Is This The Real Life? by Mark Blake Read Free Book Online

led to Brian and his father installing homemade pick-ups on the Spanish guitar. ‘We used magnets and wire,’ May recalls, ‘and plugged it into my dad’s radio and it sounded brilliant.’
    At school, the pair talked music incessantly. ‘Brian used to teach me chords in the back of the German lesson,’ says Dave. ‘I used to slide my shirt cuff up my arm, which is where I’d had a guitar fretboard drawn on, and I’d learn the chords that way: “Which one is this, Brian?” and he’d show me the position of the fingers on the board. The joke is that I failed German O-Level and he passed because he was such a clever sod.’
    Away from lessons and playing guitar, over the next couple of years, Brian would tackle his natural shyness to become secretaryof the school debating society, and act in several school productions, ‘dragging up’ as a woman (twenty years before he did so in Queen’s fabled video for ‘I Want to Break Free’) to appear in school productions of The Admirable Crichton and The Rivals . Years later, when interviewed, May would often admit to feelings of insecurity as a teenager: ‘I used to think, “My God, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to wear, I don’t know who I am.”’
    Playing music seemed to offer a respite. With the onset of the beat group boom, May and Dilloway weren’t the only aspiring musicians at Hampton Grammar. ‘There was a scene,’ explains Dave, ‘with a growing group of guitarists who would drag small amps into school and play at lunchtimes.’ Other older pupils were already playing in bands: John Garnham, nicknamed ‘Jag’, owned a handsome Hofner Colorama; Pete ‘Wooly’ Hammerton had a Telecaster and, later, an SG of which Brian was especially envious. Playing this and other friends’ guitars, May began noting what he liked and didn’t like. Unable to afford his own guitar, he and his father had already decided to make their own.
    In the summer of 1963, the pair began the painstaking process of designing and building an electric guitar from scratch. It took them eighteen months to complete, but gave May an instrument that became his signature for the next forty-five years. The guitar’s body was moulded from oak and blockboard; the neck was made from an eighteenth-century mahogany fireplace salvaged from a friend’s house (two woodworm holes were plugged with matchsticks); the fret markers on the neck were fashioned from mother-of-pearl buttons scavenged from Ruth May’s sewing box and sanded down by hand, while the tremelo arm was made from a piece of steel originally used to hold up the saddle of a bike and, recalled Brian, ‘capped by my mum’s knitting needle’. Two valve springs from a 1928 Panther motorcycle were then used to balance the strings’ tension.
    The only parts of the guitar not made from scratch were the pick-ups and the fretwire used for the strings. As Brian and Harold’s homemade pick-ups didn’t give them the sound they wanted, Brian relented and installed Burns pick-ups (as favoured by The Shadows). ‘Then I bought the fretwire from a shop calledClifford Essex in [London’s] Cambridge Circus,’ he recalled. ‘But everything else was junk.’
    With its twenty-four frets and the customised positioning of the pick-ups, the DIY instrument had a unique sound and tonality. Once completed, and varnished a deep mahogany hue, the homemade guitar came to be known as the ‘Red Special’. Showing his customary eye for detail, May photographed the construction of the instrument at every stage. In 1998, when the Special was finally taken apart to be rebuilt, Brian’s guitar tech was presented with Harold May’s original tool kit containing the same screwdrivers, fret saws and even the original tins of wood-stain used in its creation some thirty-five years earlier.
    Showing a similar ingenuity, by early 1964, Brian and Dave had begun using two reel-to-reel tape recorders to experiment with multi-track recording;