[layered guitars] Yes. That's one of my favorites. That was one of the ones which I thought came off best, and I was really pleased with the sound. It allways gives me a surprise when I listen to it because it was ment to really bring tears to your eyes. It almos does it to me.
A quiet track, very typical of Brian May's, very delicate and melodic. I personally think there's a slight McCartney influence there. Written and sung by Brian May. It's about priceless memories.
[The guitar interlude] is one of my favourites. That was one of the ones which I thought came off best, and I was really pleased with the sound. It always gives me a surprise when I listen to it because it was meant to really bring tears to your eyes. It almost does it to me.
I don't think I've ever talked about that track - nobody's ever wanted to know about that track! It was a song I'd had around for a while. It was kind of about the passing of friends and I think it crystallised because - this is very embarrassing, I don't know if I should talk about this: well, I think the thing that started it off was losing my cat! My cat died when I was a kid and I kind of never got over it and I think it was one of those things which surfaces now and again in different ways. I think I wrote the song for the album thinking that I was writing it about something completely different, but I think part of it was sort of getting that out of my system, which is a very strange thing to say, and I think that's what it's about. We never talked about it - in those days we never talked about it in the band, we didn't talk about what things were about, never, which is strange, so it was kind of personal, I suppose, and that's mainly what it is about.
For the record, as far as I remember, I played piano on: Doin' All Right, Father to Son, Now I'm Here, Dear Friends, Teo Toriatte, All Dead All Dead. Notably NOT on Sail Away Sweet Sister - I got Freddie to learn it and play it with Roger and John for the backing track - I wanted his marvellous rhythm and percussive feel on piano - but yes on Save Me, Las Palabras de Amor, Flash and The Hero (plus organ on the Wedding). But from here on in we began using synthesisers and there were many excursions from us all into keyboard territory… 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.
There's multi-tracking through the AC30 and multi-tracking through the Deacy as well. It's probably about sixteen tracks. It's all guitar. I got those by adjusting the tape speed. If I wanted to get a certain tone or to get above the guitar's range we'd slow the tape down while recording. I had to play it in a particular way so that it would work when we sped it back up. I don't remember using an EBow on that song. I've definitely used EBows to play around onstage and had a great time. But in the studio I just put myself in the exact position to get each note to feed back and sustain.
These words [“memories, my memories, how long can you stay to hunt my days…”] are the ones I was GOING to sing over the piano introduction - but decided not to! You can try it if you like!
It was started off in the studio because it was initially just an idea which I hadn't tried before. I laid down the drum track first, without any other instruments. Then I added the bass and me and Brian both played guitar. Later on I put the vocals down and it came together as a jigsaw puzzle, instead of recording the instruments together and then adding vocals and other things. I didn't even realise how it was coming together, quite a simple track, with few vocal harmonies, essentially more of a heavy metal piece, but with a relaxed feel.
Our separate identities do come to the fore on this album, on which every cut is completely different from the one before it and there's no concept at all. Apart from each having contributed two tracks to the album, Roger and John have been much more involved in the playing. Roger plays rhythm guitar on some of his cuts which makes sense, because he had a better idea of how he wanted it to go. John plays acoustic guitar on one of his as well. I played maracas on it. While we may not do it that way on stage, in the studio that makes more sense.
The only effects I like are the ones you can play, that add some sort of voice. I don't really like icing-on-the-cake effects. The only other thing I have is a gadget made by Peter Cornish to work the Harmonizer; it's a device that controls the pitch change of the Harmonizer. It's worked by a pedal. I use that for making silly noises, basically, in "Get Down, Make Love".
It's an atmospheric song written by Freddie Mercury. There's a bit in there which sounds like a synthesiser, but it's actually a new machine we'd previously used on stage, it's called a harmoniser. In fact, it creates an electronic harmony, and we adjusted the reverb and made some sort of infinite loop, which keeps on going. It sounds like a synthesiser when it's actually made up of guitar and vocal sounds.
That's a harmoniser thing which I've used really as a noise more than a musical thing. It's controllable because I had a special little pedal made for it, which means I can change the interval at which the harmoniser comes back, and it's fed back on itself so it makes all these swooping noises, and it's just an exercise in using that, together with noises from Freddie - a sort of erotic interlude.
To tell you the truth, I don't remember using an E-Bow on Good Company, though it was a long time ago and I could possibly have forgotten!! As I remember it, I did it all with the small Deacy amp, with microphones placed at various places relative to the speaker cone, depending on what tone I wanted the part to have, plus in some cases a Wah Wah pedal set to a particular place in its range, to colour the sound, and for some sounds, a volume pedal to vary the attack of, say, the trombone. I DID use an E-bow on stage though. It was very useful for starting off my long solo at one point. I could make long Whale-like noises by gently moving the device up to a position over a low string. Along with use of the Tremolo to zoom the pitch way down, and the delays I was using at the time, it gave a lot of scope for building up weird textures. I really enjoyed it if the mood was developing well that night. Usually at some point after a couple of minutes I would lob the E-bow in Jobby's direction, and lay into the guitar with a pick instead, going into more rhythmic areas. I don't know what happened to my E-bow - haven't seen it for years. Must get another one to play around with!!! The reason I didn't get heavily into it as a technique was really because I always liked to produce sustain by feedback through the air. This is quite controllable in one way, since you can move around the stage to get different degrees of positive feedback to keep the sustain going, but it's also quite exciting because unpredictable things happen - the sustained note may burst into another octave or a higher overtone. Mr. Clapton used to use this to great effect in his days in Cream. I used this too a fair bit in the early days, notably in the stage intro to Stone Cold Crazy, and later, along with a fed-back harmoniser, in the solo section of Get Down Make Love.
[tapping the fingerboard] Yes, that was actually hammering on the fingerboard with both hands. I stole it from a guy who said that he stole it from Billy Gibbons in ZZ Top. He was playing in some club in Texas, doing hammering stuff. I was so intrigued by it, I went home and played around with it for ages and put it on "It's Late". It was a sort of a double hammer. I was fretting with my left hand, hammering with another finger of the left hand, and then hammering with the right hand as well. It was a problem to do onstage; I found it was a bit too stiff. It's okay if you're sitting down with the guitar. If I persevered with it, it would probably become second nature, but it wasn't an alleyway which led very far, to my way of thinking. It's a bit gimmicky.
Typical Queen, a bit long, built up as a long, strong rock. It's essentially a rock ‘n' roll sound from 1970 and lyrics which are more in line with the new album. We spontaneously tried to show some of the styles we've done in the past. I think this piece reflects many things that we do and it was in fact the first song we recorded for the album.
It's another one of those story-of-your life songs. I think it's about all sorts of experiences that I had, and experiences that I thought other people had, but I guess it was very personal, and it's written in three parts, it's like the first part of the story is at home, the guy is with his woman. The second part is in a room somewhere, the guy is with some other woman, that he loves, and can't help loving, and the last part is he's back with his woman.
It's Late was written when my life and my experiences were very different - I had become a creature of the road - the touring world - and it seemed to me that most of the time “On the Road” was a place disconnected from home and normal life. (We are talking time before mobile phones here, and we couldn't afford to even phone home very often in the early days.) As with a lot of my stuff, it was partly very personal, and partly filtered from what I saw around me in a broad sense. The song is written in three “Scenes” because I saw the scenes as being in these almost unconnected worlds. But I'll have to leave you figure out who are the characters in each scene, and what the outcome is!!! It's Late very much also included my strong feelings that there are some things in life which CANNOT be decided - they are going to happen no matter what control we try to exert.
It's late ? Hmm ... I think we did perform it at one time ... but I'll have to check .... It wasn't easy - I remember that ... I don't really know why, but one reason was that it was very strenuous for Freddie. Hitting all those "B"'s out of the blue in the chorus was like an endurance test - not very pleasant in the middle of what was already a gruelling set ..... I certainly would find it hard myself - unless the key were changed, and that would not be easy .... But come to think of it, it would be an interesting thing for me to try live ... one day .... it sure tells a story ...
I did experiment with [tapping] very early on. I'll tell you the exact truth. I went to a bar in Texas when we were on tour and there's a very small rock band I've never heard of, playing in the bar with this amazing guitar player. I WISH to God I could remember his name. Maybe I'll find him on the net at some point. But he was playing these things, you know, nice blues licks, and then suddenly his right hand would zap onto the keyboard and make this wonderful kind of yodelling noise, or like a bagpipe or something. I'd never heard anything like it. It really made it sing in a different way and I was very excited by that, you know, seeing I'd never seen it done before. I went up to him afterwards and said, “I LOVED it. How did you do that?” I said, “I'm gonna nick this, I'm gonna tell you now. [chuckling] I'm gonna steal this” - you know, kind of joking in a way and he said, “It's nothing. I just picked it up from Billy Gibbons.” Now the odd thing is I've listened to most of Billy Gibbons' work and I've never heard him do it. I've always wondered ever since what the guy meant. But yes, I came home and I experimented with it, and I tried out, and there is a piece on It's Late where I'm doing this tapping stuff, but I never really developed it any further. I was fascinated, you know, and I used it for that solo, but I kind of left it at that.
I was in a bar in Texas and there was this guy - I wish I could remember his name. He was playing a solo and suddenly on went his right hand to the fretboard and he produced this yodeling sound that I thought was amazing - just an incredible extension of what the guitar can do. I went up to him afterwards and said, “That's great! I'm going to nick it!” His answer to me was “I got it from Billy Gibbons.” But I've heard a lot of Billy Gibbons and I don't remember ever finding it. When I went home, I started playing around with it - putting my right-hand finger on and pulling that finger off while also doing hammer-ons and pull-offs with my left hand. When it came time to cut that solo, it seemed like a good opportunity to try it out because I was looking for something different - something off the wall. Having done it, I liked it, but I was sitting down when I did it. I didn't find it so easy to play onstage standing up so I kind of got off the idea. I thought it was fine for that track but I didn't care to pursue it. I didn't think it was that important until later when a certain genius in the world made it into an art form. I want to say this very clearly: Eddie is a god and always will be. It's not just his technique, it's also his colour and spirit. But his technique is brilliant.
Written by Freddie, trying to create a mood piece, you can picture some sort of club after closing, with the singer staying and playing blues on the piano. For this piece I had to learn to play the drums with brushes.
It's different for Queen to do. I think we'll be writing some more like that.
We came up with the title for the 'Sheer Heart Attack' album, and it was a song that I had an idea for, but I hadn't actually finished the song yet. By the time I had finished the song we were two albums later, so it just struggled out on the 'News Of The World' album. It's quite interesting because we were making an album next-door to a punk band, the Sex Pistols, and it really fit into that punk explosion that was happening at the time, which was happening right then. It was actually better that it happened that it came out on the 'News Of The World' album.
We've just (at the time of writing), finished the new album (title of the moment News of the World). It's been exhausting but quicker than usual (about 2 ½ months) and is quite different to the last two. If any parallels were drawn I would say it's more like Sheer Heart Attack than any of the others, but it's very fresh sounding to my jaded ears. One of my own songs on the album is in fact called Sheer Heart Attack and was written in essence, at the time of that album, but was never properly finished and consequently didn't get on it. Anyway judge for yourselves now!
You'll probably recognise the title, as it's the same as our third album. It should have been on that album, but I couldn't finish writing it in time, but it is finished now. It's quite an energetic up-tempo track.
It was written in essence, not completely, wasn't finished at the time of recording Sheer Heart Attack, but really we didn't have room, and it wasn't quite finished and for a number of reasons it didn't get on, and now it lives again, and actually I'm quite pleased with it, it's really pure energy, and it's one of my contributions to the new album.
Our separate identities do come to the fore on this album, on which every cut is completely different from the one before it and there's no concept at all. Apart from each having contributed two tracks to the album, Roger and John have been much more involved in the playing. Roger plays rhythm guitar on some of his cuts which makes sense, because he had a better idea of how he wanted it to go. John plays acoustic guitar on one of his as well. I played maracas on it. While we may not do it that way on stage, in the studio that makes more sense.
John keeps a very close eye on our business affairs. He knows everything that's going on and shouldn't be going on. If God forsakes us now the rest of the group won't do anything unless John says it's all right. Roger is very important to us in a different way. He's always been an out-and-out rock & roll fan with no time to stop and think about music and that's very good for us. Instinct. He's also the one who is most aware of facets in music, and that's essential in the band. If you listen to Sheer Heart Attack on the new album you'll see what we mean. It sounds like a punk, or new wave song, but it was written at the same time of the Sheer Heart Attack LP. He played it to us then but it wasn't quite finished and he didn't have time to complete it before we started recording. That was three years ago and now almost all these records you hear are like that period. He was into punk for a long time, but he's tired of it.
Roger had done a demo, and our usual practice was to use the demo's as a bed for the final track. Roger had sung it all, but the decision was made to get Freddie to the job for the record. Roger was keen that Freddie sing it pretty much like the demo to retain the (kind of Punkspoof?) atmosphere. Freddie didn't find it that easy since it wasn't his natural style. But it's Freddie you hear doing the verses - double tracked. However Roger's voice is there in odd lines, joining in on “Hey hey hey”, and “'ticulate”, and the choruses are, I think, all of us, but with Roger up front – the demo versions dominating – in fact it sounds to me like ALL Roger in the choruses in the mix now I listen to it… So it's a nice little melange you have there.... Of course it was a tour de force for Freddie live - it brought out his destructive side!!!! I also enjoyed it live – nice to go flat out and uncompromisingly heavy at the end of the show. Strangely enough it was Roger who would wince when someone suggested Sheer Heart Attack as an extra encore - it was totally draining for him to keep up that pattern, especially when we got into it and it got more and more extended in our enthusiasm. Taylor Hawkins from the Foo's cites SHA as one of his favourite tracks – and even he recognises the physical commitment it takes!!
Sheer Heart Attack was really all about attitude. It was tapping very much into the punk ethos. It's a thrash. It was about the sheer frustration of being inarticulate and not being able to express your rage, I guess. It was meant to be about a teenager. I'd written some of the song a few years earlier during the period we were working on the Sheer Heart Attack album, but we hadn't recorded it properly. So I think I demoed it, and we didn't record Sheer Heart Attack until a couple of albums later.
I always liked Sheer Heart Attack. I started the song when we were doing the Sheer Heart Attack album, but didn't get ‘round to finishing it. By the time I did, punk had come along. But the song came before punk. Foo Fighters do a good version. Sheer Heart Attack sounds like a Foo Fighters song.
That was the quickest song I ever wrote in my life, I just wrote it down. It’s funny because it’s one of the ones I’m quite pleased with as well. It’s not trying too hard, it’s not highly subtle but I think it leaves me with quite a good feeling. It was sort of a one-take thing as well. Although, I messed around with the take a lot and chopped it about and rearranged it, it was basically the first take, which we used. So, it has that kind of sloppy feel that I think works with the song. Which we never would have dreamed with the previous albums. We always used to work on the backing tracks until they were a million percent perfect and if they weren’t we would splice together two which were. We’d go to great lengths, but for this album we wanted to get that spontaneity back in.
We had a classic case with "Sleeping on the Sidewalk," which we did as a first take. I was trying to explain to Roger [Taylor, Queen drummer] what I wanted, which was a simple blues shuffle beat type thing. We did endless takes and it never sounded as good as the first take. I took the cassette mix home of that first take and it sounded incredible. In my mind, we never got the sound of that first cassette mix. I have no idea why but it always sounds like it's half falling to pieces, whereas on that first cassette it all gelled and sounded like it was a band.
We recorded it in one take, it sounds like an old blues track, quick and simple. Brian did some sort of smooth voice on it.
I think we've managed to cut through to the spontaneity lacking in our other albums. I have no apologies to make for any of our previous albums. We're proud of them and wouldn't have let them out if we weren't. But I now feel some may have been over-produced, so we wanted to go with a more spontaneous rock ‘n' roll based album. It was nice to do something that didn't need such intensity. For example, with Sleeping on the Sidewalk, we did it in one take because it just seemed right the first time. We like to think of the album as a window on an unguarded moment, not a set piece.
English traditional recording at that time was: everybody has to be sealed off from everyone else - the guitar has to be in this little cubicle, the drums have to be hidden away in this place which is totally deadened, there's no way that anything should meet except when it gets on the tape. I thought it'd be fun to do it opposite and just set up all in the studio so we can all see each other and hear each other and play so you won't be able to change anything but you would get a live feel. Mike Stone was engineering and he was very into it and thought, “yeah, why don't we do this - that's obviously what people did in the old days and used to work, why doesn't it work now?” So we did it one day: set up just within about a five foot radius of each other and play the thing - and I didn't have the song complete at the time, we had just a verse and a chorus, and I said, “just try it like this,” having played it over to them, and Mike luckily had the tape rolling and the first time we played it through it had a certain sort of feel. We went and listened to it in the control room and it sounded great and we thought, “that's exact!” We all loved it and thought it sounded natural and had a nice feel to it and the sounds were warm, you could feel that everything was in the same room. So then we thought, “Great! Let's go and do it now and get it right and perfect it and then we'll have it on tape.” So we spent about, I would say, two days solid, trying to get the thing better, and it never got any better, it got worse and worse, it got turdiered and we changed some of the sounds and that made it worse and somehow it just lost all its soul. We want back and listened to the first take and we thought, “it had it then, and it doesn't now.” To this day I don't know what happened but we'd just destroyed it.
It just wasn't possible to recreate the magic of the first take. It was exceptional. I hadn't even explained the structure of the song to Roger and John - we just went in and played it as a guide, treating it as a bit of fun - playing with a lazy kind of blues feel, which was what I'd wanted. As soon as we heard the take back we were astonished - everyone thought we must have been practising it for ages… So then, after discussing the structure of the whole song, we went back in and started taking it seriously. We played all the right notes, but the feel was never like the first one - that relaxed feel could only be approximated to. It was one of those examples of a “Moment” caught on tape. You cannot recreate a moment. As soon as you're trying to do this, by definition you will fail. So? Well, I constructed the entire song out of that first take. In those days there was no Protools. We had to duplicate the multitrack tape, and cut it up, and reassemble it with a little ingenuity, a very small bit of crafty overdubbing from me, and sticky tape. I am not joking! The backing track was then ready to sing on. So there it is. As for revisiting recordings - no we we have never felt the urge unless there was some specific new purpose for doing so. I always regard the original mixes as something special - even with their imperfections. Another example of a “Moment”. That's why, when we remix for 5.1 surround, we always include a faithful reproduction of the EXACT original Stereo mix done at the time AS WELL. I have seen people complaining about this on the Web! But if they want digital stereo they have only to “fold down” the 5.1 version. To us the original mix, with the sound the mastering tape made as it was driven into saturation, and all the moves made by our fingers on the mechanical faders at that moment, not to mention all the colours brought into it by the old mixing desk, and the vintage equalisation, original valve compressors, limiters, etc. is SPECIAL.
Sleepin' on the Sidewalk was recorded using the first take of the backing track (which was incomplete, so I/we did a little jiggery pokery). WE recorded other takes, but this one had the “magic”. But it was simply a first take… a first attempt, after I'd roughly explained the song to the chaps. We were fully aware that the tape was rolling - stories get a little modified over the years, I guess.
Sleeping on the Sidewalk is a little treasure and a real departure. Queen didn't often play the blues, and we also did it completely live and spontaneous – something else which didn't happen often. I never wanted us just to be defined by our singles. We were an albums band.
A bit of a commercial piece written by John Deacon, who's a really good composer. It's something we arranged together, a team effort.
Basically just one of the two tracks I happen to have come up with, you know, this year, and managed to squeeze on the album. [Songwriting] is quite difficult actually, but it's getting a little bit better as time goes on, you know I only started really, [on] the Sheer Heart Attack album I had a little track called Misfire, but Best Friend was the real sort of first proper-length song I wrote really, so I'm sort of still new to it, but it's improving anyway. I don't actually tend to compose on the bass, I'm usually on either on a just sort of acoustic guitar, or perhaps piano.
Again a John Deacon song. He didn't write that many but a lot of them were hits. Not a huge hit but still very popular.
We have what I think is a dynamite new single called We Are the Champions - modest it's not, but fun anyway. I hope you'll all be humming it in the bath or shower soon if you go in for that sort of thing.
I like to think I write songs that are mostly different, and I'm always willing to learn. It's so much more interesting to write different types of songs rather than repeat the same formula. When I come up with a song like, We Are the Champions, because it's got a bit chorale or whatever, they think, “oh, he's trying to repeat the same Rhapsody thing,” little do they realise, structurally, it's just totally different. It's got a chorus at the end that I just thought it's a very singable chorus, but there's also some sort of sophistication, I hope, anyway, in the sort of verses. But one very interesting fact was when we did a promotional film, recently, we did it in front of an audience, it was like freezing, and they knew we were gonna do it three or four times. In between takes they'd sort of get carried away and while they were waiting for us to come on they'd go into the “we are the champions,” and they kind of drew that parallel.
I was thinking about football when I wrote it. I wanted a participation song, something that the fans could latch on to. It was aimed at the masses; I thought we'd see how they took it. It worked a treat. When we performed it at a private concert in London, the fans actually broke into a football chant between numbers. Of course, I've given it more theatrical subtlety than an ordinary football chant. You know me. I certainly wasn't thinking about the press when I wrote it. I never think about the British music press these days. It was really meant to be offered the musicians the same as the fans. I suppose it could also be construed as my version of I Did It My Way. We have made it, and it certainly wasn't easy. No bed of roses as the song says. And it's still not easy.
Freddie likes all sorts of weird things and at the moment he's really into Michael Jackson. Michael was going to come on stage for an encore at one of our shows to do We Are the Champions because it's apparently his favourite song, but he chickened out.
I remember when I was writing Bohemian Rhapsody I had a song called We Are the Champions, but I just didn't feel that it fitted at the time and I just kept it aside and it was virtually, I think about two or three years later that I sort of pulled it out of the bag again and there you are, so you can never tell.
With Freddie, I always felt there was something in the way of electricity happening and there are some moments which are on tape which I am proud of. They are not the great virtuoso moments. For instance, when we did We Are the Champions, I had done the guitar for that fairly early on. Everyone said, “That's fine.” Normally the person who wrote the song did the mix which was the case in this instance: Freddie was mixing the thing. I took a cassette tape of it home halfway through and they were going to finish it off in the morning. I thought that guitar just didn't make it. It seemed weak in comparison to the way the song had evolved. So I said, “Look, Fred, I have to get back and do that.” I re-did everything and there's a little piece towards the end when I was trying to make the guitar sing along with Freddie's vocals. He was really pushing himself on the vocals at the end so I tried to push the guitar and express the way I felt. It's hardly audible on the record. It's not like a major feature but you can hear the guitar and the vocal are kind of straining against each other. That's the sort of thing which I like to listen to now. It's a nice moment which is captured.
On guitar setting: That is my number one normal sound: I use that on a lot of things. It's the bridge pickup and the middle pickup in phase with each other. They are wired in series.
That was a response to a particular phase in our career when the audience was becoming a bigger part of the show than we were. They would sing all the songs. In a place like Birmingham, they'd be so vociferous that we'd have to stop the show and let them sing to us. So both Freddie and I thought it would be an interesting experiment to write songs with audience participation specifically in mind. My feeling was that everyone can stamp and clap and sing a simple motif. We did that record at Wessex, which is an old converted church that has a naturally good sound to it. There are no drums on there. It's just us, stamping on boards many times with many primitive delay machines and clapping. A bit of singing, a bit of guitar playing and that's it. At concerts, I discovered, people tend to do three claps rather than two stamps and a clap. The amazing thing is to go to football matches, or sports events in general, and hear people do it. It's very gratifying to find that it has become part of folklore, sort of. I'll die happy because of that.
Rythmically what everyone will remember me for is "Boom, Boom, Click. Boom, Boom, Click." which is "We Will Rock You", and everybody thinks "Oh what a great drumbeat", but there were of course no drums on that. It was just people stamping and clapping, and it was in my head because I thought this is what people could do in an audience. They could do that, and they could particpate and be with us.
If I'm honest, I think I would like to be remembered for a few of the songs, none of which were really hits, but some of which had a lot of emotion in them: White Queen and Let Us Cling Together and Long Away off the A Day at the Races album. And We Will Rock You.
That is my number one normal sound: I use that on a lot of things. It's the bridge pickup and the middle pickup in phase with each other. They are wired in series.
[The mysterious opening noise] is the tail end of me counting the stamps and claps in, that fateful day so long ago in Wessex Studios in North London. I don't know if I've described it before but I got into applying loads of different delays, not multiples of each other - prime numbers. A lot of these got applied to the original count, plus the final long delay was from one “boom boom crack” to the next. So you hear “four” delayed into the track in a kind of multiple echo.
Everybody thinks that's drums, but it's not. It's feet. We sat on a piano and used out feet on an old drum podium. It's rather hard to explain in words what we did, but what you hear isn't drums. We must have recorded it, I don't know, 15 times or so. We put all sorts of different repeats on it to make it sound big.
Stamping on Piano's? Well, I never heard this rumour. It's not true, sorry! I wanted this new song, We Will Rock You, to sound elemental, like nothing that had been done before. I had the idea to get the four of us to stamp on some building boards that were lying around in Wessex Studios in North London, where we were recording News of the World (strangely enough, the embryonic Sex Pistols were in the studio next door in the early stages of recording their first album [sic]). And clap too, to make the pattern. We stamped and clapped many times, overdubbing, building up the layers, and our engineer, Mike Stone, had microphones all round the room. This was before the days of sophisticated delay machines, so I mixed all the tracks down with Mike, with different delays, related to each other in length with prime numbers, so there would not be any discernible “echo”. I wanted the sound to be huge but totally “in-your-face” - not echoey. Well, somehow it worked, because nobody seems to have been able to make a similar sound since… the list of recording artists who have sampled our stamps and claps (legally and illegally) now run into thousands… But no piano's. Sorry. No drums either, actually! Just stamps and claps and vocals. Oh, and a bit of raw guitar!
An absolute contrast with the rest of the album, a different side of Queen, a very laid-back song with a bit of a calypso influence. People will think they're on a beach in Tahiti or wherever. It's one of John's, I'd say it's quite relaxed and light.
Our separate identities do come to the fore on this album, on which every cut is completely different from the one before it and there's no concept at all. Apart from each having contributed two tracks to the album, Roger and John have been much more involved in the playing. Roger plays rhythm guitar on some of his cuts, which makes sense, because he had a better idea of how he wanted it to go. John plays acoustic guitar on one of his as well. I played maracas on it. While we may not do it that way on stage, in the studio that makes more sense.
I played all the lead work. John played Rhythm.