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so Harold set about carving down the bridge. May Senior was known for his resourcefulness and ingenuity. As money was tight, explained Brian, ‘my dad made everything. He was a technical civil servant. So he’d fix everybody’s equipment.Everything we had in our house was pretty much made by him; the radio, the TV, the record player …’
    One evening, Harold came home with a Lonnie Donegan record. Donegan’s 1955 hit ‘Rock Island Line’ bump-started the skiffle boom of the mid-fifties, with homegrown musicians playing an amalgam of American folk, blues and pop, often on homemade instruments. Thousands of miles away in India, it was skiffle that prompted Freddie Bulsara’s school bandmate to make his own tea-chest bass.
    Brian was hooked. ‘It was something about the sound of the guitar and the voice and that sort of blues feeling,’ he explained. ‘I used to lay under the bed covers with my little crystal set listening to Radio Luxembourg and all this stuff that seemed very exciting and dangerous and forbidden. First time I heard Buddy Holly, there was just chills up my spine.’ From here on, it was a short leap to The Everly Brothers, Brenda Lee, Little Richard and, his first crush, Connie Francis.
    As an only child, Brian had the time and space to indulge his interests. He filed his records alphabetically and kept them in perfect condition. An ardent collector, he hoarded cheese labels, match-boxes, Dan Dare toys and Eagle comics (years later, a manager at EMI Records recalls May collecting hotel matchbooks while touring with Queen). The discovery of a book about astronomy by the scientist and TV presenter Patrick Moore found May, ‘hooked for ever’. Combining two pastimes, Brian wrote a spoken-word monologue about the movement of the stars, which he would perform to his family to the musical accompaniment of ‘Saturn – The Bringer of Old Age’ from Gustav Holst’s The Planets Suite . Before long, he would add a camera and a telescope (homemade, of course) to his collection.
    Music, however, was still a hobby, and never to get in the way of schoolwork. At Hanworth Road, Brian applied himself tirelessly to his studies. ‘I was a swot,’ he admitted. ‘I had a lot of application and I liked achieving.’
    In 1958, his diligence paid off when he passed his eleven-plus exam and took up a scholarship place at Hampton Grammar. The school celebrated its 450th anniversary in 2006, and currently listsBrian May among its former alumni; a list that includes QCs, judges, Olympic sportsmen and, bizarrely, William Page, the eighteenth-century highwayman.
    During his first year at Hampton Grammar, another pupil, Dave Dilloway, heard Brian playing his Spanish guitar. ‘I remember walking around one of the corridors in the upstairs wing and hearing this guy playing an acoustic guitar and singing that Tommy Steele thing, “Singing the Blues” [a hit for Steele in 1957 and Guy Mitchell in 1956]. He sounded good but I thought no more of it.’
    A year later, Dilloway and May ended up in the same class together, the elite 2LA. ‘Two Latin A,’ explains Dave. ‘It was the fast stream, which meant you could take your A-levels a year early, so you could go to university interviews with your A-level results in your pocket.’
    At the time, Dilloway was learning to play his grandfather’s guitar, May was still playing the Spanish guitar. ‘So we found this mutual interest,’ says Dilloway, ‘and we got talking. He lived in Feltham and I lived in Whitton, and we’d go over to each other’s houses on Saturday afternoons and learn a tune.’
    As it was still the pre-Beatles era, the songs they learned were by The Shadows, The Ventures, and Les Paul. ‘Mainly instrumental stuff,’ recalls Dave. ‘Crazy as it may now seem, I used to play the tune and Brian used to play the rhythm, as, for a beginner like myself, the chords were harder.’
    A desire to mimic the electric sounds of The Shadows’ guitarist Hank Marvin