“It’s like Brian May walked over to his tone booth and just turned it up to 11!” Kirk Hammett names his favorite Queen song – and it’s a seriously deep cut

With Brian May recently gracing Total Guitar with the ultimate in-depth retrospective on the Queen catalog, we took the opportunity to poll some of the biggest names in guitar for their favourite track from the British rock royalty.

Enter Kirk Hammett, Metallica’s effervescent lead guitarist… And while Metallica have covered Stone Cold Crazy, that’s not what he chose. Hammett went to 1980’s The Game, and a deep cut that May himself explains was a paean to a Munich disco the band used to spend some time in. If it worked in the Sugar Shack, then the song worked just fine.

“When Queen music came on it didn’t work so well, it didn’t inspire people to get up and go nuts on the dancefloor, whereas a lot of other things did – songs that had a lot more space in them,” May told Total Guitar.

“What I tried to do was make it the kind of track which was going to work in the Sugar Shack. That’s totally what it was about, which was to get girls excited and make boys want to get up and go nuts with them on the dance floor there. So it’s very spacious. The song doesn’t have the usual kind of rhythm build-up. It’s just the riff – bass, drums, guitar.”

So there you go. Which track was May talking about, Hammett’s favorite? Take it away, Kirk…

“Dragon Attack. Urgh! I love that song!” he enthuses. “Brian’s guitar sounds so overly saturated on that song, more so than other songs. It’s like he walked over to his fucking tone booth and just turned it up to 11.”

“Brian May has just such a wide reach. He’s like David Gilmour. Both of those guys have such a wide, wide reach. They can play extremely just like beautiful! Or, man, they can just fucking make you cry with their guitar solos, and the sense of melody that both David Gilmour and Brian May have is incredible, man.

“It’s voice-like. Voice-like! And both those guys do an extremely great job of doing their singing through their guitar. It is hard to be specific because everything they have done is so great.”