Brian May first saw Eddie Van Halen play live on October 30, 1978. The American guitarist’s eponymous band were supporting a flagging Black Sabbath at the Circus Krone, a former circus venue in Munich, Germany on a tour that has since passed into legend as a hard-rock changing of the guard.
May had been invited to the show by his friend, Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi. He knew next to nothing about the opening band; information wasn’t easy to come by in those pre-internet times, and his attention was focused on Queen anyway.
“I got there early, thinking:, ‘I wonder who these Van Halen people are? I wonder what they’re like?’” the recently knighted Queen guitarist says now. “I sat there watching them and my jaw just dropped. Watching Ed was like watching Jimi Hendrix for the first time. I was awestruck.”
Afterwards, May went backstage to say hello to Iommi. Eddie Van Halen was there too, and the two men struck up a conversation. “We just hit it off,” says May. “It felt like an easy friendship.”
The pair stayed in touch. Every so often one or the other would bring up the idea of jamming. “We’d say: ‘Oh, we should really get together,’ but it never happened,” says May.
Except it did happen, albeit five years after they first met. And when these two superstar guitarists did finally come together in an LA recording studio, in April 1983, it wasn’t for a high-profile, high-stakes supergroup. Instead it was for a three-track mini-album whose lead song was a version of the closing theme to a kids’ TV puppet show.
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