(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Thu 1 January 2026 18:30, UK
It’s hard to imagine any piece of rock and roll guitar history that Brian May hasn’t been able to master.
Throughout Queen’s career, they made it a habit of trying on any style that suited the song they were making, and whether that was stadium rock, operatic tunes, or even the occasional rockabilly, May usually found the perfect guitar solo to accompany anything that came out of Freddie Mercury’s mouth. But in the age of the guitar virtuosos, May realised that some of the finest guitar players of all time played the kind of tunes that he could have never imagined.
If you listen closely to every Queen record, though, a lot of what May was playing served the song perfectly. Every single time he turned up the gain for a solo, he seemed to be approaching it from a vocalist’s point of view. It’s easy to sing nearly everything that he came up with, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t fly off the handle. This was the same guy who jammed with Eddie Van Halen and held his own, so he wasn’t afraid to break out the real chops.
And when looking at his personal guitar heroes, May had a lot of geniuses to learn. Whether it as shouting the praises of someone like Rory Gallagher or looking on in amazement at Jimi Hendrix, every single musician in his record collection taught him a different lesson on how a guitar can fit within a rock and roll context, but that didn’t matter when the scene became inundated with guitar geniuses.
By the time Queen were making records like The Works, there was practically a war going on between guitar virtuosos over who could play the fastest and make something no one had heard before. Yngwie Malmsteen had gone the classical route, Joe Satriani sounded like he was making alien noises come out of his guitar, and Steve Vai managed to blend rock and roll taste with Frank Zappa levels of weirdness, but no scene squandered their guitarists more than hair-metal.
It’s one thing to be able to play fast, but since half of the bands coming out of the Sunset Strip couldn’t write a song to save their lives, it was easy to forget what a lot of those guitarists had to offer outside of a few decent solos. But right when the genre was fading, Extreme came out with Nuno Bettencourt creating some of the most intricate fretwork that anyone had seen since the days of Van Halen.
He had figured out how to make the guitar sing, and by the time May heard ‘Get the Funk Out’, he admitted there was no way he could match that kind of guitar playing, saying, “On pure technical ability alone, that’s colossal. I could never do that. No way in a month of Sundays could I learn that solo. It’s Nuno’s own thing. It’s a stupendous thing, it’s a landmark. That’s a landmark in rock history.”
But the beauty behind Bettencourt’s playing is that he continues to get better as well. On some of his later albums with Extreme, songs like ‘Rise’ feature the kind of playing that feels like it’s too fast for human comprehension, to the point where his hands almost seem like a blur as he’s making his way across the frets.
May will continue to get all the adulation as one of the most tasteful guitar players to ever live, but what Bettencourt did goes beyond the simple shredding everyone else from his generation did. Like Eddie Van Halen before him, he knew that there needed to be some soul behind his playing, and there’s hardly a note that goes by on any of his solos that doesn’t sound like he absolutely loves playing guitar.
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