5 Reasons To Love Dr Brian May

1. He's a fantastic guitarist.

Voted the 7th-best guitarist of all time by Planet Rock and the 37th-best by Rolling Stone, Brian May's prowess on the guitar has become almost legendary - a fact never more obvious than when he was invited to play atop Buckingham Palace as part of the Queen's Jubilee celebrations.

2. He's a great songwriter.

While it is tempting to see Freddie Mercury as the driving force behind Queen's compositional output, many of the group's best-loved hits were actually written by Brian May, including 'We Will Rock You', 'Tie Your Mother Down', 'Who Wants to Live Forever', '39', 'Save Me' and the beautiful 'White Queen (As it Began)'.

3. He sings, and sings well.

Clearly, Brian May is a guitarist, and not a singer, by trade. Within Queen, secondary vocals were usually filled by Roger Taylor in concert, and by multi-tracked versions of Mercury on studio recordings. Despite this, on the occasions when he does step up to the plate (in 'Who Wants to Live Forever' and '39', for example), May manages to put many other professional singers to shame.

4. He's ridiculously qualified.

May left school with A-levels in Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Additional Mathematics and Physics, and went on to obtain an Honours Degree in Physics and Mathematics in university. He was in the middle of a PhD "studying reflected light from interplanetary dust and the velocity of dust in the plane of the solar system" when Queen became successful; thirty years later, he completed his thesis (A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud) and was awarded his doctorate in Astrophysics.

5. He built his own guitar.

Unlike many guitarists, who seem to enjoy trying to use as many guitars as possible in the space of one gig, Brian May has remained faithful to one instrument for almost his entire career: the Red Special, which he designed at age 16 and built out of an 18th-century fireplace mantle. It says a lot about this guitar that it has its own Wikipedia article.

6. And a final bonus point:

He has amazing hair.