Brian Harold May CBE (born 19 July 1947) is an English musician, singer, songwriter and astrophysicist who achieved international fame as the lead guitarist of the rock band Queen. He uses a home-built guitar, the Red Special. His compositions for the band include We Will Rock You, Tie Your Mother Down, I Want It All, Fat Bottomed Girls, Who Wants to Live Forever, No-One but You (Only the Good Die Young) and The Show Must Go On. He was appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2005 for services to the music industry and for charity work.[1] May attained a PhD in astrophysics from Imperial College in 2007 and was Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University from 2008 to 2013.[2] He has homes in London and Windlesham, Surrey.[3] He is an active animal rights advocate and was appointed a vice-president of animal welfare charity the RSPCA in September 2012.[4] In 2005, a Planet Rock poll saw May voted the 7th greatest guitarist of all time.[5] He was ranked at No. 26 on Rolling Stone magazines list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.[6] In 2012, May was ranked the 2nd greatest guitarist of all time by a Guitar World magazine readers poll.[ Early life[edit] Brian May, the only child of Harold and Ruth May, was born in Hampton, London and attended Hampton Grammar School (now Hampton School).[8] During this time he formed his first band with vocalist and bassist Tim Staffell, named 1984 after George Orwells novel of the same name.[9] At Hampton Grammar School, he attained ten GCE Ordinary Levels and three A-Levels (Physics, Mathematics and Applied Mathematics).[9] He studied Mathematics and Physics at Imperial College London, graduating with a BSc. degree.[10] Musical career[edit] 1968–1970: Smile[edit] Main article: Smile (band) Brian May formed the band Smile in 1968. The group included Tim Staffell as singer and bassist, and later, drummer Roger Taylor, who also went on to play for Queen. The band lasted for two years from 1968 to 1970, as Staffell left in 1970, leaving the band with a catalogue of nine songs. Smile would reunite for several songs on 22 December 1992. Taylors band the Cross were headliners and he brought May and Staffell on to play Earth and If I Were a Carpenter.[11] May also performed several other songs that night. 1970–1991: Queen[edit] Main article: Queen (band) May also served as Queens backing vocalist. In Queens three-part vocal harmonies, May was generally the lower-range backing vocals. On some of his songs he sings the lead vocals, most notably the first verse of Who Wants to Live Forever, the bridge on I Want It All and Flashs Theme, and full lead vocals on Some Day One Day, She Makes Me (Stormtrooper in Stilettoes), 39, Good Company, Long Away, All Dead, All Dead, Sleeping on the Sidewalk, Leaving Home Aint Easy and Sail Away Sweet Sister. Throughout Queens career May frequently wrote songs for the band and has composed many significant songs such as the worldwide hit We Will Rock You, as well as Tie Your Mother Down, Who Wants to Live Forever, Hammer to Fall, Save Me, Fat Bottomed Girls, Flash, Now Im Here, and I Want It All. Typically, either Freddie Mercury or May wrote the most songs on every Queen album. For their 1989 release album, The Miracle, the band had decided that all of the tracks would be credited to the entire band, no matter who had been the main writer. Still, interviews and musical analyses tend to help identify the input of each member on each track. May composed I Want It All for that album, as well as Scandal (based on his personal problems with the British press). For the rest of the album he did not contribute so much creatively, although he helped in building the basis of Party and Was It All Worth It (both being predominantly Mercurys pieces) and created the guitar riff of Chinese Torture. Queens subsequent album was Innuendo, on which Mays 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 Im 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 Mercurys 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 Cant 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. In recent years, he has supervised the remastering of Queen albums and various DVD and greatest hits releases. In 2004, he announced that 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. Billed as Queen + Paul Rodgers, the band has played throughout 2005 and 2006 in South Africa, Europe, Aruba, Japan, and North America and released a new album with Paul Rodgers in 2008, entitled The Cosmos Rocks. This album was supported by a major tour. 1983–1998: the Brian May band[edit] During 1983, several members of Queen explored side projects. On 21 and 22 April in Los Angeles, May recorded his first solo work, a mini-album entitled Star Fleet Project, on which he collaborated with Eddie Van Halen.[14] May contributed to former Genesis guitarist Steve Hacketts album Feedback 86, playing guitar on the track Cassandra and providing guitar and vocals for Slot Machine. Slot Machine was also co-written by May. May worked with his second wife Anita Dobson on her first album, in which she sang vocals to the EastEnders theme tune. In this form the tune became the song Anyone Can Fall in Love.[15] May himself produced the song, which reached No. 4 in the UK Singles Chart in August 1986.[16] In 1989, May contributed guitar solos to the song When Death Calls on Black Sabbath 14th album Headless Cross, and the Living in a Box track Blow The House Down from the album Gatecrashing. Following the death of Freddie Mercury in November 1991, May booked himself into a clinic in Arizona, and states; I regarded myself as completely sick. I was wounded and very much in pieces. I went into a serious depression. I was subsumed by feelings of loss.[18] He chose to deal with his grief by committing himself as fully as possible to work, first by finishing his solo album, Back to the Light, and then touring worldwide to promote it. He frequently remarked in press interviews that this was the only form of self-prescribed therapy he could think of.[19] According to Def Leppard vocalist Joe Elliot, It was undoubtedly an enormous and terrible blow to lose someone he was so close to. Personally, I know it ripped the heart out of Brian, but having said that, he was in great spirits after the album was finished.[17] In late 1992, the Brian May Band was officially formed. An early version of the band was loosely formed for 19 October 1991, the date of the bands last concert of reunion.October 1991, when May took part in the Guitar Legends guitar festival in Seville, Spain. The line-up for his performance was May on vocals and lead guitar, Cozy Powell on drums and percussion, Mike Moran and Rick Wakeman on keyboards, and Maggie Ryder, Miriam Stockley and Chris Thompson on backing vocals. The original line-up was May on vocals and lead guitar, Powell on drums and percussion, Michael Casswell on guitar, Neil Murray on bass, and Ryder, Stockley and Thompson on backing vocals. This version of the band lasted only during the South American support tour (supporting The B-52s and Joe Cocker) on only five dates. Afterwards, May made significant changes, feeling the group never quite gelled. May brought guitarist Jamie Moses on board to replace Mike Caswell. The other change made was in the backing vocals department, when Ryder, Stockley and Thompson were replaced with Catherine Porter and Shelley Preston. On 23 February 1993, this new line-up of The Brian May Band began its world tour in the US, both supporting Guns N Roses and headlining a few dates.[20] The tour would take them through North America, Europe (support act: Valentine) and Japan. After the tour ended on 18 December 1993, May returned to the studio with fellow surviving Queen band members Roger Taylor and John Deacon to work on tracks that became Made in Heaven, the final Queen studio album.[21] The band took Mercurys solo album demos and last recordings, which he managed to perform in the studio after the album Innuendo was finished, and completed them with their additions both musically and vocally.[22] Work on the album after Mercurys death originally began in 1992 by Deacon and May, but was left until a later date due to other commitments.[21] In 1995, May began working towards a new solo album of covers tentatively named Heroes, in addition to working on various film and television projects and other collaborations. May subsequently changed the approach from covers to focus on those collaborations and on new material. The songs included Another World, and featured mainly Spike Edney, Cozy Powell, Neil Murray and Jamie Moses. On 5 April 1998, Cozy Powell was killed in a car accident on the M4 motorway near Bristol, England. This caused a huge, unexpected disruption to the upcoming tour for The Brian May Band, with a new drummer being needed at short notice. Steve Ferrone was brought on to help May finish recording drums and to join the band for the early stage promotional tour of five dates in Europe before the world tour. Following the early promotional tour, Eric Singer replaced Steve Ferrone for the full 1998 world tour 2000–present[edit] From his last solo release in 1998 May has been performing as a solo artist, as part of an ensemble, and infrequently as Queen with Roger Taylor. On 22 October 2000, Brian May made a guest appearance at the Motörhead 25th Anniversary show at Brixton Academy along with Eddie Clarke (former Motörhead guitarist) for the encore song Overkill. In the Queens birthday honours list of 2005, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to the music industry.[23] May is a friend of singer and musician Phil Collins and was a special guest at the Genesis reunion concert at Twickenham Stadium in 2007. May worked extensively with stage actress and singer Kerry Ellis after he cast her in the musical We Will Rock You. He produced and arranged her debut studio album Anthems (2010), a follow-up to her extended play Wicked in Rock (2008), as well as appearing with Ellis at many public performances – playing guitar alongside her. He also contributed a guitar solo to Meat Loafs Hang Cool, Teddy Bear album in exchange for the use of drummer John Miceli. Along with Elena Vidal, Brian May released a historical book in 2009 entitled A Village Lost and Found: Scenes in Our Village. The book is an annotated collection of stereoscopic photographs taken by the Victorian era photographer T. R. Williams and it is sold with a focussing stereoscope. May became an enthusiast of stereoscope photographs as a child, and first encountered the work of Williams during the late 1960s. In 2003 May announced a search to identify the actual location of the Scenes in Our Village images. In 2004 May reported that he had identified the location as the village of Hinton Waldrist in Oxfordshire. On 20 May 2009, May and Queen band mate Roger Taylor performed We Are the Champions live on the season finale of American Idol with winner Kris Allen and runner-up Adam Lambert providing a vocal duet.[24] In November 2009, May appeared with Taylor on The X Factor, with Queen mentoring the contestants, then later performing Bohemian Rhapsody. In April 2010, May founded the Save Me 2010 project to work against any proposed repeal of the British fox-hunting ban, and also to promote animal rights in Britain.[25] In February 2011 it was announced that May would tour with Kerry Ellis, playing 12 dates across the UK in May 2011.[26] On 1 March 2013 May and Ellis played a free thirty minute acoustic set at St Pancras railway station to launch Tiger Track, a three-week tiger conservation event. Their set list included Queens Crazy Little Thing Called Love.[27] On 18 April 2011 Lady Gaga confirmed that May would play guitar on her track You and I from her latest album Born This Way, released on 23 May 2011.[28] In June 2011, May performed with Tangerine Dream at the Starmus Festival on Tenerife, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarins first spaceflight.[29] On 26 August, May performed We Will Rock You and Welcome to the Black Parade with American rock band My Chemical Romance at the Reading Festival.[30] On 28 August, May performed You and I live with Lady Gaga at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards at the Nokia Theatre, Los Angeles.[31] On 16 September 2012, May appeared at the Sunflower Jam charity concert at the Royal Albert Hall, performing alongside bassist John Paul Jones (of Led Zeppelin), drummer Ian Paice (of Deep Purple), and vocalists Bruce Dickinson (of Iron Maiden) and Alice Cooper.[32] At the 2011 MTV Europe Music Awards on 6 November, Queen received the Global Icon Award, which Katy Perry presented to Brian May.[33] Queen closed the awards ceremony, with Adam Lambert on vocals, performing The Show Must Go On, We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions.[33] The collaboration garnered a positive response from both fans and critics, resulting in speculation about future projects together.[34] Queen + Adam Lambert played two shows at the Hammersmith Apollo, London on 11 and 12 July 2012.[35][36] Both shows sold out within 24 hours of tickets going on open sale.[37] A third London date was added for 14 July.[38] On 30 June, Queen + Lambert performed in Kiev, Ukraine at a joint concert with Elton John for the Elena Pinchuk ANTIAIDS Foundation.[39] Queen also performed with Lambert on 3 July 2012 at Moscows Olympic Stadium,[40][41] and on 7 July 2012 at the Municipal Stadium in Wroclaw, Poland.[42] On 12 August 2012, Queen performed at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.[43] May performed part of the Brighton Rock solo before being joined by Taylor and solo artist Jessie J for a performance of We Will Rock You.[43][44] On 20 September 2013, Queen + Lambert performed at the iHeartRadio Music Festival at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.[45] In 2014 Queen recorded the soundtrack for the British independent film 51 Degrees, directed by German film director Grigorij Richters. The film will have its first private viewing at the 2014 Starmus Festival.[46][47][48][49][50][51] The film is about Damon Miller (Moritz von Zeddelmann), a filmmaker who is tasked to capture the last moments of life on Earth before it collides with an Asteroid. It’s a cross genre film with factual elements and real experts throughout but dramatized to have more of an impact on the audience. It is narrated by Damons son, in the future, who has created the film as a tribute to his father. https://youtube/watch?v=AUn3_cdxkT0
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 09:55:41 +0000
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