Well, its a compilation, and we thought it was nice, because if you have the "Greatest Hits I" and "Greatest Hits II" you have the singles, but the singles were normally kind of a lighter side to Queen just because they were more kind of radio friendly. So this album is the first Queen album you would ever get where it just rocks the whole way through. It's good for your car.
The songs were just chosen because they were rock-songs really, like the hard rock end of what we do. It's just that Freddie mainly was writing different stuff, I suppose.
There are some collaborations on there. This is meant to be a hard-rock album, with the exception of this new song. And that's really the way it turned out. I mean we sort of split everything equally anyway, you know. in the band. So it was just. we tended to write that. especially Brian tended to write the harder rock songs. So it turned out.
The last album "Made in Heaven" was quite, quite slow, quite down, quite a lot of ballads, lot of slow songs and we thought it would be nice, if we did release a compilation, releasing the hard rock songs of Queen.
We thought it would be nice to give people what we never gave them, which is everything up. Like an album was normally very full of light and shade, all our albums were like that, you would find something very strong and then something very gentle on purpose you know so that the album was very listenable I suppose. But we thought it would be just great to have an album that you can just bung in your car or whatever and it rocks the whole way.
It's more than remixed. It's kind of re-performed really. It's a sort of rock n roll version which was done as a celebration of Queen Rocks.
It was going to be for the solo album, but the chaps liked it a lot and thought it was kind of an important thing.
Yes I really wrote it about Freddie, but as you deal with a song, of course, it expands in it's meaning, I suppose, and we've lost a lot of people too young, recently, you know with Princess Diana and very sad to hear about Michael Hutchence the other day. So it's something which is in your mind a lot.
It goes back to Jimi Hendrix, and in a way that's what the song's about. It's like maybe you die young, but you burn, you know. A lot of people go for it, and the metphor is that they fly too close to the sun, which is like the Icarus legend.
He [Roger] put it away in a drawer somewhere you know, cause he was busy or whatever and it was months later when Roger phoned up suddenly, excited and said I just listened to the track and its amazing, and we have to do it as a Queen song.
Um, Brian wrote the song, sent it to me, ahh, a few months ago. I lost it, found it again, and I played it, and just thought, 'it sounds like a Queen song', and I know Brian wanted me to play on it, I think for his solo album, and I thought, boy, did we need John here. And so we eventually got together, and it was like the old chemistry just came back, and it just felt great to be playing together again. It just clicked in, just like a, just like a... click.