"Crazy Little Thing Called Love" took me five or ten minutes. I did that on the guitar, which I can't play for nuts, and in one way it was quite a good thing because I was restricted, knowing only a few chords. It's a good discipline because I simply had to write within a small framework. I couldn't work through too many chords and because of that restriction I wrote a good song, I think.
I used on of Roger's really old, beat ip, natural wood Telecaster. I got bludgeoned into playing it. That was Mack's idea. I said "I don't want to play a Telecaster. It basically doesn't suit my style". But "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" was such a period piece, it seemed to need that period sound. So I said, "Okay, Mack, if you want to set it up, I'll play it". He put it through a Mesa/Boggie, which is an amplifier I don't get on what at all; it just doesn't suite me. I tried it, and it sounded okay.
The guys put down the backing track for that one when I was out doing something in Munich, where we were working; Freddie said he wrote the song in his bathtub at the Munich Hilton. I came back and thought, 'Oh my God, it's almost finished. Let me put some guitar on It before they stick It out.' Fred plays the rhythm acoustic guitar. All I really did was add a kind of ersatz rock and roll solo and some backing har- monies and it was done.
This time, though, we just went to Munich as we like the city and put it together there, ending up with far too many songs. 'Crazy Little Thing' was the easiest and we had that out in a matter of hours and the rest ws just a case of go in the studio, get a bit drunk and bash it out.
It only took about twenty minutes to do the backtrack on Crazy Little Thing. It was the first thing we cut that summer at Musicland in Munich.
We've written a lot of weird songs in our time, let me tell you. I think, in my estimation, this is one of them.
I wrote Crazy Little Thing on guitar and played rhythm on the record, and it works really well because Brian gets to play all those lead guitar fills as well as his usual solo. I'm somewhat limited by the number of chords I know. I'm really just learning, but I hope to play more guitar in the future.
This time we just went to Munich as we like the city and put it together there, ending up with far too many songs. Crazy Little Thing was the easiest and we had that out in a matter of hours and the rest was just a case of go in the studio, get a bit drunk and bash it out. We're not trying to solve the problems of the world and who isn't just entertainment? Who is writing anything more than that? I think it's very pretentious to say that there's great importance to it; that's what the press seem to spend all their time doing. This week's thing and you're nobody if you don't appreciate it.
I can write songs to order, like a job. Some songs come faster that others: Bohemian Rhapsody I had to work at like crazy. I just wanted that kind of song. Crazy Little Thing Called Love took me five or ten minutes. I did that on the guitar, which I can't play for nuts, and in one way it was quite a good thing because I was restricted, knowing only a few chords. It's a good discipline because I simply had to write within a small framework. I couldn't work through too many chords and because of that restriction I wrote a good song, I think.
All of us have played guitar on our record. It's one of those things that we have disagreements about. Brian is our guitarist, but we all happen to play. Sometimes songs are written on the guitar, like Freddie's Crazy Little Thing Called Love. Freddie wrote that on acoustic and it just had a natural feel with him playing guitar.
These days, basically, I just write [songs] in my head. Otherwise basically piano. The guitar part is over; Crazy Little Thing was the last song that I ever wrote on a guitar. I'm sort of limited with the guitar chords. Sometimes that's a good thing, that's why I liked Crazy Little Thing, the same way, if I knew too many guitar chords then I'd sort of ruin them.
I don't think I was even there! It always happens: if I go out for a couple of hours, they create something else. I came back and they'd already put down the backing track. Roger just had the live drums, Freddie had played acoustic guitar - cause that rhythm on there is Freddie, I don't think I played any of that. That was a good thing for Mack, who became our engineer for those couple of albums, and producer, well, co-producer, cause I guess we were always the producers, being big-headed as we are. I think Mack secretly had wanted to work with us for a long time, and he had all these things he wanted to try with us. And he was very good at getting drum sounds very quick, and the drum sound is very big in that particular… there was a drum which used to have mics inside and outside, so he would stick a few faders and the drums would sound crisp and big, without sounding washy, they just sounded great. So that was a bonus really. It was good, Mack, actually, I mean, he brought out some things, we were a bit set in our ways by that time, I think we thought there was one way of doing things. And Mack said - and he's a very dry German but he sounds English ‘cause he worked with Jeff Lynne for years, so he had a kind of Birmingham / German accent. Talking about the guitar, you know, I said, “Well, I can make my guitar sound like a Telecaster, like those old rock ‘n' roll records,” and he said “if you want it to sound like a Telecaster, play a Telecaster.” So he got me to do it, which is unusual. That was one of the few times I ever played something that wasn't my regular guitar, and it did work very well. I used Roger's Telecaster, one of his collection, he really collects extremely rare guitars, so I used one of those. And it just worked out, it sounded fine.
We recorded that song, really, six months before the rest of the album, and I remember while we were actually in the studio in Munich in Germany doing the rest of that album, that song had already been released, and we were there and I remember somebody phoning up and said “hey, your record's number two in America,” and we all went out in celebration, and then the next week we got the phone call again: “hey, your record's number one in America,” and it seemed unreal because we were in the other side of the world, and we hadn't even finished the album which the single was from, we were still working on it, and we thought, “we're off to a good start here.” It is Freddie on acoustic, it took half an hour to record, it was like that, it had a great feel. I remember he came in the studio, he says, “my dear, I just wrote this in the bath,” and he did, he'd just been lying in the bath, and there it was, it was very simple, very easy, and it had a great fresh sound to it. And I think Brian did a really nice Telecaster solo on that, which fitted in great with that slight rockabilly kind of edge, you know. We wanted it like an almost a slightly early Elvis feel, you know, that was the idea, that's not easy to get, but the record did sound good, I think. I remember actually one of the things which made me very proud, was that John Lennon said in some article, he said something like, “I heard the Queen record and it made me wanna get back in the studio,” and I thought, “wow, fantastic,” to have actually had any little dent on somebody like Lennon is great.
When we recorded Crazy Little Thing Called Love, rockabilly was quite uncool at the time. But it caught on in a big way, and I think influenced a lot of other artists to try stuff in that area. Look at George Michael and Faith.
The first track we attempted was Crazy Little Thing Called Love. Freddie picked up an acoustic guitar and said, “quick, let's do this before Brian comes.” About six hours later the track was done. The guitar solo was an overdub later on. Brian still hates me for making him use a Telecaster for the part. It was released as a pre-album single and went to number one. That obviously helped a great deal to inspire confidence and the working relationship tremendously.
Quite a triumph for Mack as an engineer and producer. The boys had recorded most of this by the time I got to studio that day, because it was after a late night at the studio I seem to remember. And I remember thinking, oh I could've just spent another half an hour getting there, and I came in to hear this track they'd just put down, with Freddie playing acoustic. It's worth mentioning Freddie's acoustic. Freddie was really a good acoustic player. He was very modest about it, but he could really play the acoustic guitar very well in an inimitable style, very frenetic kind of, style. I remember, he wrote Ogre Battle on the acoustic guitar. His fingers moved twice as fast as anyone else for the same speed of playing, yes I can still his kind of, horny fingers hitting the strings on this. Freddie doing his Elvis, very successfully.
Written in ten minutes, in the bath, by Freddie in the Bayerischer Hof Hotel. The first thing we recorded in Munich, the first of many, and a great-sounding record, this, and as I remember, we were working hard on the album a couple of months later, to be told this had gone to Number One in America. It was quite weird, that was good news, we had a big celebration. [Freddie] did a very good Elvis, and a very good Cliff Richard.
Freddie played the guitar very well. Certainly in the early days he used the guitar as much as the piano to write songs… Later on, he wrote almost exclusively on the piano. But of course, in the live shows, he always played the guitar in Crazy Little Thing, just like on the record. That's not me playing acoustic rhythm guitar on the original track - that's Freddie. And he played it very well indeed. As on the piano, he had a unique and inimitable touch.
Freddie being the guy who did play it on the record - that's not me playing the rhythm on the record, that's Freddie, and he was a good guitarist.