During an appearance on BBC Radio, Queen guitarist Brian May talked about his gear and some of the peculiar aspects of his musical arsenal, which include using a British sixpence instead of a guitar pick, as well as wielding his iconic homemade Red Special electric six-string.
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When asked, "Why did you start using a sixpence as a pick? And do you still do that?", the musician replied (transcribed by UG):
"I still do that, yeah. I used to use very bendy picks because I thought it was good for getting speed.
"But I gradually discovered that I wanted more and more hardness in the pick, and the more rigid it is, the more you feel what's happening at the string in your fingers.
"So in the end, I picked up a coin, and it was just perfect. That's all I needed.
"And I changed the way that I held the pick, sort of bending one of the fingers around, and I never went back from that point.
"The sixpence has another great advantage - it's hard enough to give you all that contact, it's also soft enough not to break your steel strings because it's made of nickel silver, or whatever.
"And it has this lovely serrated edge, and if you turn it at an angle to the strings, you get a lovely kind of splatter.
"So to me, the guitar is like a voice, and that splutter is one of the consonants that helps to make the guitar talk."
The Brian May Red Special, the story of the homemade guitar that rocked the world. I believe you started to work on it with your daddy around '63, didn't you?
"Yeah, that's probably right. It's hard to actually pin down an anniversary but yeah, it is over 50 years. My God..."
It's a famous guitar with its very own tone, the Red Special, that you've played at so many important events and on all the Queen records. And I was thinking, nowadays it'd be very fashionable to do what you did then, in these days of sustainability and stuff like that. But it was unheard of then to make a guitar come from scratch in a kind of also almost wartime, make-do-and-mend spirit, wasn't it?
"It was. We had no money, and that's why we made the guitar. We couldn't possibly buy a Stratocaster or a Gibson. It was unimaginable.
"We used to go in the shops and see them on the wall and not be allowed to touch them. It was when you were a kid in those days, you could see the brochures but there was no way I could have owned one of those things.
"So we decided we'd make the guitar, me and my dad."
And how did you get the shape? Because, the shape - there were no prototypes. You seem to sort of more or less just hit on this design straight away.
"Well, actually, we did do quite a bit of experimentation but the shape I did myself. I thought I will start from the first principles. What it's supposed to be is a Spanish guitar shape with cutaways.
"And I wanted the double-cutaway so I could really get to the dusty end of the fingerboard. So I did my own shape, and I sat there for quite a long time, figuring it out. And that became my guitar shape."
And famously some of it is from a friend's old fireplace.
"Yeah, it was all made from stuff that was lying around, and it was a hundred-year-old fireplace, a piece of that that I made the neck out of, all with hand tools - chisels, planes, spokeshaves, and sandpaper.
"And the main strain is taken by the body, there's an insert into the body, which is a piece of oak, which I have to say was as hard as steel and incredibly hard to work.
"But that was from an ancient oak table that we had - they don't make oak like that these days. They cut the trees down quite early. But in those days, that was well-seasoned and that was probably 100 years old as well."
So is it very heavy?
"It's not as heavy as a Gibson Les Paul. It has less weight because I put these acoustic pockets in it, so a lot of it is hollowed out.
"That's very deliberate to try and make it feedback in the right way. So I claimed to be the first person to make an electric guitar that was designed to feedback rather than not feedback."
It's got a massive neck. Because you're saying tooling the wood was very difficult, is the neck thicker than you would normally expect on a guitar?
"It's quite thick and some people are surprised when they pick it up. But I like it that way and it was actually modeled on the old acoustic I had when I was a kid.
"And I have quite long fingers, so it works for me, I like to have something to get hold of."
Your dad wasn't at all convinced that the rock-star life was the one you should be pursuing, was he?
"No. It's a kind of irony. At the time, he was very much pro making the guitar, and he loved to do stuff, and it was a great bonding experience, you can imagine, for father and son.
"But he hated the idea that I was giving up my career, as he saw it, and never getting a proper job and going off to be a pop star.
"He just could not compute that and it was so hard for him, it was about a year and a half before he could really get over it.
"And he only got over it because he saw us at Madison Square Garden, and I flew him out there.
"He saw it and he came over to me afterward and said, 'Okay, I get it now. I understand why you had to do this.' It's a wonderful moment for me."
Do you still play this guitar?
"All the time, every day. And pretty much every day of my life unless the guitar's in a different city from where I am, which does happen."
When that happens, Brian, are you a little nervous, a little sweaty-palmed about it if it's not within where you can see it?
"I used to be but now Pete Malandrone has looked after it for many years, he's been like a personal bodyguard as well as technician to that guitar. He's fantastic, it's probably safer in his hands than it is in mine."
Yeah, and people would assume you have kind of racks of these things backstage but this is the one.
"This is the one. I do have a few spares backstage and I have a couple of different tunings, and of course, we make Brian May guitars.
"I'm able to use a couple of those on stage and they're great. But the original is something else, it's like a piece of my body."
