Quote related to 'The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke' from 'Queen II'

Everybody gets so mixed up with all the other sides: the flash, the sexual ambiguity, the showmanship, the voice. It doesn't frustrate me, because I'm just pleased he's remembered. But it's when you delve deeper that you really get his musicality. Actually, at the bottom of it all was just a genius songwriter. We're re-releasing all the Queen albums at the moment, so we're being forced to listen hard to the remastering. And it's just staggering. His words got better quickly. There were some very overt lyrics. Don't Stop Me Now is a good example. He was having a good time, and that was very much a cri de coeur. Some lyrics we wrote together like I'm Going Slightly Mad, which was funny. We had fun coming up with daft things, all those ridiculous phrases. I'd say it was Freddie's actual musicality which was the cleverest thing of all, the notes, and his harmonic structure was quite brilliant. When he wrote The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, on the second album, he was crossing sections of six-part harmonies, and I thought: “Bloody hell, that is tricky stuff.” Then there's The March of the Black Queen, which is almost like prog-rock, and so outrageously complicated that I can't even remember the arrangement myself. When you write songs that complex, you have to work hard at it, and it did invoke a lot of head-scratching. But then he'd come up with Killer Queen or, later on, lots of simple things like Crazy Little Thing. He had it on all sides. Freddie evolved. I always called him “the man who invented himself.” I think the talent was innate, but he dug deep inside himself and forced it out. His determination was quite something.

Roger Taylor; Classic Rock, March 2011