Brian has finally spoken out about the long-teased collaboration with Black Sabbath‘s Tony Iommi, discussing in a new interview that fans should still get their hopes up.
Brian May has been a long-time friend of Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, said the pair have given many hours conversing and listening to riffs Iommi has written but never used.
“I think there is a chance,” May told Guitar World of the likeliness of fans ever hearing what they’ve written together. “We do more talking than anything else, but we do a lot of talking. [Iommi] is really my dearest friend in the business and has been for so many years.”
He continued: “I could write books about Tony because he’s just the most [pauses]… I don’t even know how to put it into words. You know, he’s a luminous human being is Tony, with a wonderful, kind nature and an incredibly baffling sense of humour.”
“And, of course, he is the father of heavy metal. He did that. He made that happen. And it’s from his fingers and his mind. That young ex-welder, he made that happen. So, you know, he forever wears that medal, I think. He founded this stuff, heavy metal, in my opinion. I mean, I think probably most people would agree.”
Iommi teased during his interview with Birmingham Mail in 2013 that the thought of him and May working together surfaced when both met up soon after he was diagnosed with cancer.
“When I was first ill, Brian May came to visit me at my house in Lapworth,” Iommi told the publication. “I played him some of my stuff, rock riffs that I’d never quite got round to developing, or decided not to use. He said I ought to do something with them.
“It’s early days yet, and all my attention in on SABBATH for the foreseeable future, but we may well find some way of working together on them, and making them available in some shape or form.
“One of the ideas we had is that we could make the riffs available, get fans to use them in songs of their own, and see what they come up with. That way they’d effectively be recording with Brian and myself.”