Brian May thinks what Nuno Bettencourt can play on guitar is way out of what he can do, and it doesn’t bother him.
“I’m not in the first million guitarists in the world. I know that. Not a chance,” he explained in an interview with The Howard Stern Show. “There’s people I listen to every day do things that I could never do. Nuno, I listen to Nuno Bettencourt and I just smile because it’s so beautiful and it’s so way out of what I could ever do. It doesn’t bother me because I don’t feel in competition. I just love the guy and I love what he does.”
“Same with Jeff Beck, same with Ed Van Halen. We worked together and it was the most wonderful experience. My jaw dropped every time he touched the strings. It was just beautiful,” he said of the Van Halen guitarist before naming more. “So there are so many wonderful guitarists. Steve Vai is just colossal. Beautiful.”
The guitarist also revealed he still sticks to his old heroes too: “And of course I still have my old heroes, Eric Clapton is still my hero. Jimi Hendrix is still my hero of course. It’s always gonna be that way. Jeff Beck to me is something so exceptional on the outside, anything you could have imagined.”
The feelings seem to be mutual. Bettencourt himself revealed earlier that he learned so much from May.
“What Brian May taught me was melodically bending notes, like how to simplify things and be okay with being simple at times,” the Extreme guitarist said of May. “One of the things that I learned early on was… I always felt disconnected with guitar players [where] I heard a song, and then a solo came. And I always thought, ‘Jeez, I wonder why I didn’t connect with the solo, even though the solo is great.’”
“But Brian always taught me to play the solo for the song. He didn’t tell me that. It was just there. Like, play for the song. If you’re going to do an instrumental album, then do whatever you want. But within a song, I used to go, ‘Wow, this is great. I get to create a song within a song.’ Like a little bridge; it wasn’t just for me to show up,” he added.
The two haven’t worked together, and it seems a little unlikely considering the musical and creative differences. Still, no one can ever guess when a collaboration could happen.