By Bob Hicks

At a certain age, cranking up Queen on the stereo is an inalienable right. But who knew “stereo” meant “stereoscopic,” as in those cool old double-image photos that you look at through a viewfinder?

Jesse Kornbluth, editor of Head Butler, has the lowdown via The Huffington Post. Brian May, legendary (and now 63-year-old) guitarist for the British rockers, has developed a passion for stereoscopic photographs, which created 3D effects long before Avatar (and, for those who remember that lethal pair of scissors striking out, before Hitchcock’s Dial ‘M’ for Murder). Specifically, May fell hard for the images that a pioneer of the form, T.R. Williams, created in the 1850s in his home village of Hinton Waldrist in Oxfordshire.

As Kornbluth explains it:

What Williams had done, May realized, was to freeze a small village in a magical moment — instead of reading about it in a novel by Thomas Hardy, you could almost literally visit it. That is, with the help of a viewer, you could feel yourself in the scene. And what a scene: a rural idyll, five minutes before the train comes to town, and mass literacy, and industrialization.

Now May and photography expert Elena Vidal have come out with a slipcovered book called A Village Lost and Found, an annotated version of Williams’ village series. It arrives with a foldup stereo viewer that May devised, so you can get as near as possible to the full effect.

Kornbluth’s story is fascinating (read it here), and the Huffington posting also includes almost 20 minutes’ worth of video conversation with May and Vidal as they explain the project. It also links to a pretty cool vintage version of Queen’s We Will Rock You. Along the way, Kornbluth casually drops the information that in his post-rocking days May has also immersed himself in the world of astronomy, picked up a Ph.D. (his thesis is titled Interplanetary Dust, A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud) and co-written a popular-science book, Bang! The Complete History of the Universe.

Does all of this make May the King of post-rock ‘n’ roll?

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PHOTO: Brian May performing in Warsaw, 1998. Wikimedia Commons.