moore found May, ‘hooked for ever’. Combining two pastimes, Brian wrote a spoken-word monologue about the movement of the stars, which he would perform to his family to the musical accompaniment of ‘Saturn – The Bringer of Old Age’ from Gustav Holst’s The Planets Suite. Before long, he would add a camera and a telescope (homemade, of course) to his collection.
Music, however, was still a hobby, and never to get in the way of schoolwork. At Hanworth Road, Brian applied himself tirelessly to his studies. ‘I was a swot,’ he admitted. ‘I had a lot of application and I liked achieving.’
In 1958, his diligence paid off when he passed his eleven-plus exam and took up a scholarship place at Hampton Grammar. The school celebrated its 450th anniversary in 2006, and currently lists Brian May among its former alumni; a list that includes QCs, judges, Olympic sportsmen and, bizarrely, William Page, the eighteenth-century highwayman.
During his first year at Hampton Grammar, another pupil, Dave Dilloway, heard Brian playing his Spanish guitar. ‘I remember walking around one of the corridors in the upstairs wing and hearing this guy playing an acoustic guitar and singing that Tommy Steele thing, “Singing the Blues” [a hit for Steele in 1957 and Guy Mitchell in 1956]. He sounded good but I thought no more of it.’
A year later, Dilloway and May ended up in the same class together, the elite 2LA. ‘Two Latin A,’ explains Dave. ‘It was the fast stream, which meant you could take your A-levels a year early, so you could go to university interviews with your A-level results in your pocket.’
At the time, Dilloway was learning to play his grandfather’s guitar, May was still playing the Spanish guitar. ‘So we found this mutual interest,’ says Dilloway, ‘and we got talking. He lived in Feltham and I lived in Whitton, and we’d go over to each other’s houses on Saturday afternoons and learn a tune.’
As it was still the pre-Beatles era, the songs they learned were by The Shadows, The Ventures, and Les Paul. ‘Mainly instrumental stuff,’ recalls Dave. ‘Crazy as it may now seem, I used to play the tune and Brian used to play the rhythm, as, for a beginner like myself, the chords were harder.’
A desire to mimic the electric sounds of The Shadows’ guitarist Hank Marvin led to Brian and his father installing homemade pick-ups on the Spanish guitar. ‘We used magnets and wire,’ May recalls, ‘and plugged it into my dad’s radio and it sounded brilliant.’
At school, the pair talked music incessantly. ‘Brian used to teach me chords in the back of the German lesson,’ says Dave. ‘I used to slide my shirt cuff up my arm, which is where I’d had a guitar fretboard drawn on, and I’d learn the chords that way: “Which one is this, Brian?” and he’d show me the position of the fingers on the board. The joke is that I failed German O-Level and he passed because he was such a clever sod.’
Away from lessons and playing guitar, over the next couple of years, Brian would tackle his natural shyness to become secretary of the school debating society, and act in several school productions, ‘dragging up’ as a woman (twenty years before he did so in Queen’s fabled video for ‘I Want to Break Free’) to appear in school productions of The Admirable Crichton and The Rivals. Years later, when interviewed, May would often admit to feelings of insecurity as a teenager: ‘I used to think, “My God, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to wear, I don’t know who I am.”’
Playing music seemed to offer a respite. With the onset of the beat group boom, May and Dilloway weren’t the only aspiring musicians at Hampton Grammar. ‘There was a scene,’ explains Dave, ‘with a growing group of guitarists who would drag small amps into school and play at lunchtimes.’ Other older pupils were already playing in bands: John Garnham, nicknamed ‘Jag’, owned a handsome Hofner Colorama; Pete ‘Wooly’ Hammerton had a Telecaster and, later, an SG of which Brian was especially envious. Playing this and other friends’ guitars, May began noting what he liked and didn’t like. Unable to afford his own guitar, he and his father had already decided to make their own.
In the summer of 1963, the pair began the painstaking process of designing and building an electric guitar from scratch. It took them eighteen months to complete, but gave May an instrument that became his signature for the next forty-five years. The guitar’s body was moulded from oak and blockboard; the neck was made from an eighteenth-century mahogany fireplace salvaged from a friend’s house (two woodwo
rm holes were plugged with matchsticks); the fret markers on the neck were fashioned from mother-of-pearl buttons scavenged from Ruth May’s sewing box and sanded down by hand, while the tremelo arm was made from a piece of steel originally used to hold up the saddle of a bike and, recalled Brian, ‘capped by my mum’s knitting needle’. Two valve springs from a 1928 Panther motorcycle were then used to balance the strings’ tension.
The only parts of the guitar not made from scratch were the pick-ups and the fretwire used for the strings. As Brian and Harold’s homemade pick-ups didn’t give them the sound they wanted, Brian relented and installed Burns pick-ups (as favoured by The Shadows). ‘Then I bought the fretwire from a shop called Clifford Essex in [London’s] Cambridge Circus,’ he recalled. ‘But everything else was junk.’
With its twenty-four frets and the customised positioning of the pick-ups, the DIY instrument had a unique sound and tonality. Once completed, and varnished a deep mahogany hue, the homemade guitar came to be known as the ‘Red Special’. Showing his customary eye for detail, May photographed the construction of the instrument at every stage. In 1998, when the Special was finally taken apart to be rebuilt, Brian’s guitar tech was presented with Harold May’s original tool kit containing the same screwdrivers, fret saws and even the original tins of wood-stain used in its creation some thirty-five years earlier.
Showing a similar ingenuity, by early 1964, Brian and Dave had begun using two reel-to-reel tape recorders to experiment with multi-track recording; taping the guitars on one machine, then playing the tape back in the room and playing along. Dilloway now had a homemade bass to add to the mix. ‘Brian or I would usually play the bass, then I’d hit anything I could find – hat boxes, strips of Meccano – to make a drum sound,’ remembers Dave. ‘Not sophisticated.’ Between them, the duo cut rough-and-ready versions of Bo Diddley’s self-titled hit, The Shadows’ ‘Apache’ and FBI and Chet Atkins’ ‘Windy and Warm’, among others.
Before long, the pair were scouring the school lunchtime music sessions (May: ‘We used to play in the cycle sheds as we weren’t allowed to play in the school’) looking for like-minded players. An ad hoc group soon formed around Brian on guitar, Dave on bass guitar, classmate John Sanger on piano and an older Hampton pupil, Bill Richards, on vocals and guitar.
Their repertoire included Manfred Mann, The Beatles and The Moody Blues. Richards’ tenure in the group was short-lived, after May politely told him that his guitar wasn’t up to scratch and that he would have to buy a new one or leave. ‘To be honest, I think Brian was being even more tactful by underplaying the problem with my vocals, which weren’t right at the time,’ said Richards. His replacement, Malcolm Childs, proved unreliable and lasted a few days. Before long, John ‘Jag’ Garnham – and his Hofner Coloroma – had arrived.
‘We got talking to “Jag”, who was already in a band and who was a year older than us,’ recalls Dave Dilloway. ‘But he also had transport, and microphones and cabinets, which was very important.’
‘I’d been playing in a group with Pete Hammerton, whose nickname was Wooly – I have no idea why – but Wooly could be a bit awkward,’ remembers John Garnham. ‘He went off, so I started playing with Dave and Brian May. I was a year above Brian at school but with him being such a smart-arse, he jumped a year.’
While Garnham could sing, and both May and Dilloway had recorded their vocals during the bedroom taping sessions, the group needed a dedicated lead singer. A Saturday night trip to a local dance would prove fruitful. ‘We turned up to watch this band playing at Murray Park Hall in Whitton,’ says Dave. ‘They were called Chris and The Whirlwinds. We were impressed because the lead guitarist had this very nice-looking guitar. But while we were watching we saw this chap that we recognised from school, watching in the audience. He was sitting down, minding his own business, but every so often he would start playing along to the band on a harmonica. The group couldn’t hear him, but we could, and he was good. We had no idea whether he could sing but we invited him along to rehearsals to see what he could do.’
Their latest recruit was Tim Staffell from Teddington, another Hampton pupil, and, at sixteen, a few months younger than Dave and Brian. Like John Garnham, though, Tim already had experience of playing, and had been singing in a local group called The Railroaders. Unlike his more studious bandmates, Tim struggled to stay focused on school. Three years earlier, a serious road accident had kept him away from lessons and he had ‘lost a lot of ground’. Tim was a keen artist, though, and already had his sights on a place at art school (a decision that would have lasting consequences on Brian May’s career). He quit The Railroaders and threw his lot in with Brian and friends.
However, the group were still missing one vital ingredient: a drummer. ‘So we put up a postcard saying that we were looking for one in the window of Albert’s Music Shop in Twickenham,’ says Garnham. They had one applicant, Richard Thompson, a pupil at Isleworth’s Spring Grove Grammar School, who was already playing local youth club gigs in a group called The Fifth Column.
‘Richard Thompson turned up on my parents’ doorstep in his motorcycle gear,’ recalls Dilloway. ‘He had a mate with him who had transport, so he brought his drum kit. He seemed amenable, so he was in.’
The band began regular rehearsals at Chase Bridge primary school in Twickenham, next door to the rugby stadium, reaping the benefits of a Richmond council scheme that allowed groups to use local schools and youth clubs for a small annual fee. ‘They formed this organisation called The Whitton Beat Club,’ recalls Dave Dilloway. ‘So we used to practise at the primary school. The hardcore of the band was now myself, Brian, Tim, Richard and John Garnham on rhythm guitar, but John Sanger was still on the periphery, playing the piano.’ Their set was made up of covers of pop songs of the day, including, as Brian May recalled, ‘a mixture of adapted soul stuff like Sam and Dave, and Otis Redding.’
The group had also decided on a name, 1984, taken from the title of George Orwell’s post-war novel. Brian and Tim were both ardent science fiction fans, and the name stuck.
By now, after months of his schoolfriends seeing Brian polishing the guitar’s neck in between lessons, the Red Special was complete. ‘I first saw it when it was still a drawing on a piece of paper and a mantelpiece,’ laughs Dave Dilloway. ‘There’s no bullshit. All those stories about his mum’s sewing box and the motorcycle springs are all true. They didn’t even have a lathe; they turned the motor-bridge pieces with a drill. That’s Brian, though – ever the perfectionist.’
Before long, The Whitton Beat Club network had delivered a booking. ‘We were asked to play a youth-club gig,’ explains Dave Dilloway. ‘There was a friend of someone we knew, and he and his girlfriend or wife booked us this gig at St Mary’s Hall in Twickenham.’ On 28 October 1964, while Farrokh Bulsara was still settling into Isleworth Polytechnic, 1984’s debut concert took place, in a venue just opposite Eel Pie Island.
John Sanger tagged along to play keyboards. ‘This was in the days before electronic keyboards,’ continues Dave. ‘At some gigs John would play the school hall’s upright piano, if they had one, with a microphone stuck in the back. But at that first gig, they didn’t have a piano so we borrowed a reed organ. The trouble was, it was like a glorified mouth organ with keys stuck on, and it sounded like a Hoover motor starting when you switched it on. Once you miked it up, all you could hear was this noise like a wind tunnel.’
Later, Brian would state that the ‘guitar gave me a shield to hide behind’ and that playing onstage as a teenager was infinitely preferable to being on the floor ‘wondering whether I should ask someone to dance’. ‘Brian never seemed as au fait with the world as, say, Tim and I were,’ offers Richard Thompson. Yet Brian now had a girfriend, Pat, a pupil at the neighbouring Richmond Girls’ School. Their relationship would survive until Brian’s first year at college. It was Pat and her friend, Tim Staffell’s girlfriend, that secured 1984’s next booking, on 4 November in the girls’ school hall.
‘Tim and Brian both had girlfriends at the school, and, yes, that’s how we got the gig,’ recalls Dave. ‘But we struggled with the repertoire. We had two hours’ worth, but we had to play for three hours, so there were probably a few repeats.’
As John Garnham explains: ‘We did a mix of songs in 1984, but there was no real direction. Brian and Dave liked The Beatles, and I was more into Chuck Berry and rhythm and blues, and I also took note of the soul stuff. I was always saying, “We must do stuff that people can dance to”, because I liked dancing and I liked girls, and the girls liked dancing.’
While playing in the group brought them attention, John insists, ‘None of us were that girl-minded. Out of all of 1984, Brian certainly never appeared to be. He did eventually have Pat, but I don’t remember her being brought along to gigs, done up in a short skirt, like my girlfriend or Richard’s.’ (Dave Dilloway: ‘John had some real crackers.’)
The group’s girl-friendly setlists that year veer from The Beatles’ ‘Help’ and ‘I Feel Fine’ to Little Richard’s ‘Lucille’ and Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Jack o’ Diamonds’ to Rufus Thomas’s ‘Walkin’ the Dog’, with an encore of blueser Sonny Boy Williamson’s ‘Bye Bye Bird’. But as Tim Staffell put it: ‘The songs were dredged from all sorts of areas. Because of the nature of the material we approached, we were almost schoolboy cabaret.’
