Sir Brian May listens to Avril Lavigne and Pink in the car

Sir Brian May revealed he’s an unexpected fan of Avril Lavigne and Pink, but confessed he barely has time to listen to music.

The Queen guitar god, 75, has heaped praise on pop punk princess Avril Lavigne, 38, describing her music as “fresh”.

He plays the ‘Sk8er Boi’ hitmaker, pop megastar Pink, 43, and rock titans Foo Fighters albums when he’s in the car and never gets fed up hearing their tunes.

Taking questions from readers of The Guardian for G2, Brian said: “I’m ashamed to say how little I sit down and listen to music. I’m generally making music, or working in some other way – in astrophysics, or campaigning for wild animals – and I have three children and seven grandchildren. There ain’t much time spare! I do have a few CDs in the car that I tend to keep listening to. Pink is one of them. I love her. She’s incredible. I listen to the Foo Fighters a lot and I like Avril Lavigne – I don’t get fed up with that, I always find her music fresh. There’s an ebullience to it that I like.”

The ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ hitmaker says if he weren’t in Queen, he would’ve loved to have been a Beatle, and he believes it would’ve been an “easy” gig”.

Asked which other band he’d like to have been in, he replied: “The Beatles, probably. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been easy to be a Beatle, but that incredible level of creativity, I would relate to.”

The astrologer and animal rights activist admits he got tearful watching the ‘Let it Be’ hitmakers in the studio in Peter Jackson’s docuseries ‘Get Back’ because it reminded him of the intense times in the studio with Queen’s late frontman Freddie Mercury and his bandmates.

He continued: “I watched a lot of ‘Get Back’. I got a bit sad watching the first one, because it reminded me of us – sometimes Queen in the studio would be [inhales nervously], ‘Here we are, and things aren’t quite fitting’. I felt they were in quite a painful place – but the second one, I felt like they were really finding each other again. It’s a textbook of how to be in a studio. If it wasn’t the Beatles, it could’ve been Led Zeppelin. If they let me in.”