Brian Harold May

Brian Harold May was born on July 19th 1947 in Twickenham, to parents Harold and Ruth. He started school in 1952 at the Hanworth Road Primary School, Feltham. In 1954 his father began to teach him to play the ukulele abd he had piano lessons. He won a scholarship and started at Hampton Grammar School, which is where his interest in Astronomy began. He formed his first band in 1964, called "1984". They played several small gigs that year.He left school in 1966 with ten 'O' levels and four 'A' levels in Science. He began at Imperial College in 1967 studying physics, he fully intended to become an Astrologer. When he eventually left he had achieved BSc Honours in Physics and Maths. He began work on a thesis to obtain Doctorate, but never completed it.

Brian is 6th 1 and a half inches tall, with dark brown curly hair and brown eyes, "with green bits" He likes heavy metal music (Def Leppard / Extreme / Guns 'n' Roses are favourites) and his favourite actor is Clint Eastwood. He likes to drink Guinness and eat vegetarian food. By the time Brian was in his mid-teens, he was no longer satisfied playing an acoustic guitar with pickups added. He wanted a real electric guitar, but that was something that he and his family couldn't afford. Brian's father was an electronics engineer, and Brian himself was a talented physics student planning a career in astronomy, so they decided to work together and build Brian a new guitar to the specifications he wanted.

They'd both had experience in wood and metal working, which was also a big help. They began building the guitar in August 1963 when Brian was 16. The materials for the guitar came from some unique and unusual places. The neck is made from mahogany from an old fireplace, the body mostly from oak, and the tremolo assembly included a knife edge and two motorbike valve springs. The fret-markers are made from old pearl buttons. Brian originally wound his own pick-ups for the guitar, as he had for his first guitar, but he didn't like the resulting sound so he finally purchased Burns pickups. He didn't care for their microphonic sound, so he filled them with epoxy. Brian's guitar quickly became known as the "Red Special". Instead of using a regular guitar pick, Brian found, after much experimentation, that he preferred the sound he achieved when using an old English sixpence coin. He felt it gave him more contact with the strings and more control over them. The sixpence hasn't been in curculation since the early 70's.