Queen guitarist Brian May : NPR

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Let’s continue our series of music interviews from our archive with Brian May, a founding member of the band Queen and its lead guitarist. He also wrote one of Queen’s most famous songs, which has become a stadium anthem – “We Will Rock You.”

(SOUNDBITE OF RHYTHMIC METAL CLINKING)

GROSS: That’s not the band Queen. It’s the queen – Queen Elizabeth. As part of her recent Platinum Jubilee, she made a video of her tapping her spoon on a teacup to Queen’s famous rhythm. Then the band Queen performed a concert outside Buckingham Palace to a huge crowd. When they played “We Will Rock You,” the Royal Marine drummers kicked it off.

(SOUNDBITE OF DRUMLINE PLAYING)

GROSS: We’re about to hear the story behind “We Will Rock You” from Brian May. His life has taken some surprising turns. A few years ago, he submitted his doctoral dissertation in astrophysics on the subject “A Survey Of Radial Velocities In The Zodiacal Dust Cloud.” He’s now Dr. May. In 2007, he was awarded an honorary fellowship at Liverpool John Moores University in England. When I spoke with May in 2010, we talked about the band, its lead singer, Freddie Mercury, who died in 1991, and the music.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “WE WILL ROCK YOU”)

QUEEN: (Singing) Buddy, you’re a boy. Make a big noise. Playing in the street – gonna (ph) be a big man someday. You got mud on your face, you big disgrace, kicking your can all over the place, singing, we will, we will rock you. We will, we will rock you. Buddy, you’re a young man, hard man, shouting in the street, gonna take on the world someday. You got blood on your face, you big disgrace, waving your banner all over the place. We will, we will rock you. Sing it out. We will, we will rock you. Buddy, you’re an old man, poor man…

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

GROSS: That’s Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” which is written by my guest, Brian May, who was the lead guitarist for the band. So what inspired that song? I mean, it’s been played at so many sports stadiums over the decades. Were you thinking of it as a sports anthem? – because it almost sounds like an old-school cheerleader cheer, you know…

BRIAN MAY: Yeah. It’s become part of the fabric of life.

GROSS: …Because of that stomp, stomp, clap thing and because it’s a chant.

MAY: Yeah, that’s right. Well, the stomp stomp clap thing, yeah. People think it was always there, but actually it wasn’t. And I don’t know how it got into my head. All I can tell you is we played a gig sort of middle of our career in a place called Bingley Hall near Birmingham. Now, Birmingham is the sort of home of heavy metal, as you probably know. You know, Sabbath and a slate people come from there. And it was a great night. People just – the audience were just responding hugely. And they were singing along with everything we did.

Now, in the beginning, we didn’t relate to that. We were the kind of band who like to be listened to and taken seriously and all that stuff, you know? So people singing along wasn’t part of our agenda. Having said that and then having experienced this wave of participation of the audience in – particularly in that gig in Birmingham – we almost to a man, sort of reassessed our situation. I remember talking to Freddie about it and saying, look. You know, obviously we can no longer fight this. This has to become something which is part of our show, and we have to embrace it and the fact that people want to participate. And really everything becomes a two-way process now. And we sort of looked at each other and went, hmm, how interesting.

And he went away that night and, to the best of my knowledge, wrote “We Are The Champions” with that in mind. I went away and woke up the next morning with this [imitating percussion] in my mind somehow because I was thinking to myself, what could you give an audience that they could do while they’re standing there? And they’re all crushed together. But they can stamp, and they can clap, and they can sing some kind of chant. So for some reason, it just came straight into my head that “We Will Rock You.” And to me, it was a kind of uniting thing. It was an expression of strength.

GROSS: So how did you record the stomp, stomp, clap so it would sound grand and reverberating as opposed to three people, four people stomping their feet and clapping?

MAY: Well, I’m a physicist, you see. So I had this idea if we did it enough times – and we didn’t use any reverb or anything – that I could build a sound which would work. We were very lucky. We were working in an old disused church in North London, and it already had a nice sound – not an echoey sound, but a nice big, crisp sound to it. And there were some old boards lying around. I don’t know what they were, but they just seemed ideal to stamp on. So we kind of piled them up and started stamping, and they sounded great anyway. But being a physicist, I thought, well, supposing there were a thousand people doing this, what would be happening? And I thought, well, you would be hearing them stamping. You would also be hearing a little bit of an effect which is due to the distance that they are from you. So I put lots of individual repeats on them – not an echo, but a single repeat and at varying distances. And the distances were all prime numbers. Now, much later on, people designed a machine to do this. And I think it was called Prime Time or something.

But that’s what we did. As we recorded each track, we put a delay of a certain length on it. And none of the delays were sort of harmonically related. So what you get is there’s no echo on it whatsoever, but the claps sound as though they spread around the stereo, but they’re also kind of spread as regards distance from you. So you just feel like you’re in the middle of a large number of people stamping on boards and clapping…

GROSS: That’s amazing.

MAY: …And also singing.

GROSS: Now, here’s another really interesting thing to me about “We Will Rock You.” It’s the most famous song that you’ve written. It’s a largely a cappella song. You come in for your guitar solo at the very end. So until, like, the very, very end, like, you’re not even playing on it. And it’s just kind of amazing that you, as the guitarist, would write a song that you’re barely featured on.

MAY: Well, I’m featured stamping and clapping, you see.

GROSS: Well, yes.

MAY: And I’m featured singing, so…

GROSS: And you’re very good at that.

(LAUGHTER)

MAY: Thank you. Well, we’re all (inaudible). The guitars – yeah, I didn’t want us to be standard. I didn’t want it to be like, oh, here’s a guitar solo, and then we sing another verse. I wanted it to be something stark and different. So it was very deliberate that I left the guitar solo to the end just because that was a final statement and a different statement – taking it off in a completely different direction. It changes key into that piece too, you know. So it’s a whole different kind of trip. It was not a standard pop song.

GROSS: OK. So let’s just hear the end of “We Will Rock You.” And we’ll hear that guitar solo at the end.

MAY: (Laughter) OK.

GROSS: Here it is.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “WE WILL ROCK YOU”)

QUEEN: (Singing) We will, we will rock you. Everybody, we will, we will rock you. We will, we will rock you. All right.

GROSS: So that’s the end of “We Will Rock You,” written by my guest, guitarist and singer and songwriter Brian May, who was one of the founding members of Queen. So…

MAY: I should – can I comment on the end of that?

GROSS: Yeah, please.

MAY: (Laughter) Interesting that you play the end of the song. You can hear the guitar waiting in the wings. That was – you can hear this little feedback note. And so the guitar is present although it’s not taking center stage all through the last choruses. And then, finally, it bursts upon the scene. And you notice Freddie goes, all right, which means he’s kind of handing over to the guitar, and we’re in a different universe once the guitar starts. And that was the intention. And it’s very sort of informal. And you may notice – there’s a lot of things to notice. You might notice that the last piece, the very last little riffs, are repeated. And they’re not just repeated by me playing them again. They’re repeated by cutting the tape and splicing it on again and again. So – and that’s deliberate, too. It’s a way of getting a sort of a thing that makes you sit up towards the end. And then, it stops. There’s nothing after it, which I really enjoy. There’s no big ending. It just stops and leaves you in midair thinking, well, what happened there?

GROSS: My guest is Brian May, a co-founder and the lead guitarist of the band Queen – more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF QUEEN SONG, “KILLER QUEEN”)

GROSS: My guest is Brian May, a co-founder of…