A Winters Tale was the last song he [Freddie] wrote.
Towards the end, Freddie had already kind of moved on. Freddie was writing stuff which you will hear, which is very peaceful and already removed, and I think it was left to us to write the things which we felt about him and we felt about the way he was feeling. I think it would've been too painful for Freddie to get into that, but he was happy to sing the way we felt. That's kind of complicated - we were very much directed towards him and he knew it, but he would sing it with our words.
I love the last song he wrote, A Winter's Tale. It doesn't philosophise, it's just about how beautiful life is. He wrote it one morning, beside the lake and looking at the mountains.
John actually used [his amp] himself, multi-tracked, on his song Misfire on Sheer Heart Attack, and it features heavily in much of the more intricate arrangements I did for the Queen albums. Let's see... The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke was all triple-tracked and gated by hand using the old push-push buttons in the now defunct Wessex studios [sic]; God Save the Queen, Dreamers Ball, all those trumpet, trombone and clarinet sounds from Good Company... the solo on A Winter's Tale; I love these sounds - no electronic box can make this noise!
One of the last things I did under the name of the old Queen, if you like, was a track off the Made in Heaven album called A Winter's Tale. I had plenty of time to think about it because we had lost Freddie when we were making that album and we wondered what we would do with the tracks. So I worked very hard with the old Deacy amplifier and some other effects as well. I wanted the guitar to sound like it was in heaven. I'm pleased with how that turned out.
There was huge songwriting competition in Queen, no doubt about it. It was a major factor in pushing us onwards. We were very conscious that we had to reach inside ourselves to keep up. Occasionally Freddie would write fast, but a lot of the time he'd go home and scheme and scheme, and come back with stuff written all over a pad of his dad's notepaper. He'd spend time developing ideas. But there are exceptions, where he'd get the song in one bite. And often they're the ones that connect. Freddie mainly used the piano for songwriting, but there were times when he'd get inspiration when he wasn't around his instrument. It could be any experience; a skate on the pond. One of the last songs he wrote, A Winter's Tale, was written purely sat looking out on the mountains from the other side of Lake Geneva. He could obviously hear it all in his head, although he didn't have any musical instruments with him. I remember him coming into the studio and saying: “I've got this idea… just give me a few minutes.” Then he brought it to life. That's a beautiful track, actually.
Working with Queen was always a great experience because they were just so talented, all four of them were talented, so whenever they came into the studio, not always together, but there would be someone working here on a new song, writing songs, and then when they were all together, then they would play in the big hall as a band and that was fantastic, you know. Hearing the band was like your own private concert. Amazing. The most obvious memory for me is the day I spent with Freddie by myself, well, just himself and me in here, when it wasn't the last vocal that he recorded - that was Mother Love - it was A Winter's Tale, which is the one before, only a few days before in April or May, I think it was, 1991. Everybody was away and Dave Richards, the engineer, was ill, so Freddie said, “Well, you'll have to record me!” So it was just him standing there, singing in the control room, and me recording him, and that was a very special day because it was one of the last vocals he ever recorded. Freddie and I knew each other from years before because he'd been here many times from, well, in the late 80's, so at least three or four years him coming here, so it was fine. He knew me, I knew him, so it was very easy communication, and he was always very nice to me. He sang amazingly even though he was struggling physically. He'd be conserving his energy to try and get the most power out of his voice, which is there on the records. You can hear it on Winter's Tale and Mother Love. But it wasn't a sad time - people think it may have been sad, but I mean although we knew he was ill, everybody in the Queen organisation, the band and everyone else around and mostly Freddie, just said, “Look, forget all that. I'm just going to focus on the music and do everything I can.” And everyone else was supporting the man and doing the same. Just forgetting about the bad stuff and focusing on the good stuff. He'd been ill for some years, so we'd had sessions from ‘88, ‘89, where he was coming in, the whole band was coming in every few months to record, so there's a kind of continuation. We never, we didn't know, exactly when it would happen, or when it would stop or the last recording would be.
Between 1984 until 1991 I had probably spent more time in this room than anywhere else but, when I sat down here in June 2013 to test the speaker system and demonstrate this mixing concept for Queen: The Studio Experience, I didn't anticipate feeling quite so moved. That music… in this room… after all this time - Mother Love, Freddie's final vocal recording. I was working on that session in May 1991 as assistant engineer, and Dave was at the helm with Brian, Roger and John here too. There was one particular day however, not long before we'd started work on Mother Love, that was more significant for me personally. The other band members were not around and Freddie had been in Montreux for a few days preparing to record his vocal on A Winter's Tale. This song had been started that January but the key had been changed, the lyrics since finished, and Freddie was ready to sing. When the day came, Dave was suddenly taken ill, and, when I told Freddie, he just said “you'll have to do it then darling!” He was in the habit of recording vocals in the control room with minimal monitoring and no headphones - it was quite intimate - just Freddie and me - and everyone else banished for the afternoon. He sang three or four takes all the way through, then went back and focused on various parts he felt needed attention - so we had up to five versions of the most “tricky” bits ready to compile. In addition to his lead vocal, Freddie also sang some multi-track harmonies near the end of the song. I noticed he had a remarkably clear mental image of exactly what performance of each lyric was on each track. So, for example, he might ask to drop-in one line on a particular track to replace what he knew was his least favourite without checking it first - he just knew. And all the time, even when struggling to stand with his walking-stick and finding it difficult to reach notes he thought he should have made easily… he was still incredibly funny and upbeat. That is how I came to spend a day alone in the studio with Freddie recording one of his last vocals. Jim told me afterwards Freddie was very pleased with how the session had gone, so naturally I was too.
Winter's Tale was Freddie's last piece of songwriting. He knew he didn't have long and was singing about the beauty of the world. It's not maudlin at all. After he died, I decided nobody else could touch it until Roger and I decided to bring it to a natural conclusion.