“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.
Their debut album turns 50 in July. Home to their first single, Keep Yourself Alive, it’s also the most impatient-sounding album ever made. As one of their familiars once remarked: “Queen wanted the world… and wanted it no later than teatime on Friday.”
Queen began in June 1970. Before then, astrophysics student Brian May and trainee dentist and drummer Roger Taylor were two-thirds of Smile. The trio once opened for Jimi Hendrix but couldn’t catch a break. Their confidence was especially shaken after seeing Led Zeppelin. “I felt sick,” May admitted, “because they were doing what we were trying to do, only a
