Queen legend Brian May admitted his father was dismayed at his choice of career leading to estrangement between the pair just as the band were becoming huge stars. Brian's father Harold, who died aged 66 in 1991, famously helped his son build his iconic "red special" guitar in 1963. However, he was then unhappy when his son decided to forgo a traditional job in favour of making a living from the music business instead.

“My dad felt that he’d sacrificed a lot in order to give me a good education, to give me the opportunity to get a ‘proper’ job. And he felt I chucked it all away to become a pop star. He thought there was not a snowball’s chance in hell of us getting anywhere, and he was right. The chances were against us. But we had this insane belief, we had some talent, and we were very lucky," Brian, 77,  said.

The father and son were estranged for around a year and a half as Harold remained upset by Brian's decision.

“I remember saying to my dad: ‘You helped me do this. You made the guitar with me, for God’s sake, you can’t be that upset about it.’

"But he was. He didn’t see it as a life pursuit. He changed his mind eventually, much later,” Brian recalled in a 2021 interview with The Guardian.

The pair were reconciled in 1977 when Brian flew his parents to New York on Concorde for Queen’s Madison Square Garden show. In true English fashion father and son shook hands backstage and that was the end of the matter.

Brian had earlier turned down a job in academia to pursue his music career. He has confessed to declining down a prestigious job after leaving college in 1968 because he "didn't want to leave his friends".

He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from the Queen Mother at the Royal Albert Hall on October 24, 1968 and two days later, his then band Smile opened for Pink Floyd.

 “I was offered a job in Jodrell Bank, which was just beginning to be an important radio astronomy facility in England. And Sir Bernard Lovell was there. That was a dream, really, but — being the kid that I was — I was so involved with music in London and didn’t want to leave my friends.

"So I turned it down. I’m not proud of it, because I’m not sure it was the right thing to do,” he told Astronomy Magazine in 2012.