Star Fleet Sessions

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Grow, Kory (3 January 2019). "Hear Queen Guitarist Brian May's New Anthem to Space Travel". Rolling Stone . Retrieved 19 May 2022. Phil Chen was a great character. He’s Jamaican extraction. I think he was born in Britain – full of sunshine – full of life. And as a bass player full of kind of tautness, and humour. He played with great kind of panache. He was in Rod Stewart’s band for a long time, so I got to see him fairly… … We used to bump into Rod and his band quite often. I mean, I’d spent quite a bit of time with him, having a drink or two – generally cups of tea with Phil. He wasn’t a big drinker. God bless him. Well, I wasn’t mostly – three were moments, but mostly not. Queen – rare interview 1984: Brian May & Roger Taylor". YouTube. 3 March 2016. Archived from the original on 21 April 2023 . Retrieved 21 April 2023. May continued, “Ed was a wonderful soul. Listening to him and me, I feel completely outclassed by him in the studio, but in a very pleasant way. What a joy for me to be around a guy who could do all that—such a privilege.” That’s why I wanted to put Star Fleet Project out as a box set with everything we recorded,” Brian reveals. “The whole two days, everything we recorded is in the new boxset edition, so you can hear how excited we are and how the songs developed – and you hear from the beginning that we’re having fun with this project.

a b c May, Brian (1 June 2023). "Announcing release: Star Fleet Sessions". Brian May. Archived from the original on 1 June 2023 . Retrieved 2 June 2023. Embracing this unexpected freedom, Brian pitched up in L.A., where he was able to enjoy some quality family time. However, he also wrote a new song, “Let Me Out,” which convinced him that “I could do anything, I could just ring someone up. I could ring [Edward] Van Halen up. I haven’t spoken to him for ages. We could do something.” The troupe also worked on an earlier May song, the bluesy “Let Me Out”, while the set closes with the titanic “Blues Breaker”, almost 13 minutes of scorching guitar interplay between Brian and Edward: not so much dueling as sharing ideas and passions. As Brian explains, “It was inspired by John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, the album with Eric Clapton reading The Beano on the front cover. Edward said, ‘This is great for me, I haven’t played like this in years. This is where I come from! I didn’t come up doing tapping and all the fireworks. I grew up doing blues, wanting to be like Eric Clapton and do something melodic.” The Queen star explains “It was inspired by John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, the album with Eric Clapton reading The Beano on the front cover. Edward said, ‘This is great for me, I haven’t played like this in years. This is where I come from! I didn’t come up doing tapping and all the fireworks. I grew up doing blues, wanting to be like Eric Clapton and do something melodic.” He’d done the Beat Itsolo and I wanted him to have that kind of feeling about it. I think he did three different ones, all of which were utterly brilliant. Our jaws all dropped. And I remember, at the very end of the soloing section there’s a little harmony run-up, so we overdubbed that together live, but as an overdub.

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In the previous episode of the Star Fleet mini-series, May described the effect on him of sharing studio time with Van Halen. In this new video, he adds: “Me being in the studio with Ed, yeah, I was in awe. I mean, I’ve got to be honest. It would be easy to kind of go down the road of being jealous and being, you know, resenting someone who can do something that you can’t do.

If that sense of liberation rings out, so does a spirit of shared adventure. “There was a lot of ebullience, a lot of exploration, discovery and astonishment,” says Brian. “And some truly magical moments when everything gelled together - a fusion of energies!”Purvis, Georg (2011). Queen: Complete Works (2nded.). London: Titan Books. p.214. ISBN 9780857685513. Containing 2 CDs, 1 vinyl LP, and a vinyl single, as well as other collector’s items, Brian May + Friends: Star Fleet Sessions will be launched as a Deluxe Edition box set, worldwide on July 14th. Van Halen fans should particularly take note of those released. Brian says this release has eight Edward guitar solos, “never quite treading the same path twice. Ed was a wonderful soul. Listening to him and me, I feel completely outclassed by him in the studio. But in a very pleasant way – what a joy for me to be around a guy who could do all that. Such a privilege.”