“I kept thinking, ‘It worked beautifully for Rory Gallagher with a similar setup.’ But for me it was just frustrating”: Why Brian May never took to the Strat or Les Paul

Queen's Brian May is synonymous with the Red Special electric guitar, to the point where it's double-take-inducing to see anything else strapped 'round his shoulder.

There are the sentimental reasons for May's love of the model, of course – he built the original with his father while still in his teens – but he also simply struggled to connect, sonically, with two of guitardom's most common weapons of choice.

In Queen's early days – before they were stealing the spotlight at the biggest concerts in the world – May didn't have backup copies of the Red Special, let alone a company that manufactures replicas of it, leading him to occasionally turn to Strats and Les Pauls as a plan B when needed. Neither guitar, however, was to May's liking at all.

Speaking to GP in 2012, May explained, “I only used [the Strat and Les Paul] as spares because I didn’t have a decent copy of my guitar at that time. Neither of them really worked for me, though they work just fine for other people.

“The Les Paul,” he elaborated, “was too dull, the pickups whistled, and it had no trem. The Strat sounded painfully thin and didn’t sustain the way I wanted.

“I kept thinking, ‘It worked beautifully for Rory Gallagher with a similar [Vox AC30] amp setup.’ But for me it was just frustrating. In time we got the BM guitar copies going, and my problems were solved.”

Even before his Queen days, May had great admiration for Gallagher, recalling in a 2015 documentary that he'd be left “open-mouthed” by not only the latter's virtuosity and tone, but by his showmanship, which in particular would clearly inform Queen later on.

“We’d go and see Rory every week and [be] open-mouthed at the way the guy played, the person he was, and the way he interacted with his audience – the way he could just hold people by tapping his foot or his fingers or whatever he did,” May said. “He was just a magician as far as we were concerned, as an entertainer, and funny enough he probably wouldn’t think of himself as an entertainer.”

Incidentally, Gallagher's setup happens to be in the news at the moment, with his family's recent decision to sell his gear – including his iconic '61 Strat – at auction.

The Strat in particular is legendary enough that its impending sale attracted the attention of no less than some of the most prominent names in the Irish government, who have publicly expressed their desire to keep the guitar in the late blues guitar titan's home country.