[story behind the song] Well, Yeah. I mean, it's something which has affected us, individually, as members of the group recently. It's very strange, 'cause we were fairly famous for a long time in England, you know the last fifteen years or whatever, but we didn't become a prey to these kind of scummy papers until recently. And it's not related to what you are doing, you know. They are not interested what music you play, or anything. They just want the dirt, and if they can't find any they'll invent it if they choose to pick on you. So we were all going through a lot of changes in our lives and suddenly it became a big problem, you know, in a similar way... you've heard about what they did to Elton, you know? These stories about Elton, and everything, which he sued them for and got a million quid off 'em. You know, great. Well they did very similar things to me particularly, and to a certain extent to Roger, and Freddie also had been through it a little while before. But this thing is total.. you know, steam in and destroy someone's life. They really are the scum of the earth. You can't exaggerate it too much.
We've all been hauled through the tabloids now. It's very strange that we've been moderately famous for some time, but not tabloid fodder until the last three years. It's not been pleasant. Some papers want a certain kind of news, and it can wreck people's lives. I don't think those papers have any sense of responsibility about it. I thought it would never happen to me. I thought I was a very stable person and not open to anything like that. But life changes, you know? I kicked and screamed against it, but in the end you do change. You grow, the people you're with grow, and sometimes you don't grow together. It actually screwed me up completely. For nearly a year I was incapable, so depressed. It wasn't all because of the papers, but they don't help. Most of it they made up anyway, but there's no point denying it because you just make it worse.
I think this is [Brian's].
We began using synthesisers and there were many excursions from us all into keyboard territory. My main contributions on principal parts were (in no particular order) in: Scandal, Was It All Worth It, Hang On In There, Too Much Love Will Kill You (which was done with Frank Musker up in his house in the Canyon in L.A. when we first sketched the song), No-one But You (again done on my own, originally for use on my solo album), One Vision (my first ramblings on a Kurzweil gave rise to the opening section), I Can't Live With You, The Show Must Go On (that sequence just got thrust into my head playing around with Roger - I will never know where it came from, but it completely took me over for a long time while the song was in development), and of course, Who Wants to Live Forever.
This is something from me, obviously, as far as the idea of the song happened in the studio, really; but, thematically, it's very close to all of our hearts because particularly Freddie and particularly me - and a little bit later on Roger, actually -, we were pursued by the media to a very destructive point. It was very painful, we did get very hurt at these paparazzi invading our lives - not just our lives but the lives of all those near and dear to us. All our loved ones got incredibly trashed and I never did understand the necessity for that kind of thing, but I guess there is money to be made by trashing people's lives in the newspapers and it's probably never gonna change in England. For me, it was a pretty serious song, I have to say. Not serious in the sense that I think it's that great, but serious in the sense that there was a lot of reality in the lyrics for me.
Not one of my favourite songs. One of the most boring videos we ever made. Don't remember much about it - I just remember being bored. It's rather of its time and not one of our better things, I think. Didn't do anything for me and, for something that was called Scandal, it wasn't scandalous. I think the British press is just poxy, really, but I don't remember this record really making much of a statement. If you wanna make a statement, you should really make a statement. Didn't do it for me, that one.