LISTEN UP, TONIGHT !!
Tonight Brian on Radio 2 – Brian will be interviewed by Johnnie Walker and will be playing the ‘Star Fleet’ track.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001nfxb
Brian May takes over ‘This Week in Rock’ to spill the beans on ‘Starfleet’, his 80s collab with Edward Van Halen which is being specially remastered and re-released!
Brian May talks “Star Fleet” with Johnnie Walker: The Rock Show BBC R2 14/07/2023
– https://youtu.be/hBKEBUDFCjI
TRANSCRIPT – E&OE
JOHNNIE WALKER:
We’re going to focus on this week in 2023. Brian May is reissuing his collaboration with Eddie Van Halen. The mini album called Star Fleet first came out 30 years ago. If you missed it first time around, here’s the man himself to tell us a bit more about it. Hi, Brian.
BRIAN MAY:
Hi, Johnnie. Good to be back in touch. Thanks for having me.
Yes, I’m here to tell you about Star Fleet. And this is my major, major reissue. It’s the third in my Gold Series reissues and we’ve all put an immense amount of work into this to polish it up.
Just so you know, it was 1983 that I went into the studio with Ed Van Halen. Alan Gratzer, and a couple of amazing session guys and we just blasted away for two days with a bit of a framework, because I had this song in mind called Star Fleet, which was the signature tune for a kids’ TV science fiction series, which me and my little boy used to get up and see, every Saturday morning. He was five years old at the time. I had this idea that I could make it into a rock anthem. And waking up one morning in LA, I thought, why don’t I just call my mates and we go in the studio and see what happens. So there’s a framework then I’ve got this song called Star Fleet. I’ve got an arrangement in mind, and we just go in. And we’ve never ever played together, any of us, before. And it just happens. And it happens gradually, the chemistry kind of builds.
So for this reissue of this box set, what I’ve done is put everything in there. So you will hear every note of every take every mistake, every laugh, everything that happened on that day that went on … … you’ll hear in this box set. So you get the chance to really kind of sit in the studio with us and hear it developing.
So Star Fleet is a single – I’ve remixed that as well. Everything’s remixed beautifully in the way that modern technology allows you to do, but what you’re listening to is a transfer from the original analogue multitrack masters. This is me, Edward Van Halen, Alan Gratzer, Phil Chen and Fred Mandel, a wonderful keyboard player who actually played on some of the Queen stuff, notably Radio Ga Ga.
So this is Star Fleet God bless you all. Enjoy.
MUSIC: Star Fleet track.
JOHNNIE: That’s Brian May and Eddie Van Halen together, performing the title track of Brian’s Star Fleet mini album. The remastered version is out today as part of Brian’s Gold series reissues and has also included all sorts of never before heard tracks from those sessions, recorded at the Record Plant in Los Angeles.