[violin-like tone] There's a particular pickup combination which I use for the violin things: the fingerboard pickup and the middle one. Those two working in phase make a very mellow sound. And there's a point on the amplifier where it's just about to get distortioned, but not quite. Instead of using my pick, I tap the fingerboard with the right hand, and that just sets the thing moving. It sustain itself. you hardly need to even tap it any. If you even stand in exactly the right place, it feeds back in any position so I can just warble around and it's very smooth.
This one I did myself, I multi tracked myself. So the others weren’t used on this for the voices. I played piano and basically, I don’t know how we managed to stay this simple you know, with all our over dubs and things. People seem to think that we’re over complexed, and it’s not true. It depends on the individual track really, if it needs it – we do it. So this is pretty sparse actually by Queen and our standards.
`You Take My Breath Away' is a slow ballad with a new twist. That's another track I did at Hyde Park, with just me on the piano. It was very nerve-wracking playing all by myself in front of 200,000 people. I didn't think my voice would come through. It's a very emotional, laid-back number.
For instance on You Take My Breath Away, that's mostly Freddie, and the beginning and end of that song are real harmony showpieces without any rhythm section at all. But then, say, Tie Your Mother Down or something really hard like Liar or something like that - we're using very hard, blasting harmonies, really, in sort-of old English rock n' roll sense, with a rhythm section.
The harmonies on that are supreme!
Freddie has a very powerful voice with a good range at both ends. I'm not so good in the low range, he's very good; he's also good in the high range. We use harmonies in very different ways, for instance on You Take My Breath Away and that's mostly Freddie and that's the beginning and the end of that are real harmony showpieces without any rhythm section at all. But then, say, Tie Your Mother Down or something really hard like Liar or something like that were using very hard blasting harmonies really, in a sort of old English rock and roll sense, with a rhythm section.
I think that because some of the complexities of some of our songs the tag “overproduced” is one that is easily applied to Queen, but it's just not true. If you look at it intelligently, there are certain kinds of songs that need that kind of attention, just as there are others that don't. On A Day at the Races you can find both examples: Millionaire Waltz needed that layered effect whereas Take My Breath Away needed the sparseness that we gave it, just piano and vocal.
I couldn't come up with a Tie Your Mother Down because I'd done it with Death on Two Legs. I don't want to recreate the same formula. I could have written a vicious song, but that would have been too easy a comparison… I know I deliberately wrote You Take My Breath Away which is keeping with Love of My Life, but I wanted to do that.
I don't know Freddie very well but I think he's real clever, musically. I think he knows that too and sometimes it seems as if there is an effort to convince other people about it, which I don't think is necessary. Some of the things Freddie has done have been excellent and others not so good. For instance, Love of My Life and You Take My Breath Away are both in the same mould, but I love Love of My Life and You Take My Breath Away brings me to the point of nausea. To repeat the formula is the wrong thing to do. It would have been much better if Freddie had moved on to something else.
There's a particular pick-up combination which I use for the violin things: the fingerboard pickup and the middle one. Those two working in phase make a very mellow sound. And there's a point on the amplifier where it's just about to get distorted, but not quite. Instead of using my pick, I tap the fingerboard with the right hand, and that just sets the thing moving. It sustains itself. You hardly need to even tap it. If you even stand in exactly the right place, it feeds back in any position so I can just warble around and it's very smooth.
One song I remember him writing specifically is on the Day at the Races album. Before recording it, he played it to me and I remember feeling shattered for days that anyone was prepared to write a song like that for me for that it is what he told me the lyrics were about. It was a worthwhile vindication for at the time, our friendship was under severe pressure from many quarters. It was ironic that later on in his career, I knew exactly about whom he had written subsequent songs. He was awfully clever like that.
Going into the recording of Races we just had come back from a sensational tour in Japan, and fallen in love with all things Japanese, including of course some of their music. The opening piano figure on which Breath is based is very deliberately on the Japanese Pentatonic scale. Freddie was also clever enough to leave the sustain pedal down at exactly the right moment so all the five notes could be heard beating with each other as the chord dies away. The vocals are based on the background chords which is why they achieve a similar effect when a spin is put on them.