New York, NY (Top40 Charts) A new video in Brian May's "Star Fleet Sessions" YouTube mini series is available to view today. Watch the concluding episode Star Fleet Sessions: In The Studio (Episode 3), in which May describes his experience of working with Edward
Van Halen as "I felt like, 'I'm in the presence of a God here'".
Having assembled a band, and booked two days in a studio, Brian was ready to launch his Starfleet project. But as he now shares in this exclusive interview, he had no idea if this idea would ever get off the ground.
"I didn't know if it was going to work. I really didn't," says May in the opening of the video.
"You know, we didn't gel immediately, but it didn't take very long before we did," May continues, "You can hear it happening. That's what's great about these sessions, because you hear the whole progression and you can hear in the beginning we're quite tentative, we don't really know the parts, we don't know each other, and things are kind of slipping around.
"Nice thing is there's no pressure because there was no end product. We didn't say 'we're going to make a record here'. It's just like, 'Let's have some fun and see what we can do'. So you can hear on these sessions, which I've now put in the boxset, you can hear us feeling our way and gradually gaining confidence and locking in and becoming a really tight unit, which was amazing."
The band's transition from tentative to full burn can be experienced close-up in May's newly assembled and exhaustively expanded Star Fleet box set due July 14. For the very first time, the 2-CD, Vinyl Single and LP deluxe edition box set format offers 23 previously unheard takes from those legendary two days of sessions at Los Angeles' The Record Plant in April 1983. "It's all here. ALL of it. Every note we played on those two days is right here, on show for the first time," May has said.
Speaking in this final video of his Star Fleet mini-series, May describes the journey from picking up the phone on a sunny California day and making the call to some 'friends'.
"People who are like us, who are on the road almost constantly, you have friends, but you don't see them very often because it's not very often that your paths cross. So you have to make a bit of an effort if you're going to spend any kind of friendship time. So that was one of the reasons for making this call. I thought, I hardly ever see Ed. And wouldn't it be great to have some time together, and not only that, but actually play and look into each other's eyes and play off each other, see what happens? So that was an immense,a big kind of step for me.
"I'm a bit of a shy person, to be honest, and if I hadn't been in that particularly ebullient kind of 'I want to be free' mood in Los Angeles, it never would have happened. That was a moment where I actually had the courage to phone these people up and say, 'Come and play with me'. I haven't done that very often in my life."
May describes the effect on him of sharing studio time with Van Halen:
"Me being in the studio with Ed, yeah, I was in awe. I mean, I've got to be honest. I was in awe. I just thought 'what an amazing thing'. And it would easily, it would be easy to kind of go down the road of being jealous and being, you know, resenting someone who can do something that you can't do.
"But for some reason that doesn't really happen with guitar players. I've never seen that because we all do different stuff and we all enjoy each other's stuff. So although I felt like 'I'm in the presence of a God here', there was also this feeling of pure joy, pure joy, just being in the room with that guy and being able to play stuff to him and hear him respond. You can hear us doing it. And what a treat, what an absolutely unrepeatable, unique experience that was. What a moment in time.
"When people get hold of this, I hope that they will feel they're opening a door into being there with us, being there with us on those sessions, being in that room and experiencing something that happened only once in my life, only once in anybody's life. And I hope they'll enjoy the feelings of being able to make mistakes and enjoy it, I suppose. Being able to be tentative and to be brave and to be forgiving and just explore any place that we could go, any place that was available. So I hope people will open this (box set) and feel that they have an insight into what it was like just for those few hours, for those couple of days in 1983."
