In the project section of this website you will find build details for this 3/4 scale Brian May Red Special replica which started life as a BMG Mini May I bought in 2012. At the suggestion of some fellow enthusiasts, I requested and was granted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet Brian and get him to autograph it before the Queen + Adam Lambert concert at the SSE Hydro arena in Glasgow on 3rd December 2017.
I had resisted arranging this for various reasons, not least of which are that the instrument was my first guitar project and I was concerned about putting Brian in the awkward position of having to be polite about an unusual replica of his famous Red Special guitar, particularly since the inference was that the BMG Mini May that inspired it was not satisfactory in some way.
Thankfully the meeting went well and I needn’t have been concerned; Brian was relaxed and in good spirits because the other guests in our small group were Scottish members of his family [his late mother, Ruth Fletcher was Scottish] including Mike Donald and his father (Brian’s cousin). We asked his permission to take the photographs I have included with this blog post and he was kind enough to show interest in, and pose with the guitar. Thanks to Sharon Ashley, Brian’s touring PA for arranging this and Jen Tunney for forwarding on my e-mail that made it happen. Credit also goes to Andy Guyton because I sent a picture of him handling the guitar at the 2017 Red Special meet-up to Jen which might have leveraged the situation in my favour!
This was indeed the gift that kept on giving: ‘sidestage’ we spotted Brian’s celebrity guitar tech, Pete Malandrone from a view normally reserved for Queen flight cases.
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