| Available to view today (Thursday, June 29) is a new video in Brian May’s Star Fleet Sessions YouTube Mini-Series.
Watch the concluding episode Star Fleet Sessions: In The Studio (Episode 3) below finds which May describing his experience working with Edward Van Halen: “I felt like, ‘I’m in the presence of a God here’”.
Having assembled a band and booked two days in the studio, May 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.
“The nice thing is there’s no pressure because there was no end to the 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, gradually gaining confidence, and locking in and becoming a 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 boxset due July 14 via UMe. For the very first time, the 2-CD, vinyl single and LP deluxe edition boxset 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, have friends, but we 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.” |
