There is a little hooter in there, because we thought, my god, we're really getting too overblown here! And there's an element of humour in there, in the lyrics, which is nice. It's a kind of conscious comment on some of the stuff we've done, it's sort of retrospective, and we did laugh at ourselves, which I think is good. We enjoy it, we like painting those pictures. It's fun, and it's something peculiar to Queen. We're pretty proud of what we've done, as a whole. We took chances. Some of the things we did set the world alight and some didn't. But at least we made our own mistakes. We did what we wanted to do. Music by democracy just can't be. Music by Gallup Poll is what I mean. You can't go around and ask everyone if what you're doing is OK. That's Freddie [the line, “leaving, breathing rock ‘n' roll, this godforsaken life”]. But that's very tongue-in-cheek, because he loves the life he has. I regard Khashoggi's Ship and Was It All Worth It as the two ends of the album, and both are comments on ourselves. We read about that kind of society life - the parties on the ship, the excess. We feel that we've touched on those areas at some time. We've been through it.
I do like that one, yes, it's, the last track on the album. It has a semi-autobiographical feel about it.
It sort of runs over the band's history, really. The track was written in Switzerland and was recorded basically live, and then we put a lot of other stuff on afterwards, the orchestra and stuff in the middle. It does sound like a swan song, but it's not gonna be the last thing we do. There's even a duck call in there, if you're listening.
Was It All Worth It was recorded in Montreux - there's a huge concert hall beneath the studio which we can hire for a week, and we take 54 microphone tie-lines and closed-circuit TV cables down there. We can set drums up on the stage and you can get a very big sound. [The orchestral section] is all Emulator and synthesisers. Originally the song didn't go like that at all, but the band wanted that section added and then moved around two or three times. Because it was virtually a live recording there was no click track, so I had to insert space on the master, time it, and add an equal space on the slave, and then add timecode. So some parts of the song go to about 10 generations of copying, but because we were working digitally there's no loss of quality.
Sort of fun track, and it was a little potted history in the lyric of that track.
A lot of people think that Innuendo is much better than The Miracle but I like them both. I was in a complete state of mental untogetherness during most of the making of The Miracle; I always say that it's a miracle that I managed to play anything at all. What I did play I'm quite proud of but my input to the material wasn't as good as it could have been. By Innuendo the others were having emotional problems and I was a bit more together so I was able to pitch into the writing a lot more. I think they are both very good albums; The Miracle track, which is mainly Freddie, is a small masterpiece in its own way. And Was It All Worth It I really like. That's me and Fred, but more him. For that track we did all sit around and try to come up with rhymes and stuff. Roger's very good at that.
That was a particularly brilliant [guitar] solo.
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.