Brian Harold Can CBE (born 19 July 1947 in Hampton, London, England) became famous in the 1970s and 1980s as the guitarist of the rock group Queen and composed many of their hits, including "We Will Rock You", "Hammer to Fall", "Tie Your Mother Down", "Who Wants to Live Forever", "I Want it All", & "The Show Must Go On".

He was too known for creating harmonious guitar riffs & solos, & witharound studios would typically overdub his guitar leads in an orchestral style, adding to the harmonies.

He remained an active musician in the 1990s, after Freddie Mercury's death, publishing ii solo albums & participate within favorite cases prefer Pavarotti & Friends, Montreux Jazz Festival, 46664 at Cape Town, & Person at a Palace for the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2002.

Can has played the range of guitars, most typically a Red Special, which he designed by using his father, Harold Can, & built with wood from either the virtually all unbelievable source — an old hearth. His comments on this instrument, from either Queen In Their Have Words (ed. Mick St. Michael, Omnibus Click, 1992, p62) come:

Additionally to utilizing his homemade guitar, he prefers to apply coins (especially sixpenny pieces) instead of a supplementary traditional disposables plectrum, on the basis that their rigidity gives him more control inside swimming. He is known to constantly carry coins around his pockets specifically for this purpose.

Might's early heroes were Cliff Richard and The Shadows, whom he says were a virtually all metal tool retired at the period. Numbers of years late he gained his chance to play in separate occasions by owning each Cliff Richard & Shadows lead guitar player Hank Marvin. Might was gallant upon hearing that Cliff Richard experienced mentioned withwithin an locate that he would use at times Brian Might in his household fantasy band. Too when recording by having Hank Marvin, Could too contributed to the 1996 album "Twang!: A Tribute to Hank Marvin & the Shadows," playing FBI. A album featured more greats like Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath, Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, and Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt of Status Quo.

Might, unlike fellow bandmates Mercury & Roger Taylor, and within direct contrast sustaining numerous rock stars, never recreationally used doses, was non sexually promiscuous, didn't smoke & seldom drank. He was known for existence like quietly & reticent at parties. Once he does ingest, his preferred beer is Guinness.

Can has declared around interviews that he suffered from either depression in the late 1980s, even pertinent of contemplating suicide, and that drug apply would use at times exacerbated any problems he faced. At a instance, when you took a recording sessions of the Queen album The Miracle he was leaving his married woman, Queen was non swimming any survive shows, & his father died.

Could as well cherished without doubt everthing of his lives were wholly rattling, & he felt that was impossible under a influence of any narcotics.

Might's father Harold got been the longtime cigarette smoker, and this probably contributed to his early demise. Following, Will dislikes smoking, possibly pertinent in which he specifically prohibits smoking inside at his supplementary recent concerts.

His dodging of alcohol may be traced to an early concert in which Queen played by having a band Aerosmith, and Can experienced the conversation using fellow guitar player Joe Perry backstage. Perry brought out the bottle of whiskey, which the two drank between themselves. Might felt and then unpleasant in a period of the concert that he promised himself never to use at times additional than 1 digest prior to swimming.

Inside Queen's 3-a portion vocal harmonies, his was usually a mid-range backing vocal, sounding non unlike Mercury's, albeit non quite when heavy. In a select few of his songs he sings a lead vocal, like "Some Day One Day", "All Dead, All Dead", "Leaving Home Ain't Easy" & "'39".

He was a tallest member of Queen, & at Hexad' I", the only member over 6 feet tall.

May attended Hampton School and the prestigious Imperial College London and had been part way through a Ph.D. course there when Queen became successful, and never completed his astronomy doctorate. He had written most of his thesis but never submitted it, although his professors claimed it was strong enough to earn him the doctorate. He was a coauthor on at least one scholarly publication [http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1974MNRAS.166..439H&db_key=AST&link_type=ABSTRACT&high=430f64f97313399]. He was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science in November 2002 by Hertfordshire University, although it is not typically customary in the United Kingdom for honorary doctors to be called "Doctor".

Throughout the last several years, he has overseen the remastering of Queen albums and various DVD and Greatest Hits releases. In 2004, he announced he and drummer Roger Taylor were going on tour for the first time in 18 years as "Queen," along with Free/Bad Company vocalist Paul Rodgers. The tour is being billed as "Queen + Paul Rodgers Spring 2005." In the Queen's birthday honours list of the same year, he was made a Commander of the British Empire "for services to the music industry".

He has been quoted throughout the years as saying: "We sleep in the head bay."

May has also been a vegetarian for a number of years.

Highlights

Brian May began composing in 1968/1969. He covered a wide variety of styles, but basically he wrote ballads and hard rock. From the first group perhaps the most respected piece is Who Wants To Live Forever, which has been covered by artists like Seal and Sarah Brightman. His most popular rock number is We Will Rock You, a very simple ABABAB composition with pentatonic melody and ostinato percussion. Among his most ambitious works were Procession (Queen II, 1974), a pseudo-baroque short piece for guitar octet, and The Dark (1980-1991).

Through the years he wrote some songs with other people, the most memorable being Too Much Love Will Kill You, composed with Frank Musker and Elizabeth Lamers, which won Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically & Lyrically in 1996. As a meticulous arranger he focused on multi-part harmonies, often more contrapuntal than parallel — a rarity for rock guitar. Good examples are found in Queen's albums A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, where he arranged a jazz band for guitar mini-orchestra (Good Company), a vocal canon (Prophet's Song) and guitar and vocal counterpoints (Teo Toriatte).

As a performer, he was primarily respected as a guitarist. May explored a wide variety of styles in guitar as well. Playing lead some of his best works include sweep picking (Was It All Worth It), tapping (Bijou, Resurrection, Cyborg), Hendrix-like licks (Liar, Brighton Rock) and melodic parts (Bohemian Rhapsody, Killer Queen, These Are The Days Of Our Lives). Some of his solos and orchestral parts were composed by Freddie Mercury, who then asked Brian to bring them to life (Bicycle Race, Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon). May also performed notable acoustic works, including the fingerpicked solo of White Queen (Queen II, 1974) and the skiffle-influenced '39.

Brian didn't restrict his abilities to one instrument. During his Queen days he performed ukelele (Good Company) and sometimes piano, detaching on a soft and gentle style (All Dead All Dead, Save Me, Dear Friends). He recorded some other instruments here and there (maracas, banjo, etc), including the harp on Love Of My Life, which was recorded in overdubs and mixed to sound as one performance.

May was an excellent singer too. His wide vocal range went from notes around low A (110 Hz) to very high tenor Ds and Es (mostly in his solo career). Occasionally he contributed falsetto parts as well (Ogre Battle, Why Don't We Try Again). In some Queen songs, such as Good Company or She Makes Me, he sang all the vocals.

Gear

Most of Brian's guitar work was played with the Red Special. Still, he used some other electric guitars, including a Burns Double Six (Long Away), a Fender Telecaster (Crazy Little Thing Called Love) an Ibanez (Nothing But Blue) and a Flying V (One Vision).

In early Queen tours he had a Stratocaster as spare guitar, replacing it with a Les Paul Deluxe in 1974, then a John Birch replica of his Red Special the next year. In a concert in the States on the 1982 Hot Space North American tour, he got frustrated with that instrument and smashed it, thereafter using a Gibson Flying V until he got more suitable replicas of his beloved Red Special.

For acoustic guitars, mostly he used Ovation 12-Strings, Martins and a Gibson Chet Atkins for nylon-string parts. His ukelele was Aloha. Pianos he recorded include Bosendorfers, although in concerts he relied on Mercury's Steinway. May used Yamaha DX-7 synths for some of his most memorable inputs: the opening sequence of One Vision and the backgrounds of Who Wants To Live Forever, Scandal and Show Must Go On.

Brian was keen on using some toys as instruments as well. Some of his early acoustic works were done on a cheap Hairfred he had conserved from his childhood. He also used a Yamaha plastic piano in Teo Toriatte, a mini-banjo in Bring Back That Leroy Brown and a toy mini koto in Prophet's Song.

Brian has used Vox AC-30 amplifiers almost exclusively since a meeting with his long time hero 'Rory Gallagher' at a gig in london during the late 60s/early 70s. He always used a 'treble booster' of some kind which with the AC-30 went a long way in helping create many of his signature guitar tones. Live, he used banks of AC-30 amplifiers keeping some amps with only guitar and others with all effects such as delay, flanger and chorus.

Brian May's Input In Songs Credited To Queen

After the famous Live Aid concert in summer 1985, Mercury rang his band mates and proposed to write a song together between them. The result was One Vision, which was basically Brian on music (the Magic Years documentary shows how he came up with the opening section and the basic guitar riff) and Roger on lyrics, with Freddie being more a producer and arranger than a proper co-writer, and John Deacon mostly absent.

For their 1989 release album, The Miracle, the band had decided that all of the tracks would be credited to all the band, no matter who had been the main writer. Still, interviews and musical analyses tend to identify the input of each member on each track.

May composed I Want It All for that album (recent releases credit the song to just him), as well as Scandal (based on his personal problems with the British press). For the rest of the album he didn't contribute so much creatively, although he helped building the basis of Party and Was It All Worth It (both being mostly Freddie's pieces) and came up with the guitar riff of Chinese Torture, an unreleased track of those sessions.

Queen's next album was Innuendo, on which May's contributions increased, although more in arrangements than actual writing in most cases; for the title track he did some of the arrangement for the heavy solo, then he added vocal harmonies to I'm Going Slightly Mad and composed the solo of These Are The Days Of Our Lives, a song for which the four of them decided the keyboard parts together. He changed the tempo and key of Freddie's metal song The Hitman and took it under his wing, even singing guide vocal in the demo. May also co-wrote some of the guitar lines in Bijou.

Two songs that May had composed for his first solo album, Headlong and I Can't Live With You, eventually ended up in the Queen project. His other composition was The Show Must Go On, a group effort in which he was the coordinator and primary composer, but in which they all had input — Deacon and Taylor with the famous chord sequence, Mercury with the first verse.

Albums
Star Fleet Project (Mini Album, 1983), featuring Eddie Van Halen Back To The Light (1992) Live At The Brixton Academy (1994) Another World (1998) Furia (Soundtrack) (2000)