“Sir, are you married?” asked Marianne, a pupil in Mr May’s mathematics class. “Sir, if you’re married, why doesn’t your wife iron your shirts?” she added, giggling.
Marianne Elliott-Said attended Stockwell Manor School in Brixton. It was spring 1972. Queen were making slow progress, so Brian May took a student teacher’s job while he worked on his PhD.
Marianne and her friends liked Mr May. He looked a bit like Mick Robertson from children’s TV show Magpie, and sometimes brought his guitar to class. He lived with his future wife, Chrissie, in a bedsit with limited space for ironing clothes.
“Brian was a very good teacher,” Marianne recalled, decades later. “But he used to come in with his long hair and holes in his shoes, and we used to tease him.” And so “Sir, are you married?” was often heard while May tried to teach some complex long division or geometry.
The joke ended in September that year when Queen’s management put the band members on £20-a-week wages and Mr May handed in his notice. One of the senior staff took him aside. ”You’ve got a proper job here, Brian,” he said incredulously. “You’re giving it up for a pop group?” But Mr May wouldn’t be swayed. Queen were hungry, desperate even, for success.
Today, Queen + Adam Lambert are still basking in the box-office glow of the film Bohemian Rhapsody and rehearsing for another US stadium tour. It’s easy to forget that Queen’s global conquest was a long time coming.
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Denne historien er fra Summer 2023-utgaven av Classic Rock.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Joan Armatrading
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With previously unseen photographs from their early days as featured in the new Queen | Collector's Edition, Sir Brian May talks us through sights of the band in the early seventies.
BASS-IC INSTINCT
Plucked from obscurity in 1975 to be in David Bowie's band, then unceremoniously out of the picture five years later, bassist George Murray looks back on his time with the Thin White Duke.
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When Ronnie Wood, the Stones and some A-list mates holed up at his house to help with his solo album, it sparked a days-long party, a Rolling Stones hit and the last album by arguably their finest line-up.
THE NAME OF THE GAM
When ABBA-mad Opeth leader Mikael Akerfeldt met one of their singers, he lost it”. She didn’t sing on their new concept album, but some other, perhaps unlikely, big names did.
