Creativity Quote by Brian May

It reads like a flex, but it’s really a defense of craft in an era when rock authenticity was already getting slippery. Brian May isn’t just listing gear; he’s drawing a hard border around what counted, for Queen, as “the band.” No synthesizers. No orchestra. No hired hands. That kind of purity claim is less about nostalgia and more about authorship: if it’s on tape, it’s us, our hands, our arguments, our limitations, our signatures.

The subtext is about control. Queen were famously maximalist, building “orchestral” grandeur from stacked guitars and layered vocals. By stressing the absence of external players, May reframes that grandeur as engineering and performance, not budget or studio trickery. It’s also a subtle correction to the lazy misunderstanding of Queen as bombast-for-bombast’s sake. The point is: the spectacle was homemade.

Context matters: 1970s rock treated synths as a kind of aesthetic contamination (prog’s excess on one side, disco’s machine pulse on the other). Queen’s early catalog sits right on that fault line, flirting with opera and hard rock while trying not to surrender its “band” identity. The “first nine albums” qualifier is telling, too: it implies a later shift (Queen eventually did embrace synths), and May is preemptively shielding the earlier work from being read through the later sound.

It’s pride, yes, but also a statement of ethos: we weren’t borrowing legitimacy; we were manufacturing it, track by track.