Credit: Far Out / Carl Lender
Sun 2 August 2026 3:00, UK
Brian May knows guitar music inside and out… quite literally.
When he was just 15 in the halcyon days of 1963, he began constructing his own guitar, The Red Special, alongside his father. Beyond being the most wholesome origin story of any of the rock gods, this gave the fuzzy-haired friend of the badgers a robust knowledge of the intricacies of guitars and the nuances of their sound.
This understanding has always brought a subtlety to the Queen strummer that others struggle with. “I can listen to any player and pantomime their sound,” Steve Vai told Rolling Stone, “But I can’t do Brian May. He’s just walking on higher ground.” Well, maybe beyond the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ man’s virtuosity, that is actually tied to a shed in Middlesex where the Red Special was born.
From tinkering with timbre to mastering tone, May was well acquainted. Yet, while the astrophysicist figured he knew all about the capabilities of the guitar as he got out into the world and formed his first juvenile, Smile, he was soon reminded that he actually knew the square root of jack shit when ‘Stone Free’ almost blew the ample hair off his brainy head in 1966.
Brimming with more imagination than Dr Suess’ bibliography, more skill than Lionel Messi’s highlights compilation (not quite), and more acid reflux than a Gaviscon advert, Jimi Hendrix’s stunning B-side to ‘Hey Jude’ barely sounded human. The groovy Seattleite stunned the world with his debut single. Or rather, he stunned the UK, shooting to sixth in Blighty but failing to chart entirely in his native US.
The enamoured rockers on this side of the pond spread the word with whispers. And the hushed tones coming from May’s mouth were touting a conspiracy theory: ‘Stone Free’ wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
“I’d heard the solo on ‘Stone Free’ and refused to believe that someone could actually play this,” May recalled, rocked and humbled by Hendrix’s uncanny wizardry. “It had to be some kind of studio trickery, the way he talks to the guitar and the guitar talks back to him,” May continued, failing to even mention the sheer imagination behind it, too.
Further reading: From The Vault
“I was already playing in a band called Smile, and I thought I was a reasonably good guitarist, so I knew it wasn’t possible,” May explains. “So I went to the Saville [a music venue in London], determined to be a disbeliever, but I was swept off my feet.” Hendrix had replicated what had once seemed impossible live before May’s very eyes. The future Queen guitarist and a handful of his peers must have mumbled in unison, ‘The bastard.’
As Jeff Beck also testified, “It was a horrible time, really. Not because of him, but because of the fact that he swept us all aside and put us in a bin.” Heralded by ‘Stone Free’, a new era of rock ‘n’ roll was evidently upon the world. While the opening riff is stripped-back and almost Chuck Berry-adjacent, it liberates itself from there, exploding into a conversation between melody, noise and feedback in a way that abandoned genre, and used amps and pedals not just the guitar.
The Red Special might have given May a tone and an acute understanding, but Hendrix was like Tesla to his direct current sensibilities. Perfectly capturing the times and their footloose ways, ‘Stone Free’ seemed to inform the blue devotees looking on that those days were gone, and the ‘60s had moved on.
May was awed and well aware of the revolution unfurling before his eyes. “I thought, ‘This guy is the most astounding thing I’ve ever seen.’ And he did the ‘Stone Free’ solo live, absolutely perfectly. It was back to the drawing board for me.”
