(Credits: Far Out / Carl Lender)
Sun 29 March 2026 13:34, UK
For many, Queen are the best band to ever take to the stage, so the idea that Brian May could ever want to play with anybody else seems wild; however, the guitarist always had backups in mind.
Back in the day, when Queen was initially making music and the British invasion was well underway, everyone was in a band and trying to make it big. The result? A barrage of what-ifs, as musicians who we would never put together jammed, and line-ups that could have been are lost in time.
For instance, before Led Zeppelin’s inception, Jimmy Page was doing session work for nearly every group making music. He could have joined The Yardbirds a lot earlier and was even in line to step in for Pete Townshend in The Who at one point. Subsequently, most musicians from that period had bands they would have liked to join, but these bands never came to fruition, and Brian May was no exception.
It speaks to just how fluid the music scene was at the time. With so many musicians crossing paths in studios and on stages, the lines between bands often felt blurred, and the idea of swapping members didn’t seem nearly as far-fetched as it does today. In that environment, it wasn’t uncommon for players to imagine themselves in entirely different line-ups.
For someone like May, those what-ifs were less about dissatisfaction and more about admiration. Being surrounded by so many groundbreaking artists inevitably led to a sense of curiosity about how those collaborations might have sounded. Even at the height of his own success, the pull of those possibilities never quite disappeared.
That being said, May’s two bands that he would have liked to have been in are slightly unrealistic. One was a bit before his time, and both had a playing style that the Queen guitarist might have struggled to replicate. Regardless, a man can dream, even if that man helped front one of the biggest rock outfits in the world.
In an interview, when asked what bands he would have liked to have been in, May started by announcing his adoration for The Beatles and confirming that they looked a lot like Queen at times. “I’m sure it wouldn’t have been easy to be a Beatle, but that incredible level of creativity, I would relate to.”
May went on to reflect on the Get Back documentary and how it perfectly reflects life in a studio. “I watched a lot of Get Back. I got a bit sad watching the first one because it reminded me of us – sometimes Queen in the studio would be [inhales nervously], ‘Here we are, and things aren’t quite fitting’,” he said, “I felt they were in a painful place – but the second one, I felt like they were really finding each other again. It’s a textbook of how to be in a studio.”
May didn’t have as in-depth an explanation for the second band he would have liked to be in; however, very few guitarists haven’t dreamt of being a member of these rock pioneers. “If it wasn’t The Beatles, it could’ve been Led Zeppelin. If they let me in.”
It’s pretty funny to look at one of the most successful bands of all time and imagine that members might have preferred to have been elsewhere, but given the amount of persistent inspiration that floated around in the 1960s and ‘70s in the form of rock music, it was hard for musicians to turn on the radio and not feel a sense of pining. Even Brian May was a victim of this, as despite the hits that Queen was responsible for putting out, he would have still loved to work with The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.
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