Enjoy the moment when Brian May got to unbox the first copy of the Gold Series release of Star Fleet.
Brian May – Star Fleet Sessions: Gold Series Unboxing
– https://youtu.be/TgAhXFScqQ4
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIAN MAY: A very exciting moment. We’ll start at first base with the complete package I’m about to hack into. Takes some skill – and opening the box. Oh my god. She’s very beautiful. So this is the box set, the result of millions of hours of effort and love and care. So happy to see this… the front and there’s the back. Have to be really careful at this point, don’t you. Being a geek I always like to keep the sticker. I don’t like to rip the sticker, ‘cause who knows when you might want s sticker..
And here we have the beautiful box. It’s very, very slightly silky finish, so it doesn’t get too finger marked too easily. Gold series, because this is number three in the Gold series. Parental Advisory, which I didn’t want on there, but there’s a couple of *** in there, so they told me I had to.
So opening the box…
So the first thing we find is a poster – reproduction of the original poster in the USA, I believe. I always loved this robot. He’s called Dai-X and he’s the hero of the Starfleet series on TV. Beautiful Japanese creation, Science fiction creation. And there he is. And he’s composed of the four rocket ships which they fly – hey all assembled.
So it’s a very early kind of Transformer, this guy. And I have a model of him somewhere, Oh, and you’ll see him in the artwork for the book.
So that’s the poster.
The first thing that comes out is the booklet. And I was wondering if there was going to be anything in the booklet, but we managed to find lots of memorabilia from the time. So we’re very happy how this has turned out. We didn’t obviously, concentrate much on taking photos, but luckily there are some, which is nice. From the days – here we are larking about and we have Ed playing Phil’s guitar and Phil playing Ed’s guitar, because that’s the kind of silliness that we did. To picture outside in the car park and me and Ed on the day. It was very charged with emotion.
Here we have the hardware because, of course, it was all done on tape – analogue tape. And here are the original boxes, ‘cause I thought this is a very exhaustive box set. You know, tou get everything in this box.
So you can see the track sheets, you can see the boxes – even see the reels – and you can see who was playing and at what time. Lots of other stuff.
Yeah, here we go. All this stuff, some original liner notes, and some modern night liner notes, which I wrote to bring it up to date. And even a few little stereos here and there because I can’t do anything without stereos. Little 3-D memorabilia pieces. So that’s it.
And here’s us. This is one of my favourite features of us playing in my my little Sitting Room in Los Angeles at the time with Phil Chen. We’re both plugged into Rockman’s, which were great things at the time, I didn’t get Rocklands these days. I think I did the same thing with Eddie – whereas here, this is Eddie and me doing a similar thing – just playing around with each other in the home environment.
It’s interesting to see that there’s a picture down on a computer – very early computer picture – of my children Jimmy and Louisa, my eldest children. And it was really because of Jimmy that this happened because we would get up every Saturday morning and look at this wonderful TV series. And all the time I’m hearing this great theme tune thinking I could enjoy playing that – written by Paul Bliss. So it’s nice that Jimmy’s in this picture. He’s part of this. He’s big boy now he’s 44 years old, so not a kid anymore, but none of us are kids anymore only. So it’s great to see it there – was a lovely moment in my little house.
So next in the box we have the completely reproduced vinyl version. It’s Gold series, so you’re not going to confuse it with the original, but all the mixes are new. It’s not just remastered. This is newly mixed the whole way and very faithful to the original but with much better sounds.
This is the original inner sleeve, which we reproduced with the three guitars rather than ice and the original snapshots. And what you get here is – I love this stuff is a very juicy piece of translucent red vinyl, which actually plays at very high quality. This is mastered at half speed is the business suite – sound great. And you know vinyl is what this was made for. It was all analogue. So this is the ultimate experience really of Starflight in a way.
So up to now we’re looking at reproducing what went before. But now in Detroit, we have two CDs. First one contains everything that the original vinyl release had, but newly remixed or mirroring the vinyl. But it also has a lot more. Besides it has some interviews from the release day itself synth from Cynthia Fox, Bob Coburn, and rock line. And we have a couple of live tracks we have ‘Let Me Out’ at the Palace Theatre, Los Angeles, and we have ‘We Will Rock You’ from the same gig -A nd we have ‘We Will Rock You’.
We also have two versions of Star Fleet – one is the single edit as it was first put out, and one is the album version. So between this and ‘Blues Breaker’, and ‘Let Me Out. We have the complete original album, plus all these extras. … …
Now, this CD is all the stuff nobody ever heard before. It’s every single tape that we did on that day, every mistake, every goof, every laugh, every string break. And you hear the whole thing. It’s like you were there.
You can also [hear] us chatting to each other at the beginning and ends of takes. And I think what’s most interesting is you hear it come together he starts are very sketchy. We don’t really know each other, we don’t really know the, the order of the songs, we’re gradually putting it together. And by the time we get to about Take Five, you can hear we’re getting pretty tightly together – we know each other and we know what’s going to happen. And we’re hitting it… we’re hitting some kind of tightness and a new kind of band feel. So you can hear that going all the way through here.
And most importantly of all, of course, the Star Fleet badge, which entitles you to a place in the in the Star Fleet, of course – particularly red one here, I don’t think there’s ever been a red one before.
This is the Special Edition – special Special Edition which goes with the box set reissue. So I will be wearing this with pride and I hope you will too – Will fit in the lovely box.
These things are quite hard to make, so I’m very grateful to the people at Universal Music, who spent a lot of time getting me what I wanted as regards making this a nice feeling object, something that you can enjoy playing with. But I’m also very grateful to Justin and Chris who did the mixing, the re-mixing and Richard Gray who did the artwork with me, everyone who worked on this. I have to say big thank you because this is kind of a dream come true for me. I always wanted to put this properly in its place as a proper release and this finally does it – the Starfleet sessions.
The Starfleet re-release, all shiny and new, and as you never quite heard it before.