We approached [the album] from a different angle, with the idea of ruthlessly pruning it down to a coherent album rather than letting our flights of fancy lead us off into different ideas. The impetus came very largely from Freddie, who said that he thought we'd been diversifying so much that people didn't know what we were about anymore. So if there's a theme to the album, it's rhythm and sparseness: never two notes played if one would do. Which is a hard discipline for us, because we tend to be quite over the top in the way we work. So the whole thing had a very economical feel to it, particularly Another One Bites the Dust, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Dragon Attack, Suicide, a very sparse feel to all of them and, for us, a very modern-sounding album.
It was put together in an unusual way, in fact, I don't know if I can really claim to have written it, because in fact we just jammed for a little while, we were feeling good one night, and put down the basic riff, and I just sat in the studio and cut it up and made it into a song, and put the vocal on, obviously, we had to actually make it into a song that meant something. But all that guitar stuff was all done on the night and I just used the bits that I liked.
We used to do a song called Dragon Attack that was very hard on the right wrist.
The drum solo in the middle, and the pounding Bonham-esque beat, gives this a dancey groove. As a band, Queen were always creating and going deeper.
If I had to choose three favourite Queen tracks, I'd have: Dragon Attack, because it has such a great riff and that insane drum solo; Play the Game, which I remember from first hearing The Game album and which still sounds incredible; and, finally, Under Pressure.