Innuendo was gradually evolved by the four of us, but not every track was done like that: for instance, on the track Headlong, I was in the studio for a couple of days to get some things out of my system. I thought that maybe I'd be left with a solo album, maybe with a Queen album, I just didn't know and I came up with Headlong and I Can't Live with You, and the rest of the guys liked them and were very enthusiastic. So we decided to go for them on the Queen album. They were more or less finished when the group worked on them. Usually at one point one of us says, “Right! I'm going to take this track and finish it and make a proper song.” In the case of Headlong, that was me; on Innuendo, Roger actually decided to organise the words. We had a smattering of words but somebody actually has to decide what the song is going to be about, and in this case it was Roger.
There's a track on here - I won't tell you which one - which I dearly would have liked for my solo album, which I'm still working on. I thought, “I enjoy singing it, I enjoy playing it and it sounds good to me,” and then I played it to the group to see what they thought and they liked it. I decided if it gets the treatment that the group can give it, it's going to gain an extra dimension, and it would be stupid to keep it just for myself. We have each other's measures quite well, and we argue fiercely. But there's that point where you know you've said your bit, and then you should back down. I think we all know that, and it's what keeps the thing running.
Some evolved together. In the end, one of us took each song under our wing. Headlong came from me, at our studio in Montreux, a home recording studio for us that's very state-of-the-art, lovely for creating. The ideas came in a couple of days. At first I thought about it as a song for my solo album but, as always, the band is the best vehicle. As soon as I heard Freddie sing it, I said, “That's it!” Sometimes it's painful to give the baby away, but what you gain is much more. It became a Queen song.
[Joint songwriting credits] worked very well for the band, although you can pretty much work out who is responsible for what. There are things on Innuendo, for example, which are obviously me, but by talking about it you obviously destroy what we were trying to achieve… I was obviously involved heavily in Headlong, I Can't Live with You and Hitman, while All God's People came from Freddie at the same time as the Barcelona project. The Show Must Go On came from Roger and John playing the sequence and I started to put things down.