Alongside the release of an updated edition of his book The Red Special – co-written with Simon Bradley – Brian May has unveiled the origin of the name of his iconic guitar.

May famously built the guitar by hand alongside his father, when he was just a teenager. Back in the 1960s when he built it, he didn’t know how it would feature on every single Queen album and at historic concerts, including Live Aid and the closure of the 2012 London Olympics – among countless others. The updated version of the book includes two new chapters, exploring the guitar’s repairs and its role in the film Bohemian Rapsody.

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Read an exclusive excerpt from the newly updated Brian May’s Red Special book

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Here are some examples of the May’s hand-drawn documents.

 

 

 

Here’s an example of a so-called Guild Pre-Prototype that was made in 1992. In the Guild timeline it sits somewhere between the BHM1 and BM01 and probably its most famous appearance is on the longform video Live at the Brixton Academy that was released in 1993. Brian still owns the guitar and it appears in the updated Gallery section of the Red Special book, which will be out soon.

 

Although many rock fans believe that the whole guitar was fashioned from an old fireplace, in reality the only part of the Red Special’s build to be sourced from such a thing was the mahogany Brian used for the neck, apocryphally reclaimed from a mantlepiece. He says he used a tenon saw to cut around a template and took it the rest of the way with “…planes, knives, chisels and a lot of sandpaper. I gradually just whittled it away until it felt good”.

This is what was left after the neck had been hand-shaped and, from this angle, it’s easy to see not only the unmistakeable red hue of the mahogany but also the neo-legendary damage by woodworms. Brian filled similar holes in the wood he used for the neck with matchsticks and, peering at the Red Special up close, it’s almost impossible to see the marks… almost!

The mahogany, secured as it is through the very heart of the Red Special, forms an interegral part of Brian’s tone and contributes to the guitar’s ability to unfailingly sustain on cue, one of the main goals of the build.

 

Here’s a shot of the Red Special‘s scratchplate, one that’s at a slightly different angle to that of the image featured in the book. It shows not only the bevelled edges and modest width of the material, but also the three pickup surrounds and the wounds of over 50 years in rock ‘n roll.