It's a very good film [Highlander] by the way, I think. Very dramatic, very heavy and also has a very nice romantic subplot. There was a song which was written for that called "Who Wants To Live Forever." The hero of the movie discovers in his first battle that he can't die, and unfortunately he finds that he falls in love with this girl, and everybody tells him that it's a bad idea if they stay together because eventually she must grow old and die, and he won't. But nevertheless he does, he stays with her and she does grow old and she dies in his arms and she says "I never understood why you stayed with me" and he says "I see you just the same as I saw you when I first met you" and she's old and she's dying. I was very moved by that and I wrote this song called "Who Wants To Live Forever (When Love Must Die)." That's another part of the movie.
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. The only pure piece of piano from this era from me is Forever - which was a doodle done live in the studio which I rescued for a bonus track later on. Of course there are many other smaller contributions, but in many cases later on we would work together on the programming of a keyboard part (eg Days Pf [sic] Our Lives). This is a benefit of the new technology which allows us to keep the original feel of a demo keyboard part but update the actual notes as the song is developed - I've used it many times in my solo work - giving an impression that I can play better than I actually can!!! Luckily the guitar still has to be PLAYED LIVE – so my best job is safe for a while at least!!!
Queen were working in Studio 3 at Abbey Road and I was working in Studio 1 and Brian May came down to see how we were getting on and he stood there and at the end he said, “You do all that in one [pass]?” I said, “Yeah”… He said, “I can't believe it! That would have taken us about three days to do this three-minute piece, layering and layering this and that.”
Biographical? Autobiographical? Such an interesting study. The more I see of songs and their writers, the more I tend towards the opinion that ALL songs have these elements in them!!! As far as I remember, I used an early sampling keyboard to record that part. I had sampled a note which I had sung, and the keyboard created a whole spectrum of notes. But whether this got on to the Queen record, or not, I am not quite sure. Listening to it now, it sounds more like a DX7 sound. But I played it … in one take, complete with all the changes at the end .... and by a miracle, when we first tried fitting the recorded track to the pictures as they were edited together, the pictures and the track completely locked together … every change of mood, every beat .... I actually think my sampled sound is on the version which my (then tiny) daughter, recorded. By the way, the song was born in a car, as my manager drove me back home from viewing the rushes of Highlander … including the sequence in which Connor McCloud [sic] falls in love with his Bonnie Heather, is warned that it will lead to misery, but does not listen. I saw her die in his arms, and him carrying her body up the hill. At the time, my Dad was dying of Cancer, and my marriage was breaking up. After about 5 minutes, the song was almost complete in my mind.
It's funny: it was uncanny because I went away and wrote the song and obviously didn't see the rushes for ages again afterwards, put it down very roughly with a keyboard, but the form of it when we played it back with the movie, when we eventually got it on video, it just fitted exactly so luckily they didn't re-cut anything. And all the mood changes worked like magic and you can't predict that that would happen, you know, it wasn't done to picture. And I still see it and can't believe the way it fits.
I think this one of the best songs Brian ever wrote, and again, inspired by the movie, Highlander. I think the sequence of the movie, with the music, is one of the scenes that lifts the movie from out of the… not ordinary, it was never ordinary, it's a good movie. It's just a… it's a very special theme, music blending perfectly with what's happening on the camera and very moving.