A lot of people said it would've made a single at the time, but there wasn't really room. There always was this thing about me that I sort of felt that I'd missed out on life by being an only child. I thought that that explained some of my endless running around looking for the right woman to sort of share my problems or whatever, I guess it's got something to do with that.
That's a pretty song, maybe [Brian] should've called it Ballad of an Only Child or something.
This one has always been a favourite of mine - I wished it could have been a single at the time, but really it would not have worked to put something out as a single on which Freddie was not the principal singer. Of course he DOES sing the middle eight - and beautifully too. The solo in Sail Away was always intended to be Killer Queen revisited in a different way (for reasons which are obvious to me, but do not need going into!). The solo starts the same way, on one guitar, and is then enjoined by two others which add in “Bell” type harmonies, a la Mantovani(which I think I talked about elsewhere). In other words the first guitar hangs on, and each guitar that joins in adds in a harmony. The three guitar melodies go on for just a few notes, and then there is an interplay of “Bells” going upwards in pitch (rather than downwards as in Killer Queen), and there are FIVE of them and they step in very quickly! Now four of them keep playing in harmony until the end when they all become bound into a tight set of ascending chords leading back into the final chorus.
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.
I'm fond of Sail Away Sweet Sister.
One more memory from the Mack days. We're mixing Sail Away Sweet Sister, and I had planned to have all the small fragments in the multitrack guitar solo pan across the stereo in a certain way, so it would be fun when you listened on headphones. Most recording engineers start a mix by establishing a sound balance for the backing track - drums, bass, rhythm guitar or piano - and then add in other instruments one by one so you can logically build up the mix. Mack had none of this going on. He worked the whole time listening to everything, and making adjustments with what seemed like random levels. Of course it all made perfect sense to him, but sitting beside him, you had no clue what he was working on at any one time. I asked him if we could hear all the bits of the solo separately and locate them in the stereo space. He looked at me strangely: “Probably not”, he said. I think he tried, reluctantly, to let me hear them separately but, bizarrely, it turned out that you could only hear them all with the whole mix up! So some of them must have got put on to tracks that were dedicated to other instruments… We never did find all the pieces, and to this day it sounds odd to me, but … actually? It works. Mack's methods were strange but they worked for him. And they sure worked for us in this piece of our history, the glory days of the Munich era.