“Total Guitar” Magazine Names Queen’s Brian May As The Greatest Guitarist of All Time
Queen guitarist, Brian May, was named the greatest guitarist of all time in a recent article, beating out a couple of his biggest influences in Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page.
May’s response upon learning of winning the award: “I’m absolutely speechless. I’m blown away. I have to say it’s completely unexpected. Obviously, I’m deeply touched that people feel that way about me. I’m not under any illusions that, technically, I’m even on the tree of great guitarists.”
When asked about beating out Hendrix for the top spot, May said, “Oh my god! Well, it is very humbling. Jimi is, of course, my number one. And I’ve always said that. To me, he’s still something superhuman. Its like he really did come from an alien planet, and I will never know quite how he did what he did. And every time I go back to Hendrix, I’m thrilled and stunned, and I get that feeling all over again, like either I’m going to give up playing guitar, because I can’t face up to this, or I’m gonna really have to get into it in a big way and try and do what is in my own body and soul. I never stop learning from Jimi. Strangely enough, these days I seldom play his stuff but it’s kind of inside my anyway.”
On Page’s influence on him, May added, “He’s almost my generation, but a little bit older, and we went to the same primary school, although he was, I think, two or three years above me — and that’s a lot when you’re small. So I always looked up to him, I gotta say, because he’s kind of a local boy to me. Strangely enough, we live quite close to each other at the moment. To me, he’s a master of invention, that’s what I would say. And he’s a major, major force in defining what heavy rock became as it was being born. I never get ed up of listening to those [Led] Zeppelin albums, and I never will. And it’s a funny feeling as well, because we were boys trying to do our thing and hoping that one day we might be rock stars and live their life, and listening to ‘Communication Breakdown’ and ‘Good Times Bad Times’, I remember I had that feeling of, ‘Oh my god, he’s doing what I want to do and I either have to give up or else I have to try bloody hard.'”
