As a treat to help lift the dark clouds of Blue Monday, here’s the Red Special in a state of undress. It’s an outtake from the photo session that provided incredible images that formed the heart of the ‘Brian May’s Red Special’ book.

The screws that secure the mahogany neck to the guitar’s oak insert are clearly visible, as are the contacts of the middle pickup, one of three that Brian made and wound before discovering that Burns Tri-Sonics did a far better job.

We can also see that, in the guitar’s dim and distant past, the bridge pickup has been moved back towards the bridge a couple of mm and a rubber base has also been included. Greg Fryer applied the copper shielding to the control cavity, and we can also see how thin the mahogany veneer is atop the lighter-coloured blockboard.

This photo, snapped by co-author Simon Bradley, was obviously taken before Andrew Guyton‘s more recent restoration and we’ll be posting a few more shots like this over the coming weeks and months, so keep checking back to www.theredspecial.com.

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

Don’t miss Simon’s six-part blog that goes behind the scenes of the book in much more detail

For part one click here
For part two click here
For part three click here
For part four click here
For part five click here
For part six click here

The August 2016 issue of UK publication Guitar & Bass features a detailed piece on Brian’s Vox AC30 amps, written by the co-author of the Red Special book Simon Bradley. Here, for your viewing pleasure, are a selection of phone shots taken on the day by Simon that show just a little more than could be squeezed into the feature.

Rest assured that the images that feature in the magazine itself, courtesy of Eleanor Jane, are of an infinitely higher, nay professional, standard but we hope you enjoy this exclusive peek.

Read the whole feature, plus loads more, in the August issue of Guitar & Bass, which is on sale from 5 July 2016. Find out how to order a single print or digital copy of the magazine via this link: http://www.guitar-bass.net/magazine/the-august-2016-issue-of-guitar-bass-is-on-sale-now

More information on the magazine can be found at www.guitar-bass.net

Brian May took time out before the ‘One Voice’ show with Kerry Ellis in Milan to meet up with members of Tsunami Edizioni, publishers of the Italian version of the Red Special book written by Brian and Simon Bradley.

Copies are available at each of the venues and are selling very strongly, which is great news. You can read about the tour so far in Brian’s own words by clicking here, and it sounds like some great music, plus no small amount of fun, is happening out there!

To buy your own copy of the Italian version of the Red Special book, click here

To buy a copy in the original English, click here

For details on the remaining Italian dates, click here

Italian Queen fansite Communità Queeniana has conducted an interview with the co-author of the Red Special book, in which he talks about aspects of the book’s production and how Brian was involved, as well as his own background and history.

Click here to read the full interview in both English and Italian

Click here for details of the Italian version of the Red Special book

Still not got your copy? Click here to right that wrong…

The Wait is Over

The Italian edition of the Red Special book is finally available for sale, with shipments scheduled for 23rd October 2015

Pre-order your copy now on www.tsunamiedizioni.com to get a special discount and a unique chance to win the very first copy signed by Dr May.

Please follow Tsunami Edizioni on Facebook or Twitter for further details, or click here for much more (in Italian, natch!)

“La Red Special di Brian May”
by Brian May and co-author Simon Bradley
Publisher: Tsunami Edizioni
Hardcover: 144 pages – 21×28 – full colour
Italian translation: Raffaella Rolla

The January 2015 issue of Classic Rock magazine featured a positive review of ‘Brian May’s Red Special’, as well as new interviews with Brian May, Roger Taylor and Adam Lambert.

Back issues can be purchased online.

Review (c) Team Rock

In the final part of Simon Bradley’s blog detailing the production process of the Red Special book, the job is fnally done and finished copies being arriving in bookstores.

Although articles I’ve written have featured in numerous copies of various magazines over the past 18 years or so, I’ve never really considered myself to be a ‘published author’. Maybe it’s the somewhat ‘…here today, gone later today…’ nature of some aspects of modern digital media, but a book, it seems to me, is for life, whereas an issue of Guitarist, for example, is for just three weeks until the next one is published. A book – any book – may ultimately go out of print, but it’s unlikely that, as with magazines, unsold copies will be pulped for recycling when the new issue on the block sashays through the door of WHSmith or wherever, spitting on the floor and laughing at the now irrelevant ‘back issue’. Of course, the same fate awaits them, mere weeks in the future.

We’d hit the deadline with mere days to go, as previously described, and then…well, a whole lot of nothing happened, or so it seemed from where I was sitting. I cherish my ignorance of the whole process of assigning print slots to a particular title (think a huge jigsaw with pieces each made from thousands of pounds and one false move would see the whole thing disintegrate) but, needless to say, the book needs to actually be printed in time to allow for its distribution to retail outlets and this takes planning and precise timing. Get it wrong and there’s danger that slots will be missed, leading to the ultimate in publishing no-no’s: it goes on-sale either late or, worse, not at all.

All I could do was wait. Then, one day, I got a short text from the Malandrone household. ‘Book looks great’, it said. An advance copy had arrived. Wha’? Does it? Where’s mine? WHERE’S MINE!!?? A panicky call to Carlton Books led to us discovering that an incorrect postcode had delayed my copy, and I spent a pathetically tense afternoon and evening waiting for the clock to tick around to the following day when our postie would drop a big padded envelope through my door. I felt like a kid on Christmas Eve, although it was a dark and unsettling level of excitement rather than one filled with sugar plums, reindeer hooves and a fat bloke with a beard.

The next day, to my eternal relief, postie didn’t let me down and pushed a package through the letterbox…just 30 minutes before I had to leave for work. Pile it on, why dontcha!? I treated myself to the quickest of quick flicks, emotions running every which way, before bolting out the door. I sort of dreamt my way through that day’s shift, and I actually felt a little weepy at times. That said, I was also feeling impossibly happy, buoyed by our – my! – achievement in actually getting the book out there.

It’s difficult to accurately describe how I felt when I finally sat down to give it a proper going-over, but seeing the by now familiar cover image, actually holding the book in my hands and flicking through, spotting certain passages that I distinctly remembered writing a couple of years previously, was an almost out of body experience.

By this time I’d read the book in myriad guises many, many times, so was intimately familiar with the book’s pacing, where my favourite bits were and, as is the author’s curse, parts where, in hindsight, we could have done a little better. But I thought – think – it was great and I tried to imagine if I was 14 years old today, clicking away on Amazon to order my copy and waiting, breathlessly, for it to be delivered so I could do exactly what I was doing at that moment: revel in the story of a man and guitarist I admired and the iconic instrument with which he played music that changed my life forever.

If truth be told, I’m a little sad that the journey is over. Don’t get me wrong; I’m so happy that the book is out there, but it’s unlikely that I’ll be involved in such an engrossing project again any time soon. I’ve held the dismantled Red Special in my hands, a dream for such a Queen-obsessed guitar geek as myself, and have worked closely with my ultimate guitar hero. While I’m not sufficiently arrogant to assume that Brian and I are close friends, we have what I consider to be an effective and warm working relationship, and – take it from me – he’s as affable and accommodating a man as everyone says he is. Remember, he’s a world-famous rock star, a member of one of the most successful rock bands of all time, and an icon to countless tens of thousands. For me to have had the opportunity to work with him on this overdue and incredibly worthy project… well, I’m struggling to imagine how it will ever be bettered.

Still, we didn’t do it for the glory, but because it needed to be done. The book’s proving popular and is selling well, I’m told, which is the greatest achievement of all, and I genuinely hope everyone who did us the great privilege of buying a copy finds themselves revisiting the story of one man and his guitar again and again.

What shall we cover in the next book…? Let’s see…

In the final step before being submitted to the printers and onwards to a bookstore near you, the manuscript goes through some rather important hands. Now the waiting begins.

For someone creating anything – a piece of music, written work, a painting, anything – the process of checking and approval can be an interminable yet wholly unavoidable one. Whilst I fully understand its necessity, not only to the overall production arc but to the quality of the finished article too, I used to bite my lip during my early days on Guitarist magazine when edits and changes were made that I felt weren’t needed. Well, suck it up, big boy: I learned pretty soon that it’s a vital process, especially if what you’ve written is ultimately going to be read by people who have spent their own money to do so, be they readers of Guitarist or this very book. If you need any examples of the ‘quality’ of the unrefined written word, check out just about any of the posts on any Forum out there on t’internet: Shakespeare they most certainly are not. Roxxor!

Brian is fully hands-on with anything that either involves him or Queen directly. If we stick to books for now, any that has his name on the cover, be it Carlton’s most excellent ’40 Years Of Queen’ tome or the equally absorbing yet slightly more bizarre ‘Diableries’, he’ll read, re-read, check, mull-over and, all being well, approve every single word, which results in the greatest part of the production process of all: the Signing Off.

Now, you may have noticed that Queen are having one of the busiest periods of their more recent career, with something about new Freddie Mercury songs and the album Queen Forever, a film in the works and an increasingly mahoosive tour all going on – or at least noisily bubbling under – in 2014/15. So, trying to get Brian to find the time it’d take – and that’d he’d wish to take – to sit down and read every word of the finished layouts wouldn’t, I’d assumed, be an easy task.

The book had been laid out, proofed and checked by Queen archivist Greg Brooks and Gary Taylor before being sent to Brian in electronic form at, I feared, possibly the worst time: right in the middle of the US leg of the Once In A Lifetime tour. Like many big-time artists, Brian gets into Road Mode (he’s done it a few times before, of course, so knows exactly what it takes to be the best he can be every night!) and it takes a lot for him to drag himself out of that frame of mind to concentrate on something else. I was very worried that he’d leave the checking of the book until he got back off the road, by which time we’d have missed the print deadline we were aiming for in order to hit our planned publication date.

We got an email from Brian on 8^th July that included his foreword (*blush…) and a new version of the draft that he had not only read from beginning to end, but had also added more detail to, improving the first two chapters especially. How do I know he’d read every word? I found an additional sentence in the strings boxout, plus he’d augmented a number of captions. What a legend!

He was very positive about the whole thing, which I was both relieved about and grateful for and, privately, said some very nice things about how we’d approached the entire concept. I allowed myself a quiet sigh and put on Jazz, the first Queen album I ever bought and the one I still feel the most affection for. Remember that triple-tracked harmony guitar lick 1.46 into ‘Mustapha’? That’s my own ‘Beatles On Ed Sullivan’ moment and why I play guitar, not that I knew it was a guitar I was hearing at the time. Deep…

The final part of the story will revolve around the finished publication, all bound, covered and awesome. Can’t wait to see it.

The pictures used on this blog are either mine or used with the permission of the copyright owner. If you feel you have to take and use them elsewhere, a credit would be nice and presumably you’ll be buying the book now it’s out? Thank you!