With a musical career spanning four decades, Queen founding member Brian May is a world-renowned guitarist and songwriter, with production and performance credits on recordings, which have sold in excess of 100 million copies worldwide.
Brian has penned 22 worldwide hits for Queen, among them the anthems “We Will Rock You”, “The Show Must Go On” and “I Want It All”, and powerful ballads, including “Who Wants To Live Forever”, “No-One But You (Only The Good Die Young)” and “Save Me”. As a successful and respected solo artist, Brian’s recordings include albums Back To The Light (1992), featuring “Too Much Love Will Kill You” and “Driven By You”, both Ivor Novello Award winners, and 1998´s Another World.
His songs continue to influence new generations of performers and have inspired recordings by artists as diverse as Elton John, Def Leppard, The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Shirley Bassey and Eminem. Brian has enjoyed collaborations with numerous artists, including Robbie Williams, Foo Fighters, Cliff Richard, Guns N’ Roses, Diana Ross, and Luciano Pavarotti. He was also proud to play feature guitar on the Winter Olympics 2002 opening music, “The Fire Within” for his friend and composer, the late Michael Kamen.
Perhaps the most memorable display of Brian’s unique style and musicianship was his performance of his own arrangement of “God Save the Queen”, live from the roof of Buckingham Palace, to open HM the Queen’s 2002 Golden Jubilee celebrations in front of an audience of more than 200 million people around the world.
An interest in film scoring developed when Queen became the first rock group to score a major film, Flash Gordon, featuring the hit “Flash!” penned by Brian, followed by definitive music for Highlander. Brian later contributed a mini-opera for Steve Baron´s 1996 Pinocchio, and composed a complete film soundtrack for the 1999 French art film, Furia.
May is, of course, no stranger to the theatrical world, frequently contributing to the live performance work of his wife, Anita Dobson, but in 1990, entering this world in his own right, he wrote and performed the music for the London Riverside Studios production of Macbeth. He returned at full strength to the Theatre in 2002, as one of the principal creative forces behind the ground-breaking ‘Rock Theatrical’, We Will Rock You, which became phenomenally successful, still one of London’s top-selling shows after six years of nightly standing ovations at the Dominion Theatre, London, and the longest running show ever to play at the theatre. Although We Will Rock You is now a global enterprise, Brian remains personally involved in developing new productions and updating those currently playing.
Fotoquelle : http://www.brianmay.com/ |
