Having assembled a band, and booked two days in a studio, Brian 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.
Brian May – Star Fleet Sessions: In The Studio (Episode 3)
– https://youtu.be/DaMoDurBYOg
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TRANSCRIPT
E&OE
STAR FLEET SESSIONS – Episode 3 [28 June 2023]
– [EPISODE 1 and TRANSCRIPT – How It Began – HERE]
– [EPISODE 2 and TRANSCRIPT – Meet The Band – HERE]
BRIAN MAY:
I didn’t know if it was gonna work, I really didn’t.
I think there’s a little bit of pushing and pulling, and we didn’t gel immediately, but it didn’t take very long before we did. You can hear it happening.
That’s what’s great about these sessions, ‘ cause you hear the whole progression. And you can hear the beginning b quite tentative. We don’t really know the parts. We don’t know each other and things are kind of slipping around. Nice thing is there’s no pressure. There was no end product. We didn’t say “We’re going to make a record” – it’s just like, just have some fun and see what we can do.
So you can hear on these sessions, which I’ve now put in the box seeet, that you can hear us feeling our way and gradually gaining confidence and locking in and becoming a really tight unit, which was amazing.
Now, people who are like us are on the road almost constantly, you have friends but you 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. 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 – it’s abig, kind of step for me.
I’m a bit of a shy person to be honest and if I hadn’t been in that particularly ebullient, kind of “I want to be free” mood in Los Angeles, it never would have happened. That was a moment where I actually had the courage to phone these people up and say, “Come and play with me”. I’ve done that very often in my life.
Me being in the studio with Ed, I was in awe. I men, I gotta be honest. I was – I was in awe.
I just got… amazing thing. And it would easily, it would be easy to kind of go down the road of being jealous and beaten – resenting someone who can do something that you can’t do. But for some reason, that doesn’t really happen with guitar players. I’ve never seen that, because we all do different stuff and we all enjoy each other’s stuff. So although I felt like I’m in the presence of a God here, there was also this feeling of pure joy. Pure joy just being in the room with that guy and being able to play stuff to him and hear him respond. You can hear us doing it. And what a treat – what an absolutely unrepeatable, unique experience, ghat was. What a moment in time.
When people get hold of this, I hope that they will feel that they’re opening a door into being there with us – being there with us on those sessions. Being in that room and experiencing something that happened only once in my life – only once in anybody’s life. And I hope they’ll enjoy the feelings of being able to make mistakes and enjoy it, I suppose – being able to be tentative and to be brave, and to be forgiving and just explore any place that we could go – any place that was available.
So, I hope people will open this and feel that they have an insight into what it was like just for those few hours, for those couple of days in 1983.