BRIAN MAY TO LAUNCH SOLO SINGLE

Brian May is to release his first solo single in 20 years in New Year’s Day, and he’s launching it at NASA.

The song, ‘New Horizons’, was co-written by the Queen guitarist with Don Black and is to be available digitally on January 1. This is May’s tribute to NASA’s ongoing New Horizons project, which on that very day will achieve the mist distant spacecraft flyby ever, as it reaches an o object in the Kuiper Belt named Ultima Thule, right on the outskirts of our solar system. It is therefore appropriate that the single will have its premier at NASA’s headquarters in Maryland. It will be broadcast at 5.02am GMT.

Says May:  “This project has energized me in a new way. For me, it’s been an exciting challenge to bring two sides of my life together — astronomy and music. It was Alan Stern, the project instigator of this amazing NASA mission, who threw down the glove last May. He asked if I could come up with a theme for Ultima Thule which could be played as the NH probe reached this new destination. I was inspired by the idea that this is the furthest that the hand of man has ever reached. It will be by far the most distant object we have ever seen at close quarters, through the images which the space craft will beam back to earth.

“To me, it epitomizes the human spirit’s unceasing desire to understand the universe we inhabit. Everyone who has devoted so much energy to this mission since its launch in January 2006 will be feeling they are actually inside that small but intrepid vehicle — only about the size of a grand piano — as it pulls off another spectacular close encounter. And through the vehicle’s ‘eyes,’ we will begin to learn, for the very first time, what a Kuiper Belt Object is made of. And pick up precious clues about how our solar system was born.”

Here’s a teaser for the single: