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“We walked into this restaurant and everybody turned round to look at us,” says Howe.

It got towards evening, and we’d doodled and I’d noodled, and it turned out to be really good fun.”Īfter a few hours, somebody looked at their watch and suggested they all go out for a meal. They let me do stuff, climbing around, doing stuff that isn’t very structured. After a couple of hours, I thought: ‘I’ve bitten off more than I can chew here.’ I had to learn a bit of the structure, work out the chordal roots were, where you had to fall if you did a mad run in the distance you have to know where you’re going. “I started noodling around on the guitar, and it was pretty tough. The next thing he knew, May was handing him a nylon-stringed Gibson Chet Atkins guitar. Howe listened to the track a few more times to get a handle on it.

I said, ‘You want me to kind of improvise?’ And they were, like, ‘Yes! Improvise!’” We want some crazy Spanish guitar flying around over the top. “He said, ‘Yes, I’ve done some stuff there, but on Spanish guitar I don’t really improvise or race about.’ And then they all chime in, going: “We’d like you to give it some Paco de Lucia. And what he did was keep colouring.”Įxcept Brian May himself was insistent. It required him to come up with more than guitar solos… He had to come up with a semi-thematic approach to play the guitar. The remarkable thing was that he was the front and the back man. “Queen weren’t like Yes, who had a dualistic role of guitar and keyboards, where both shared the terrain. “I said, ‘You must be mad! Brian’s done everything on that track,’” Howe remembered. Did Howe want to play on the title track? That’s when the members of Queen dropped their bombshell. They played it and I was fucking blown away.” And they saved Innuendo itself until last. They go: ‘Let’s play you the album.’ Of course, I’m hearing it for the first time: I Can’t Live Without You, I’m Going Slightly Mad. “Inside, there’s Freddie, Brian and Roger all sitting together,” Howe said.

When he was done, he took a 10 minute walk to Mountain and knocked on the door to announce his arrival. While Groves left, presumably to tell Queen that Howe was in town, the guitarist finished his lunch.