A lovely shot of the Red Special on the day it was finished, propped up on a chair in living room of the May family home, Feltham, October 1964.

Note the original features; the headstock logo, those quaint radio knobs, the guitar’s first tuners and the orginal pickups. This also shows the vibrato arm in its original configuration. When compared with images from the earliest Queen gigs, it’s far straighter here than it became, developing a kink that was adopted for the Burns and BMG guitar’s vibrato arms of several decades later.

Two images of the 12th fret dot inlays of the Red Special. The contrast of the second has been adjusted to highlight the fine cracks that have appeared in the central dot, one that was actually replaced by Andrew Guyton during his 2016 restoration of the guitar. It was, by all accounts, ‘wafer thin’.

And here are some of the original buttons that the teenage Brian ‘sourced’ from his mother’s sewing box during the build. They’re all either pearl or mother of pearl and Brian meticulously shaped each one of the Red Special’s 16 fingerboard dots by hand. He recalls that he could get ‘two or three’ from each pearl button.

Here’s a great shot of the contraption that Harold and Brian May made – from scratch, of course – upon which they wound the three pickups that were originally fitted to the Red Special. Sadly, they didn’t quite do what Brian wanted, so he shelled out for a trio of Burns Tri-Sonics and the rest is history.

We’ve been very fortunate to have been able to grab a few minutes with Dave Colquhoun, a Cumbrian guitarist who was one of the music coaches on the recent Oscar-winning Freddie biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, aiding Gwilym Lee and, more extensively, Rami Malik in mimicing the guitar styles of Brian and Freddie.

He’s toured and worked with many bands and musicians since winning Guitarist magazine’s Guitarist of the Year shindig in 1994, and has also gone on to become an established teacher. Currently he’s guitarist in Rick Wakeman’s English Rock Ensemble and lives in the South East.

Interview by Simon Bradley (c) The Red Special.com 2019

================================================================================

SB: When did you first meet Brian?

Dave Colquhoun: It would have been when he guested with Wakeman at 2015’s Starmus Festival in Tenerife. I’m into running, and I’d gone for a run the day before and sprained my ankle. Turns out I’d actually broken it and, as is the way of things, pretty much everyone took the mickey out of me. Brian was the only one who gave me any sympathy and, from there, he started taking an interest in my playing. He’d ask me technical questions and it was a bit surreal. I got a get well soon card from Brian and Anita too, which was so nice of them.

SB: So how did you get involved with the film?

DC: Brian asked me to do a gig with him and Kerry Ellis for Radio 2, the Michael Ball show, in 2017, which went well, and we just kept in touch. Moving on from that I got a bizarre call from Becky Bentham, who was the Music Supervisor on the film, asking me if I was available the following week to come down and do this thing. I didn’t even know that the movie had been commissioned and I didn’t really understand what it was they wanted me to do. I had to send some pictures for the body doubling; whether I’d fit into the costumes was the main issue. I filmed a couple of solos because they were interested in hand-shape, that sort of thing, too. Yeah, so that was on the Saturday and the day after I was on-set for the Live Aid thing, sitting around in a wig!

SB: What was your role on the film?

DC: Gwilym would have been doing guitar lessons for six months by that point and he just about had it down, although I did coach him for the Smile gig section, Freddie’s first gig. I was brought in as a double, so it was full-costume fittings, although I didn’t know whether I was actually going to be used, but I did continue to check in with Gwil and offer him moral support and approval.

DC: Nobody really knew what the director would be looking for, although I think in hindsight he wasn’t really that interested in the guitar thing. I think the actors really wanted to do it all themselves, for obvious reasons, and Gwilym had done so much work to get to the level he got it to. After about seven days it became apparent that I wasn’t going to be used for anything much!

DC: Anyway, there was Live Aid and all these other different locations; basically all the music stuff moved around. I did the Rockfield stuff and the scenes at LH2, pretty much everything, but… I used to get in at 6 o’clock in the morning, get made up and into the outfit, and then you’d just sit there for twelve hours until it was time to get de-wigged! After a few days I thought ‘I’ve got to do something about this’, so I started to bring in my guitar, and I sat in my trailer and just wore the frets out!

SB: Then the director reportedly left…

DC: Yes, then there was the big director change and a couple of things got cancelled. I didn’t know what was going on; I read in the press that things had gone a bit belly-up. I mean, I think they might have even ceased filming for a while. Then I got another call from Becky…

SB: That was to work with Rami, right?

DC: Rami, yeah. I mean I’d seen him on set and everything but it’s all a bit intense; there’s a bit of a hierarchy and you keep yourself out of the way, so I’d never really spoken to him. They were shooting the scene where they were writing Crazy Little Thing Called Love, a ‘Freddie in the bath tub’ kind of vibe, and I was asked to teach him how to play it. He’d never played guitar and he didn’t have a lot of time… when you get to that B-flat chord, you can’t really do that in a couple of weeks. So I had this idea that if they were writing it, it would be a kind of framework so why didn’t we just do a one-chord strum version of it. So they filmed me doing that and they thought that approach was great. Then they got Marc Martel to basically recreate that by singing it kind of half-written with a few wrong lyrics, and I had to teach Rami to play that version of it.

DC: We did loads of sessions over the course of seven or eight days just breaking it down and it was so hard for him because he was also doing piano stuff and all the filming – he was absolutely burnt to a crisp. He stuck with it and we became quite close – it’s quite an intimate thing, all that! – and we did the shoot and he did brilliantly. I basically played the guitar along with what he was playing just to give him the timing of it, which was really strange because he was in a gold, diamond-encrusted bathrobe, of course. And, because I would have been reflected in the bath tub, I had to stand on the toilet on one leg with the guitar right up in the air, and look over my shoulder to see when he was going to strum the chords. And that was, like, for four hours!

SB: But… that scene’s missing from the final cut!

DC: It was a great scene and they were really into it but I think because CLTCL had been used a couple of other times it didn’t make the final cut. I’m sure it’ll come out on a boxset or something. But yeah, Rami was really pleased with it and I think he was disappointed that it didn’t make it.

A large image of the Red Special’s innovative tailpiece. Easy to use and maintain, it’s smooth and comes back perfectly in tune just about every time.

The long-awaited 20th Century Fox Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody is ready to rock (you…) and, with a release date of 2 November 2018, issues surrounding its somewhat laboured production have faded in the glare of the admittedly excellent trailer that dropped just a few weeks ago.

If you’ve somehow missed the trailer you can enjoy it (yet again) here.

According to IMDB.com it’s… ‘a chronicle of the years leading up to Queen’s legendary appearance at the Live Aid concert in 1985…’ and, with casting for the actors who are playing the four band members completed and announced in early 2017, guitarist Brian May has been sharing images and video clips to whet the appetite of the fans ever since.

The trailer, although perhaps understandably concentrating on actor Rami Malek in his guise as Freddie Mercury, also shows fleeting glimpses of Gwilym Lee, who’s playing Brian, on various stages with a Red Special in his hands. Whilst obviously not the original, online discussion forums and chat rooms have been chewing over what the guitar might have been and who’d made it, and, while the identity of the luthier in question was hardly a huge secret, details have been scant until now.

In a TheRedSpecial.com exclusive we caught up not only with Brian himself, but also the creator of two guitar props for the film, the indomitable Andrew Guyton, to get the full story.

Words by Simon Bradley.

The interview with both Brian and Andrew took place in October 2017.

All images (c) Guyton Guitars. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Do not redistribute.

RS.com: Please tell us about the guitars that are being used in the film

Brian May: Andrew Guyton was asked to make guitar props for the film and he’s made, I think, two different guitars that represent my Red Special from the past. One’s for Live Aid and the other’s for Madison Square Garden in the seventies, and he’s made them absolutely faithfully to the appearance and condition of the guitar at those moments: it’s uncanny to see it. Times when it had bits of tape holding it together, times when the fretboard was all worn down and had lost some of its colour, and lots of damage to the body, and he’s reproduced everything in the finest detail.

Andrew Guyton: They emailed me saying they needed some props for the film, but they didn’t really know what they should do. At the beginning they thought they would modify some BMG Supers, but they asked me if I could build three in three weeks. That was the initial idea but I just told them that it simply couldn’t be done in that time. After quotes and a bit of backwards and forwards we agreed that I should build two, one from the Bohemian Rhapsody recording era and another from Live Aid. We tackled that one first and it took two weeks – in fact they each took two weeks to build – but they were both done in time!

RS.com: Presumably they have the period-correct playing marks and wear patterns…

BM: The one that Gwilym, who’s playing me in the film, is using at the moment to do the Rockfield period has a little piece of red paper from Rymans over the hole that used to house the fuzzbox. He’s doing the scene where I’m recording the Rhapsody solo – I probably shouldn’t be telling you this! – and Freddie’s listening and commenting. I used to coil the strings around the machineheads and he’s reproduced that, and the exact amount of distress the fretboard and body had. It’s amazing.

AG: I tried to get the ageing as close as I could given the timeframe. You just think of what the guitar goes through and what impact that has on it, like the forearm: you get gradual wear there. Obviously there’s a lot of sixpence damage and putting 30 years worth of damage into a guitar is quite tough. I used a wire brush into a drill to keep the sweep going and whacked the hell out of it, strummed it good and hard, with a fifty pence piece.

RS.com: What reference material did you use?

AG: We went through all the pictures we could find and we had help from Greg Brooks and the [Queen] archive. He sent me a lot of images, especially of the seventies one as although there are quite a few pictures floating around, not many have any detail. One of the things we really got stuck on was the indicator on the volume knob [of the Live Aid-era prop]; it seemed to change every few years.

RS.com: Were there any other issues?

AG: The tuners on the seventies one were a major problem; trying to find those online was a nightmare. So I spoke to [fellow luthier] Martyn Booth to see if he had any in his parts bin and he basically donated the ones off his first guitar. He was sure, so fair enough. They were ‘six in line’ so we had to modify three of them to turn them the other way, which wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. It’s fiddly, but you approach it in the right way: I literally couldn’t do anything else for the tuners. It’s not like it has to be road-worthy, they just have to hold in tune and not fall off!

AG: The machineheads for the Live Aid version were like the old design Schaller M6s, and I wasn’t sure where I could get some of those from. I looked in the workshop and I’ve got an old Gibson Melody Maker that had been modified with these exact tuners, so we used those.

RS.com: How close is the construction of the props to that of the original Red Special?

AG: The necks are mahogany with oak fingerboards and the only reason I used [those materials] was that I already had the fingerboards made for the Transporters. That saved a lot of time. The bodies are plywood, just laminated up then veneered and bound like the real thing, and finished in the Rustins plastic coating.

RS.com: The pickups look good. Where did you source those?

AG: Adrian Turner supplied the covers, which were pre-worn. There aren’t any coils inside so the pieces of rubber [visible through the holes in the covers] are kept in place with layers of plywood. The only reason we didn’t get them working was that we just didn’t have time to get some pickups wound.

RS.com: You’ve told us that ageing the tip of the vibrato arm was tricky too…

AG: Well, it’s modern plastic so it’s a bit of a toughie because it’s difficult to stain and it’s made to be UV-stable too. I used some concentrated stains but if you use it too much it just tends to come off: it was a tough one.

RS.com: But do they actually function as guitars?

AG: They’re dummies but everything works mechanically – the switches move, the volume and tone pots move and the pickups are there – but there’d be no sound if you were to actually plug them in; nothing’s wired up. There’s no truss rod either and we tried to think of every way, not to cut corners as such, but to save time.

BM: And they do play, they’re proper guitars. I don’t know what we’ll do with them, maybe something for charity. That’d be nice.

Keep an eye on Andrew’s website http://www.guytonguitars.com/ as, when he gets the time in his hectic schedule, he’ll post a gallery featuring many more great shots of both prop guitars.

As part of an interview with Brian May that was published in the UK by The Guitar Magazine on 1^st December 2017, one that first announced to the world that the Red Special’s original pickups had been found, we asked him to talk – in hitherto unrivalled depth – about the pickups, their design and what ultimately led them to be replaced by the now iconic trio of Burns Tri-Sonic single coils.

Part of the following interview forms sections of the feature published in TGM and we’re grateful to them for allowing us to publish this content in full.

The interview was conducted by Simon Bradley in October 2017

Simon Bradley: It must feel strange having the pickups back in your hands again…

Brian May: Yeah, I was worried that we couldn’t find them: it was one of those things that eats away at you in odd moments. But it’s great that Pete found them and here they are, which makes me very happy. Looking at them, it reminds me of a lot of stuff. They were, of course, original features of the guitar and they did work really well.

SB: We’ve spoken about this before, but please remind us of how you approached their design and construction

BM: I figured out that the principle behind a pickup must be that you have a coil or wire around some magnets that create a magnetic field and when the string vibrates within that magnetic field it causes a change in the flux that links the coil, as a physicist would describe it. When you change the flux you get an EMF generated in the coil, which effectively makes a current, and that’s what you amplify to make the guitar electrified. I was clear about the principle so I bought some little Eclipse button magnets from a place in Kingston (upon-Thames), screwed them to a block and put a former around them and I wound, I think, 50 gauge copper wire around them. Me and my dad made a little winder to do that, and you have to be incredibly careful with 50 gauge wire; it’s like a human hair and you can’t stress it or else your whole coil is ruined. So we wound as many turns as we could get around these pickups. Then there’s a piece of plasticard around the outside and it’s all buttoned up really neatly.

SB: And you worked out a way of fitting them into the guitar without using solder

BM: Now, that’s another invention that I never pursued. Most pickups that you buy have a couple of wires hanging out of it and you have to solder those wires onto some part of the guitar. So, my little invention was that, instead of doing that, the wires are terminated not only on little brass tabs that are built into the pickup itself, but they’re also built in around the two screws that fix it to the body. So, when you put these pickups on the guitar you don’t have to do any wiring; they’re automatically wired into the system. It’s quite a neat way of doing things as it means you can interchange pickups really quickly and easily without doing any wiring changes. I was quite proud of that!

SB: Could you describe the sound problems you experienced when using them?

BM: I remember they had an amazing top end to them, but there was one flaw, yes. I wanted to bend strings and when you bend strings with this pickup in place, it picked up the sound OK but added in was this strange sort of shuffling noise a bit like the sound of striking a match on the side of a matchbox. That obviously got in the way and it wasn’t practical to use them. Now, my theory at the time was that instead of having all north poles at the top of the pickup I had alternately north/south, north/south, north/south and what I wanted to do was cut those magnets in half so I could put all norths on one pickup and all souths on another. Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to do that as I didn’t have the equipment. It’s incredibly hard what they make the magnets out of, some kind of special steel I think, and I didn’t have anything that could touch them: it’d take all the teeth off a hack saw.

SB: Why did you opt for three apertures rather than the more customary six? It’s strange that they bear a passing resemblance to Tri-Sonics…

BM: Well, it has to be three apertures because only three magnets can go in there. They’re button shaped, with both a north and south sticking up, so it had to be three apertures rather than six. I thought that, as the polepieces are equally spaced, it would make a nice, even magnetic field but actually it doesn’t because I think what happens is the north pole, which is next to the south pole of the next one in line, draws the field in very close, which it shouldn’t: the field should really be going outwards to meet the strings. So something happens when the string hits that intense field, but I’m not sure.

BM: So, looking at them now, I’m thinking that it’d be nice to revisit and do that, cut them in half, put them back in so that all the norths are in a line and see what kind of noise the pickups make.

SB: What made you come up with the white covers? They’re quite striking

BM: I just had this white Formica and I liked the look of it. I thought they looked quite attractive at the beginning and I think the idea that you weren’t hiding the pickups, that you were making them a highlight, appealed to me. Strangely enough I didn’t really like the way they looked afterwards and I remember that when I got the photos back from Putney I sort of painted the whiteness out, thinking that they looked not very cool!

SB: You’ve told me that you have some recordings of them somewhere…

BM: Actually, I do know where they are…

SB: That’s great news! How did you go about amplifying and recording the guitar back then?

BM: In those days I used a preamp that I would plug this straight into the amplifier which served our Collaro two-track, but reversible, tape recorder. The recorder had three speed settings, 15, 7½ and 3¾ inches per second, and what happened was that if you slowed the speed down you’d lose all your top end. This happens because it becomes very inefficient so when I switched from 15 to 3¾ you’d have to compensate. The preamp had three different positions for the three speeds and if you run at 3¾ there’s a massive amount of top end being added on: it’s like a really violent EQ and that’s what I liked. That’s the precursor to the treble booster that I’ve used ever since I met Rory Gallagher.

BM: So, I’d plug the guitar into that preamp, put in on 3¾ so it’d give me the top boost, come out of that and straight into my dad’s homemade amplifier that served our record player, tape recorder, radio and everything else. So that was my little system and I remember cranking it up and my mum getting very anxious about the neighbours, but it had a real sizzle to it and that was the sound I wanted to get onstage. Again, what stopped that happening was that bending the strings didn’t work, but it had a great low end and, because of this EQ, a great top end as well.

SB: And what speakers would you have been using?

BM: I think it was just a Wharfdale speaker in a cabinet that my dad had made.

SB: Maybe you could fit the pickups onto a guitar? Maybe a Guyton or BMG Super?

BM: They had a particular sound to them and I am now wondering if we should go back and look at what they brought to the guitar. Strangely enough they would still fit onto the original guitar because the tabs that would mate with the tabs on the pickups are still there, so it could be done.

This is the last of the new pictures we’ll be sharing – at least for now.

Here’s the Red Special in all its unmistakable glory, shot in 2013. Since then it’s been around the world several times, has melted the faces of hundred of thousands of rabid punters and has enjoyed a complete overhaul courtesy of Andrew Guyton. It still plays beautifully and sounds as good as ever it did.

Not bad for something designed and built from scratch in suburban Middlesex during the mid sixties!

Happy Xmas!

By all means share this photo, but please credit The Red Special.com should you do so.