I was never a professional musician; the only times I've ever played in public were in the school band and in the Air Force during the war when I used to take my ukelele down to the pub - that's the same old ukelele, a genuine “George Formby Uke”, that Brian still plays now when he uses a ukelele on stage with Queen. It's full of beer stains inside from the war days, but Brian still insists that it's got the best sound he's ever heard from a ukelele, although he also uses a little Japanese one which he was presented with there when they were touring Japan. It was on that ukelele that he learned to play and sing his first songs, old George Formby music hall numbers like Cleaning Windows, Leaning on the Lamp-Post, and Chinese Laundry Blues - I taught them all to him. Then he started developing techniques of his own which were remarkably like George Formby's… he also used to play the mouth organ and when he joined the school choir, he used to practise like mad for that.
It is a genuine George Formby ukelele, it says “George Formby,” there's a little picture of him at the top. I'm not saying the ukelele actually belonged to George Formby, it was made in that style.
The ukelele was incidental to that because it that was Freddie's song. It had this kind of vaudeville atmosphere and I just thought the ukelele would go nicely on it and we worked beside it, so it could be done, and I managed to fiddle a little ukelele solo. That was the first instrument I played. My father had a genuine George Formby ukelele. George Formby was the originator of that style of playing, which is rhythmic and slightly melodic at the same time, because he played across the top and bottom strings to make little melodies. I'm a pretty poor imitator of that style, but I got interested in it.
[The low voice] was either Brian or Freddie. I think maybe we cheated it with a bit of I think we might have speeded the tape up a bit, so it sounded really deep.
We really got there on Sheer Heart Attack. It's still one of my favourites. It's got a lot of fire and it's slightly more streamlined - Queen II is a bit lumbering in places. We were working very hard in the studio by then. There's a song on Heart Attack called Bring Back That Leroy Brown that's incredibly complex in terms of instrumentation and arrangements - there were countless hours labouring over that.
At the beginning it was also accepted Freddie was the most prolific writer. Listen to something like Bring Back That Leroy Brown. I don't even know how you'd describe that music. Is it blackmusic? Vaudeville… What is it?