On using slide: No, that's guitar in parallel harmonies. Those aren't my favorite harmonies, really. I much prefer guitar harmonies which aren't parallel. There are very few people who have done them. The real interest in guitar harmonies comes from when they're crossing over, diverging, and converging. Somehow on "Dancer" it seemed right to do those parallels.
We were thinking about rhythm before anything else, so in some cases like Dancer the backing track was there a long time before the actual song was properly pieced together. We would experiment with the rhythm and the bass and drum track and get that sounding right, and then very cautiously piece the rest around it, which was an experimental way for us to do it, this way.
Some records out now are all keyboards. Songs like Don't You Want Me Baby? don't have a guitar on them. That's mainly because keyboards have gotten better over the years. It's now very easy to get a nice full bass sound out of them. My role actually shrank with the use of keyboards. It now gives the group direct expression for a non-bassist to play their own bass line. Some of the track on the album - like Body Language - were Freddie on keyboard bass. Brian played [synth] bass on Dancer. So I'm redundant in a sense.
That's guitar in parallel harmonies. Those aren't my favourite harmonies, really. I much prefer guitar harmonies which aren't parallel - there are very few people who have done them. The real interest in guitar harmonies comes from when they're crossing over, diverging, and converging. Somehow, on Dancer, it seemed right to do those parallels.