On backwards sounds: It’s not actually, well some of it is backwards, yeah, you’re right, and some of it’s sort of harmonized, slowed down, and tape trickery in general.
Queen is a very democratic arrangement. Regardless of who writes the song, or comes up with the original idea for it, everyone will tend to have a degree of input, guided by whoever wrote it. In the case of One Vision it was very much a co-effort with no-one taking sole composer credit, which made it a little more complicated as regards putting it together because no one had the final say.
The ideas for the song started in the studio. It's not always the case that everyone's around at the same time and so maybe Freddie will come in and put an idea down, then Brian might listen to it and put some more guitar-orientated things on tape. Roger actually already had a complete song ready, and so he recorded a rough idea of that. Everyone works in a different way; for instance John is very organised and has a mathematical mind, so when he comes into the studio, he has a fairly precise idea of what he wants to do. On the other hand Freddie will often come in with absolutely nothing worked out and he'll just say, 'Give me five minutes', and maybe come up with something great. He's very good in that way. And so, over the course of a week we recorded a whole series of ideas ending up with four or five songs-worth to choose the best from. Out of that came One Vision.
The weird introduction was done with the Kurzweil 250. Freddie had said that he wanted lots of strange noises and swirling sounds, but hadn't actually come up with anything definite. I came into the studio early one morning, and started playing around with sampling some of his vocal lines into the Kurzweil and playing them back with a downward pitch change, with various effects.
Where we did get into tracking was the choral backing vocals. They're basically a three-part harmony with an occasional fourth part, and each part was sung and recorded three times, by three people, which gives a very full final sound. I used AKG 414s for all the vocals, including Freddie's lead vocal.
Freddie was on the phone and he wanted to go back in the studio and do some more recording. So, in the end, we went back to the studio and we actually recorded another single. It was his idea, really, that we should go in and actually write a song together. In fact, I was late getting to the recording sessions ‘cause I was actually on holiday at the time. It's credited as a Queen composition but, to be honest, I would say it was mainly Roger, Brian and Freddie who did most of the writing.
Some of it is backwards, yeah and some of it's sort of harmonized, slowed down, and tape trickery in general. There's a line and it says - and I think some people attribute it to some kind of devil worship -, the line is: “God works in mysterious ways.” That's what it's saying.
We began using synthesisers and there were many excursions from us all into keyboard territory. My main contributions on principal parts were (in no particular order) in: Scandal, Was It All Worth It, Hang On In There, Too Much Love Will Kill You (which was done with Frank Musker up in his house in the Canyon in L.A. when we first sketched the song), No-one But You (again done on my own, originally for use on my solo album), One Vision (my first ramblings on a Kurzweil gave rise to the opening section), I Can't Live With You, The Show Must Go On (that sequence just got thrust into my head playing around with Roger - I will never know where it came from, but it completely took me over for a long time while the song was in development), and of course, Who Wants to Live Forever.
Freddie appreciated the fact that he never had to wait to do something creative. He did not mind my placeholders, like the backward piano in Another One Bites the Dust, the guitar slide down in Princes of the Universe, the intro to One Vision or Fred Mandel's keyboard solo in I Want to Break Free years later.
Now, this song was a true collaboration as well, I would definitely say, we all brought stuff to this, the four or us. And we allowed people in to make a documentary of us making it so I think we all kind of showed off in the video. But it was very useful to have the footage when it came to making the, sort of, promo video. But really we got in… brought all sorts of stuff. You know there's… obviously the riff is my kind of thing, you know, and we all pitched in and produced ideas. Freddie had lots of vocal ideas most of which were unprintable. We did have a laugh doing it, it was great, we had some fun. And it's not often that we really wrote a song together, truly. This is a good example.
I have here as a transcript of [Frederick's] original lyrics: “one heart, one soul, one sex position; one shrimp, one prawn, one clam, one chicken”, yeah, and the only bit that actually survived was “fried chicken” at the end. I think he went through the entire Chinese menu. I wrote a sort of a bunch of lyrics which was a sort or poem and, actually, I sort of plundered it for A Kind Of Magic and this song. You'll notice the similarities in there, being “one of” a lot of things. It was a sort of Martin Luther King pastiche, so that's where all the one stuff came into it.
I had a sort of set of lyrics that I think I used for two songs, actually, with sort of amendments, but I think it started with those lyrics and we literally wrote the song between ourselves in the studio around these lyrics. That really was a proper collaboration: Brian came up with the riff, John came up with the bass bit and Fred came up with the Chinese menu - he was reading at the end, which is why we kept “fried chicken” in the end.