The Brian May Star Fleet Project began with a four-year-old boy glued to a Saturday morning puppet show and ended with two of the greatest rock guitarists of their generation sitting face-to-face in a Hollywood control room, playing a unison run that May still calls his favourite moment of the entire session. The full, strange story of how it happened has come back into focus with the release of a reissued box set, and May has been talking through every detail.
First contact: Munich, October 1978
May first saw Eddie Van Halen play live on 30 October 1978, when Van Halen were supporting Black Sabbath at the Circus Krone in Munich. May had been invited by Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi and arrived knowing virtually nothing about the opening band. ‘I sat there watching them and my jaw just dropped,’ he says. ‘Watching Ed was like watching Jimi Hendrix for the first time. I was awestruck.’
Backstage afterwards, with Iommi making the introduction, May and Eddie Van Halen struck up a conversation. ‘We just hit it off,’ says May. ‘It felt like an easy friendship.’ The pair stayed in contact, the idea of jamming circling the edges of their friendship for years without ever quite landing. ‘We’d say: “Oh, we should really get together,” but it never happened,’ May admits.
Until, five years later, it did. And it happened in the least likely circumstances imaginable.
Brian May Star Fleet Project: how a puppet show became a recording session
The seed was planted not by any grand artistic ambition but by May’s son James, who was four years old when Star Fleet began airing on ITV on Saturday mornings in late 1982. The show had originally broadcast in Japan as X-Bomber, dubbed into English for Western audiences, its propulsive synth-driven theme composed and sung by British composer and songwriter Paul Bliss. May watched every episode with his son. ‘I heard the signature tune and I thought: “Hmm, I like that. Maybe I could do something with it,”‘ he says.
Queen were between albums (‘We’d made a conscious decision to lay off for a while,’ May explains) and he was spending time in Los Angeles, where he found himself more sociable than he ever managed back home. In the spring of 1983 he decided to round up a small group of friends, head into a studio for a couple of days, and simply have some fun. He called Alan Gratzer, Phil Chen, Fred Mandel, and Eddie Van Halen. Every one of them said yes before May had even explained what the project was.
Aware that none of them would know the Star Fleet theme, May recorded a rough demo, just himself singing into a tape machine and imitating guitars and drums, and sent it round. Van Halen and Chen came to his house in LA to run through it. ‘It was just a great feeling from the beginning,’ May says. ‘”Yeah, let’s do it!” It was like stepping into a place we’d never been.’
The group gathered at the Record Plant Studios in Hollywood on 21 April 1983. According to Brian May’s official website, the reissued box set is a complete document of the two days, 21 and 22 April, that May spent there. Engineer Mike Beiriger was behind the desk; May took the producer credit. The approach was stripped back from the first moment: no individual tracking, no agonising over arrangements, just five musicians playing simultaneously in the room. ‘It was a total band recording session,’ May says. ‘We were all there, plugged in, playing at the same time during every take.’
Drummer Alan Gratzer, midway through one take, apparently summed up the atmosphere perfectly. ‘This is so much fun, this is going to be like cheating on your wife,’ he said. May has not forgotten it. ‘That sums up the feeling. It was exhilarating. It felt like an illicit liaison.’
The session: ski runs, blues and a dedication to E.C.
The main track ran to eight minutes, May’s arrangement of the Star Fleet theme stretching it well beyond the TV original. Playing alongside Van Halen, May says, was a specific kind of pressure. ‘It was like going down a really challenging ski run. I was very much conscious of his talent and his incredible aura. But to hear the two guitars together was a blast. Not the same, by any means, but we locked together very easily.’
The mutual admiration ran deep. Van Halen had told May his band were covering Queen’s ‘Now I’m Here’ as far back as 1974, and credited May’s use of the tapping technique on the 1977 track It’s Late as an early influence. ‘I’d done it in the most rudimentary form, then I’d moved on to something else,’ May says. ‘Whereas Ed basically made the guitar a new instrument.’
The session also produced a seven-minute blues number, Let Me Out, and its final track was a spontaneous 13-minute workout titled Blues Breaker (Dedicated To E.C.), a direct nod to John Mayall’s 1960s collective and their then-guitarist Eric Clapton. Van Halen admitted during the session that he hadn’t played that way in years. ‘I wanted to play like Eric before I started all this tapping stuff,’ he told May. May sent the finished track to Clapton. ‘I think I did send it to Eric, but I never heard back,’ he says. ‘He probably hated it, but that doesn’t matter to me.’
The mini-album, credited to Brian May + Friends, came out on 31 October 1983 and peaked at No.35 in the UK. Chart positions, May is clear, were never the point.
The 2023 reissue, handled as part of the Brian May Gold Series via Queen Vault, arrived completely remixed and loaded with outtakes, giving the sessions a more thorough airing than they ever received first time around. It also gave the whole project a bittersweet quality it did not originally carry: Eddie Van Halen died in 2020, and bassist Phil Chen the following year. At the very end of Blues Breaker, a fragment of studio chat caught on tape has May saying: ‘I wish I’d done this more often in my life.’ He means it more now. ‘I wish I’d made those phone calls more often,’ he says. ‘Especially when you lose somebody, you think: “There were times when I could have picked up the phone.” Life just takes you off in different directions.’ ITV, the channel that aired the puppet show that started it all, probably has no idea what it set in motion on those Saturday mornings in 1982.
