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the number 9 London bus that the singer occupied during his regular journeys twenty-five years earlier.
    Inside the house, the first thing you notice are the guitars and amps propped up around the living area, and the absence of what interior designers might condescendingly describe as ‘a woman’s touch’. May reveals that his partner, the actress Anita Dobson, is away ‘doing a play’ and that she rarely visits this house. In an adjacent workshop, his homemade guitar, the cherished ‘Red Special’, is being taken apart and reassembled; a process that, you suspect, leaves the guitarist feeling a little vulnerable. May still sports the snug jeans, the garish shirts and, of course, the hair that have become his recognisable uniform. Other things remain unchanged also. When he first lopes into the room, Brian’s opening gambit is to complain of a cold (‘I feel a bit fluey’). It’s an excuse he’s used more than once before in interviews.
    But he is a paragon of politeness and good manners, and displays none of the airs and graces you suspect Freddie Mercury might have been prone to in a similar situation. But May is one of life’s worriers. Being the lead guitarist in one of the most successful rock bands of all time may have bought him recognition, money, the adoration of fans and the respect of fellow musicians, but you sense that at no time has he ever sat back and just relished it all. At this stage in his career, the notion of Queen going back on the road with another singer seems incomprehensible. But without Queen, Brian May sometimes seems a little lost. ‘I’d like to be viewed as something alive and relevant,’ he says, with a rather harried look. ‘Not some fossil.’
    In December 1966, while Freddie Bulsara was still some way off from living out any musical dream, May, then a nineteen-year-old physics student and part-time guitarist, was a little closer. But although they lived just a few minutes away from each other inFeltham, the two had never knowingly met. Later, Freddie would talk of ‘scouring the country’ to see Hendrix play, which suggests that he and Queen’s future guitarist may have even been in the same audience when Hendrix played London’s Saville Theatre on 29 January 1967.
    For May, seeing Hendrix was a pivotal moment. ‘I was already playing, I was in groups. Then this guy came along who was so far in advance of everyone else it was frightening,’ he recalled in 1991. ‘He was on the same road but almost out of sight, ahead of us all. I thought I was pretty good before I saw Hendrix.’ By the end of 1967, his bandmates at the time had nicknamed him ‘Brimi’, such was his devotion to the guitarist.
    May and Bulsara’s mutual love of Hendrix was the first step towards their paths crossing. But May’s upbringing in the same enclave of West London couldn’t have been more different from the singer’s.
    Nearly a year younger than his future sparring partner, Brian Harold May was born on 19 July 1947 at Gloucester House Nursing Home in Sevenoaks, Kent. He was an only child to parents Harold and Ruth. His father was an electronics engineer and senior draughtsman at the Ministry of Aviation, working on the creation of blind-landing equipment for Concorde. Previously, Harold had served as a radio operator during the Second World War.
    The May family home, in a small cul-de-sac at 6 Walsham Road, was barely a few hundred yards from the Bulsaras’ house in Gladstone Avenue. At the age of five Brian began attending Hanworth Road primary school; a year later he took his first steps towards learning music when his father, a fan of wartime entertainer George Formby, began teaching him a few chords on Formby’s trademark instrument, the ukelele. Piano lessons, which May always claimed to tolerate rather than enjoy, soon followed.
    On his seventh birthday, Brian awoke to find ‘a Spanish guitar hanging off the end of my bed’. His hands were still too small to play it properly,