WRITING AND RECORDING WITH QUEEN

"The fighting for the Queen songs has been one of the worthwhile factors. Sometimes I think it's a question of who ever fights the longest wins the day."

Basically we get back home after a tour and we know that in a couple of months time it will be time to record a new album again. We go our separate ways for a while, and write individually, and then we get together and play each other our ideas. And that's when we try to work out which ones are going to go and which will stay. We try to work out what kind of an album it's going to be. That's what the last few albums have been like; individual songs from individual writers. We have a teething period when we get together - a long sifting process, with a lot of rows, where we pick the belt songs. It's not only about how an individual song is concerned, it's also about what will go, what will work best, and how the other songs will sound with each other. So it's basically looking in terms of an album, as opposed to juil individual songs.

I think we are aware of current trends and changes and we writ^ accordingly. I mean, Brian still writes in a heavy mould, or whatever, but I think the four of us write very different songs, which is good. The more Wt write, the further apart in song writing we become and the repertoire grow». I think we are accumulating more and more research and «panning different territories in that way. I'm writing very different stuff now to what Queen were doing say three years ago.

It's quite competitive now, just within the band - before it even gets out to the public and becomes competitive with all the other groups around. The whole band is very particular. We don't go in for half measures and I'm pretty hard on myself. There are no compromises. If I think a song isn't quite right, then I'll discard it. There are four good writers who are equally adept at doing things, and there are no passengers, especially now that Roger's writing very well and so is John. Brian and I used to be the principal writers, but now we all write. There's a good fight right at the start of every album, where we present the material and say, "Ok, what do you think?" and then the real fighting starts.

You can have the best musicians in the world but that doesn't make a better song. It is entirely up to the song and the person that writes it. You have to fight. I like to add my two penn'orth, dears. If it was made too easy for me I would come up with lesser material. Because we fight, it makes it much more interesting and you get la creme de la creme, the cream of the crop. The fighting for the Queen songs has been one of the worthwhile factors. I Sometimes I think it's a question of who ever fights the longest wins the day.

I've said it before, but the way I see it is that you write songs and once they’re out, they're out, and then you just move on. If the new album is a flop, we'll just move on to the next. We've had albums that haven't been absolutely major, in the past, like Jazz [1978], but we just moved on. That one was considered to have taken a slight dip, but that didn't stop us. We came up

With another album, The Game, and that was huge.

If I was to think about it in those terms, where I woke up every morning and said, "Are they going to like everything?" I'd have heart seizures and ulcels. I like to think of it in a more broader spectrum than that. It's to do with longevity too.

I’m quite aware of what goes on, but that doesn't mean I want to incorporate that particular trend into my songs. 1 still write a song the way I feel it, and if that means that it needs something old fashioned, I will do it. I will newer let a song down, the song comes first. I feel so strongly about my songs that if they are not done properly, I'd rather they weren't done at all,

That's why something like Living On My Own [1985] has got scat singing in it, something like Ella Fitzgerald did a long time ago - and not a current trend. Maybe it could set a trend today, because a rock'n'roll artist has never done scat singing before in that way, and it might not be appreciated, but I'm not worried about that. I wanted to showcase my vocal ability on that track and that's what I was doing. So, I do whatever I like. I'm aware of what goes on but that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to pinch it.

A lot of reviews I've read lately have said, "If you associate Queen with the Bohemian Rhapsody harmonies and that kind of Cecil B. De Mille package, forget it, because there's not an ounce of that on this record." In a way that's quite nice. It's either black or white. In this case, with Hot Space, I think it is a big risk and the public have been torn between two. I hope the Americans will see it as something new, because the other side of the spectrum is that England just totally ignored it. It was obviously not their cup of tea. So they just rejected it totally.

I'm extremely upset - outraged, in fact. I just think they could have given it a little... I mean, I know Body Language [1982] was the first one of its kind from us, but it met with such disapproval in England. God! If they think that because of that situation I'm going to suddenly revert back and come out with a rehash of Rhapsody, they're mistaken. There's no way I'm going to do that. But I'm glad that the Americans have seen that side of it.

Good songs don't have to be absolutely saturated with humungous operatic scenes, or what have you. I really think that part of talent these days is not just being a good musician, and writing a damn good song, it's also being aware of what's happening out there and getting with the pace. And after that, you really just leave it to the luck of the draw.

I feel that Queen have written some good songs which haven't sold, but te me they are still good. Songs are only perceived as good as long as they sell and get into the charts. I want to write commercial music that sells to everybody. If I think I have written a good song that doesn't sell, I say, “ O key, forget that, just throw it out and onto the next!" I just move on to the next one.

The trademark of Queen, and which I like, just happens to be a coincidence - that there are four writers who write very different material, which gives us maybe a wider span than most other groups. We are equal, but I have been the main writer from the start. If you go back to the very early days, Brian and I have been the main songwriters. John and Roger didn't write at all to begin with, so Brian and I took up about fifty percent of all the song writing. We have grown up being the two main writers, but then the others started writing and we encouraged them.

I don't think there has ever been an album where it was completely equal writing status. On the last album we came very close, but I think maybe for the next album the time has come where it will be completely even in song writing.

If we were writing all the same kind of songs then we would have got fed up long ago, but we were all writing different songs, so that kept us interested. If everybody wrote the same kind of thing that appealed to the lame kind of people, then it would be a bit boring. We have four totally diverse personalities and different egos, and that's good. We still fight! We still fight like kids. A Queen album is made up of that. You have to fight. I think that's the best way. I like to fight for the very best we can achieve, and I think I make everyone else fight as well. It makes it much more interesting.

Sometimes I'll take one of my songs to Brian and he may put guitars on it the way he wants to, not my way. So we'll fight. Sometimes we're the bitchiest band in the world. There's a lot of bad vibes, but in the end it always comes together. We have to conflict, otherwise it would be dull, I think. Sometimes you just disagree, but in the end what does happen is that the writer is the boss. He can say, "Look, this is the way I want the song, and this is the way I’m going to have it." As far as I'm concerned the person who wrote the words can effectively written the song.

In the early days, Brian and I always wrote far more, as I've said, but now me to the stage where they all want to pull their weight. I think that at this point in time, that's the only way for Queen to survive. 1 know people think I hog everything, but that's not quit true. I think that for every album that's ever come out of Queen, we really picked the best of the batch. I'm not trying to hog a Queen album in any way. I have to make sure that I come up with good songs, and they looked upon me as the chief song writer, or Brian and I as the principal writers, but in a funny way that makes them write better songs. That doesn't mean I write the best songs, because the songs are hits, it just means that they come up with very good songs too.

I seem to participate more on Roger or John's tracks, as they let me help them and suggest things. "Whereas Brian's got his own writing ideas and they're very strong, so I don't seem to be able to get into his ideas so much. With John and Roger's songs I sort of get in there at quite an early stage and they don't mind me tearing things apart and piecing it back together again, Sometimes I even take the whole song over, like with... and I don't mind saying it, with Roger's Radio Ga Ga. I instantly felt that there was going to be something one could build into a really good strong and saleable commodity there. And so he went on a skiing holiday for a week and I worked on it. But it's basically his song. He had the ideas all together and I just felt that there were some construction elements that were wrong. He just said, "Ok, you do what you want."

There's no way of telling how much a song is going to change until you're in the studio. A lot expands while you're actually in the recording process, like with Somebody To Love [1976]. I knew that I wanted a gospel choir feel to it, and I knew we'd have to do it all ourselves. That song is something like 160-piece choir effect. You can imagine how long it took to do - over and over and over again. We spent a week on that, but it was worth it. I never want to look back on one of our albums and think, "If only we'd spent longer, and done that, it would have been better!" We are perfectionists about things and we think it's worth spending that time. People probably think, "Oh God, they're in the studio again for four and a half months," but W think it's necessary because it just has to be right, that's all.

The phrase 'over-produced' is too easily applied to Queen, but it' just not true. If you look at it intelligently, there are certain songs that need that kind of attention. If we want overkill, we can do that. But then again, take the song Уои Take My Breath Awa ,that certainly is out of the Queen idiom, because I left it as just a vocal and piano song - it needed that kind of sparseness. And The Millionaires Waltz needed yet another kind of treatment.

In terms of writing, producing and arranging, we learnt from the very early days of Queen that we would actually do all that ourselves. We were very reticent to have anybody else infiltrate our territory. So we learnt to do it all ourselves and keep it within the four of us. And that's the only way I know how to do it.

I think our lyrics have changed from the early days. I'm writing sorter stuff at the moment. I'm at the stage where I like to write with simplicity and that means the song's structure as well as the lyrics. I got away from all that Bohemian Rhapsody stuff, and the Killer Queen lyrics. That was just a phase 1 was going through then [1974/75].

I think the people who buy our records now are interested in the change in Queen. They are used to us coming up with something different every time, 10 they adapt to that. I think sometimes they would be disappointed if we didn't do that. I never like to repeat the same formula more than once because I find it boring. I'm always looking for something different which is good because that's a challenge. That's something that comes naturally. The songs are diverse. We change with moods, we are adaptable. A lot of it is spontaneous, we don't really think about it too hard. I think that's the best way. If it's too planned then it would be too wooden and it wouldn't be us.

Chapter five: part 3

QUEEN SONGS

"We are all strong believers in doing things which are unusual, not expected of us, and out of the ordinary. We never want to get into a rut or become stale as a band, and there is a danger of doing that when you have been together as long as we have. There is a danger of resting on your laurels and just getting lax, and there is no way any of us would want that. We never want to stay still."

QUEEN (1973) Keep Yourself Alive was a very good way of telling people what Queen was about in those days.

QUEEN П (1974)

There was no deep meaning or concept in the album. At the time of recording we conceived it impulsively. I wrote a song. The March Of The Black Queen, for the album and that's when we got the idea of having white and black side» - reflecting white and black moods. It became a good contrast.

Seven Seas OfRhye is really just fictitious. I know it's like bowing out, or the easy way out, but that's what it is. It was just a figment of my imagination, At that time I was learning about a lot of things in song writing, like song structure -1 was just learning different techniques all the time.

On Ogre Battle we used a huge gong. It we even bigger then the one Pink Floyd used on stage and it took all Roger’s strenth to just lift the hammer!

The 'No Synths' thing* we put on as a joke, at first, and because we were frustrated, but it turned out to be quite a good idea, because we even managed to fool John Peel at the time. He said something in a review once about there being good use of Moog synthesizer, and actually it was just multi-tracked guitar.

SHEER HEART ATTACK (1974)

Killer Queen is about a high-class call girl. I was trying to say that classy people can be whores as well. That's what the song is about, though I'd prefer people to put their own interpretation upon it - to read what they like into it. People are used to hard rock energy music from Queen, yet with that single you almost expect Noel Coward to sing it. It's one of those bowler hat, black suspender numbers - not that Noel Coward would wear that.

We're very proud of that number. It's just one of the tracks I wrote for the aIbum, it wasn't written as a single. I just wrote a batch of songs for Sheer Heart Attack and when I finished writing it, and when we recorded it, we found it was a very strong single. It really was. At that time it was very unlike Queen. It was another risk we took, but you know every risk we took, up to that time, paid off.

Killer Queen was another one I wrote the words for first. It was one song that was really out of the format that I usually write in. Generally the music comes first, but that time it was the words, along with the sophisticated style l 1 wanted to put across. A lot of my songs are fantasy, I can dream up all kinds of things.

Now I'm Here. That was nice. That was a Brian May thing. We released it |after Killer Queen. It's a total contrast. It was just to show people that we can rock'n'roll roots - that we haven't forgotten our rock'n'roll roots. It's nice to do on stage. I enjoyed doing that live.

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1975)

A Night At Tht Opera is easily one of Queen's best. It took the longest to record out of all the first four albums. We didn't really cater for that, we just l it and said that we were going to do so many thing». It took us about four months to record and we nearly went over the deadline, with a tour approaching at the time. It was important to get the album the way we wanted it, especially after we've spent so long on it. Each song on Opera can stand up in its own right.

There were a lot of things we wanted to do on Queen 11 and Sheer Heart Attack, but there wasn't space enough. With Opera there was. Guitar-wise and with vocals we did things we've never done before. It featured every sound, from a tuba to a comb. Nothing was out of bounds.

There were just so many songs and styles we wanted to do. It makes a change to have short numbers as well a long ones. It's so varied that we were able to go to extremes. Every molecule on that album is us, just the four of us - every iota. There were no session men; not for strings, not for anything.

We produced the album in co-operation with Roy [Thomas] Baker, who'd had some amazing all-round experience and was a great help to us.

It may have been an expensive album -1 think it cost us about £15,000 to £20,000, because we were determined to make it the best we possibly could, and I suppose we really wanted to prove we could do it - but the relief of getting it finished... I can't tell you!

Now then... Death On Two Legs was the most vicious lyric I ever wrote. It was so vindictive that Brian felt bad singing it. No-one would ever believe how much hate and venom went into the singing of that song, let alone the lyrics themselves. Just listen to the words carefully kiddies. It's a nasty little number which brings out my evil streak.

I don't usually like to explain what I was thinking when I wrote that son|, It's about a nasty old man that I used to know. The words came very easy to me.

I decided that if I wanted to stress something strongly, like that, I might as well go the whole hog and not compromise. I had a tough time trying to get the lyrics across. 1 wanted to make them at coarse as possible, My throat was bleeding - the whole bit. I was changing lyrics every day trying to get it as vicious as possible. When the others first heard it they were in a state of shock. When I was describing it, they went, "Oh yeah!" but then they saw the words and they were frightened by it. But for me the step had been taken and I was completely engrossed in it, swimming in it. I was a demon for a few days.

The album needed a strong opening and what better way than to have the first words, 'You suck my blood like a leech'? Initially it was going to have the intro, and then everything stop, and the words, 'You, suck, my »»»»'- but that was going too far. Let's just say that the song has made its mark!

Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon is a short track, just one minute and six seconds. It's a very perky spicy number, dears. Brian likes that one.

That's the way the mood takes me, you see. That's just one aspect of me -I can really change. Everything on Sunday Afternoon is something a bit different to the norm. I love doing the vaudeville side of things. It's quite a int. 1 love writing things like that and I'm sure I'm going to do more of that. It'l a challenge too.

Then there's Good Company, written by Brian, a George Formby track with saxophones, trombone and clarinet - all sounds from Brian's guitar. I don't believe in having any session men, we do everything ourselves, from the high falsetto to the low bassy parts. It's all us.

It’s sign of transition. We could probably have done them on the first album, but you can't have it all, and it took until that fourth album to try to put it across. There are so many things we wanted to delve into. I always wanted to write something like that. Ogre Battle was written on a guitar, but then I got more into Love Of My Life and Lily Of The Valley-type things, on piano. I've always listened to that kind of music.

Seaside Rendezvous has я 1920's feel to it, and Roger does a tuba and clarinet thing on there too, vocally, if you see what I mean. I'm going to make him tap-dance too. I'll have to buy him some Ginger Rogers tap-shoes.

'39 was a little spacey number by Brian, a skiffle style of piece, which we'd never tried before. It's something that we have in us and people can't believe it. They can't believe it's us. It's something Brian May wanted to do and it's very, very unlike Queen, really. I think it's going to the B-side of You're My Best Friend.

Brian has an outrageously mammoth epic track. The Prophet's Song, which is one of our heaviest numbers to date. He's got his guitar extravaganza on it. You see, Brian's guitar is specially built, so he can almost make it speak. It will talk on this track.

The Rhapsody single took bloody ages, and The Prophet's Song alone took three weeks, but we had all the freedom we wanted and we were able to go to greater extremes. Fancy doing opera, for a start! I believe that album combined the outrageousness of Queen II with the good songs on Sheer Heart Attack. They are the finest songs ever written dears!

I'm In Love With My Car, the B-side of Rhapsody, was Roger's first hit. He wanted that very badly and I think he deserved it. It was a big hit in Europe.

Love Of My Life is a lovely little ballad. My classical influence comes into that. Brian plays real life-size harp on that. I remember thinking, "I'm going to force him to play until his fingers drop off!"

It's been adapted now on stage for guitar, but it was written on the piano. Everywhere we've been in the world, they know how to sing Love Of My Life - it's amazing to watch with so many people.

I once dedicated Love Of My Life to Kenny Everett, dears, on his radio programme [1976], for being so nice to us, and letting us infiltrate his "Be Bop Bonanza' programme. It's from our Sheer Heart Attack album... Oh no, it’s A Night At The Opera. God! We've made so many, I keep forgetting.

You're My Best Friend is John Deacon's song. I was very pleased with that, actually. John really started coming into his own at that time. He worked very hard at that, and it's very good, isn't it? It's very nice. It added to the versatility of Queen - do you know what I mean?

A DAY AT THE RACES (1976)

On You Take My Breath Away I multi-tracked myself. The others weren't used on that, for the voices. I played piano and that was basically it. I don't know how we managed to keep it that simple, you know, with all our overdubs and things. People seem to think that we're over complex, and it's not true. It depends on the individual track. If it needs it, we do it. So that track is pretty sparse actually, by Queen standards.

Long Away is a twelve-string thing written by Brian. It has very interesting harmonies.

For Somebody To Love we had the same three people singing on the big choir section, but I think it had a different kind of technical approach because и was a gospel way of singing - which was different to us. That track was me going a bit mad. I just wanted to write something in the Aretha Franklin kind of mode. I was inspired by the gospel approach she had on her earlier

albums. Although it might sound like the same approach on the harmonies, it very different in the studio because it's a different range.

The Millionaire Waltz is quite outlandish, really. It's the kind of track I ^! r to put on every album - something way outside Queen's format. Brian orchestrated it fully with guitars, like he'd never done before. He went from tubas to piccolos to cellos. It took weeks. Brian's very finicky. That track is i lung that Queen had never undertaken before - a Strauss waltz.

It’s all about John Reid, actually - our manager at the time. Again, I think I went a bid mad on that one. But it turned out alright I think - and it makes people laugh sometimes.

Actually I’d like to say Brian did a very good job on the guitars. He really took his guitar orchestration to its limits. I don't know how he's ever going to out-do that one. And John played very nice bass on that. I think it's very good and we were patting ourselves on the back with that one. I really think it worked out well especially from the orchestration point of view. Brian has really used his guitar in a different sort of way. I know he's done lots of orchestrations before, but even so... very nice.

You And I — on the end of side one — is a track by John Deacon, his contribution to that album. His songs are getting better all the time. I'm getting a bit worried actually.

Tie Your Mother Down is one of Brian's heavies. In fact, I remember we played it at Hyde Park, at our picnic by the Serpentine, in the summer of 1976, before we had actually recorded it. I was able to come to grips with the song in front of a live audience before I had to record the vocal in the studio. Being a very raucous track, it worked well for me.

That song has really done us proud, especially in England. It's been a very, very strong live track. And I think it sounds good. It's opened up a lot of new areas.

White Man, the В side of Somebody To Love is Brian's song too. It's a very bluesy track and it gave me the opportunity to do raucous vocals. I think it'll be a great stage number.

Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy is another one of my vaudeville numbers, I always do a vaudeville track, though Lover Boy is more straightforward than Seaside Rendezvous, for instance. It's quite simple piano/vocals with a catchy beat; the album needs it to sort of ease off.

Drowse is a very interesting song of Roger's. Roger is very rock'n'roll. It’s got great slide guitar from Brian, and Roger's done octave vocals. It's a very hummable tune, actually. I sing it all the time.

jThe album - A Day At The Races, not Horse Feathers, which was another film by the Marx Brothers - ends with a Japanese thing, a track from Brian celled Teo Torriate, which means 'let us cling together,' It's a very emotional track, one of his best. Brian plays harmonium and some lovely guitar. It's a nice song to close the album.

NEWS OF THE WORLD (1977)

We Are The Champions was the most egotistical and arrogant song I've ever written. I was thinking about football when I wrote it. I wanted a participation song, something the fans could latch on to. It was aimed at the masses. I thought we'd see how they took it. It worked a treat. When we performed it at a private concert in London, the fans actually broke into a football chant between numbers. Of course, I've given it more theatrical subtlety than an ordinary football chant. You know me!

I certainly wasn't thinking about the press when I wrote it. I never think about the British music press these days. It was really meant to be offered to the musicians, as well as the fans. I suppose it could also be construed as my version of I Did It My Way. We have made it, and it certainly wasn't easy. No bed of roses as the song says. And it's still not easy. That song was taken up by football fans because it's a winner's song. I can't believe that someone hasn't written a new song to overtake it.

Spread Your Wings is very John Deacon - but with more raucous guitars. After I'd done the vocals, John put all these guitars in, and the mood has changed. I think it's his strongest song to date.

THE GAME (1980)

I wrote Crazy Little Thing Called Love on guitar and played rhythm on the record„ and it works really well because Brian gets to play all those lead guitar fills as well as his usual solo. I'm somewhat limited by the number of chords I know. I'm really just learning, but I hope to play more guitar in the future. That song is not typical of my work, but that's because nothing is typical of my work.

Another One Bites The Dust was a dance hit, but it doesn't mean we're going to do everything in that style from this point on. We like to experiment, althrougt I have learnt a lot from all this black rhythm disco music, from Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin.

UNDER PRESSURE (collaboration with David Bowie, 1981) Under Pressure came about by pure chance, my dears. David came in to see us one day in the recording studios we owned at the time, in Montreux, where we were working. We began to dabble on something together, and it happened very spontaneously and very quickly indeed. We were both overjoyed by the result.

It may have been a totally unexpected thing, but as a group we are all strong believers in doing things which are unusual, not expected of us, and out of the ordinary. We never want to get into a rut or become stale as a band, and there is a danger of doing that when you have been together as long as we have. There is a danger of resting on your laurels and just getting lax, and there is no way any of us would want that.

David was a real pleasure to work with. He is a remarkable talent. When I saw him play in the stage version of 'The Elephant Man' on Broadway, his performance fuelled me with thoughts about acting. It is something I may do in the future, but right now I'm looking at other projects to do with Queen. We never want to stay still. There are so many vistas still to explore.

THE WORKS (1984)

I wrote a song with Brian for this album. There should be an eclipse!

It's called Is This The World We Created. I like the way we approached that song. We were looking at all the songs we had on the album and we thought that the one thing we didn't have was one of those real limpid ballads - or the lilting type; the Love Of My Life-type things. And rather than one of us going back and thinking of one, I just said to Brian, "Why don't we just think fl something right here," and that song just evolved in about two days. He got an acoustic guitar and I just sat next to him and we worked it out together

If we actually thought beforehand that we should sit down and write a song together, I don't think it would ever have happened, because then all kinds of things, like egos, play havoc, and who does what. But this way, we didn’t have time to think about it. We just went in there and got it together. It it didn't work we were throw it out, but it seemed to work and it was quite strong, so we said yes, this should work as a tail out of the album. And later we did it at Live Aid.

THE MIRACLE (1989)

Personally, I don't like titles which give an album a concept, as it sometimes gives the wrong image. For example, the working title of The Miracle album was The Invisible Man. There's a song on it with the same title, and we talked about making a video and doing some magical things in it. But you can imagine that the journalists will have taken the title in the wrong sense. Anyway the title was The Invisible Man until the very last week. I think it was Roger who started to say, "Come on, this title won't do!" So we thought about changing it, and there was a song called The Miracle, so we thought that would express ourselves well. So we made the title The Miracle. Of course, lots of people will have thought that we think of our work as miracles, but huh! If they want to think like that, they can. It basically just came from the title of one song on the album.

It was okay, but we had our various fisticuffs.

INNUENDO (1991)

I'm pleased with my vocals on this album. Innuendo is a word I often use in

Scrabble. For Queen, it's a perfect title.

Chapter six

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 1008