We'd normally do things anything up to about a dozen times before they would be ready, and there wouldn't be any repairing. Nowadays you could get into the hard disc and start repairing things but in these days the take was the take and, apart from very few little things, nothing could be done to it, so you use the take. You might hear the odd little glitch on the piano or whatever, but it would stay that way, that's the human way it was. We've now listened to a lot of this in the retrospect, and the quality of the backing tracks that Freddie and Roger and John would put down is just stunning. The precision and the feel, the energy. They were all great musicians and it was a great combination. I think Freddie was an exceptional pianist. He didn't actually rate himself very much, but he had such a unique style, that no-one else could quite do. He didn't have the huge chops of the concert pianist but he would learn things in his own way and play them immaculately with incredible attack and precision. It's almost like he had a metronome inside him, very few piano players that I've met have that ability to do that - a lot of them are very technically great, can do wonderful things, but they haven't got that wonderful sense of drama and the precision, I mean, it has to be said, he's almost like a drummer playing piano. And he played [lowering his wrists] at his own style; there was a lot of force there. It's totally like a metronome - he's not playing to a click or anything, that's just the way he plays. We have three different bass tracks: they're all the same part, but it's recorded three different ways - one is direct from the guitar, the DI; one is direct from the amp, I think; and one is out of the speaker into the room, so you get sort of a little bit of ambience on the bass if you want. So the bass sound is a mixture of all three. That was a favourite technique of Roy's, who wanted to get the most out of the bass. He would also play around with the phase switchers to try and get the most out of the three different signals for the bass, which makes a huge difference, again for different colours. Again, you can hear how locked in they are. I mean, John is completely locked in to Freddie's left hand, which is more or less doing the same thing. The sound of the drums changes in the heavy bit. It starts off quite a tight sound for the verses but, when it gets big and becomes live, the drum sound changes to a live drum sound. So that, and the addition of the extra instruments, really makes a huge colour change, and that's partly why the song goes through all these different moods. Partly, it's the way the music's arranged, but partly it's the sounds as well. Ambience, of course, is the room sound, and if you don't have the room sound in there, everything sounds very small. If you put in loads of room, everything sounds very big and, if you're lucky, it doesn't sound echoey - it shouldn't echo, it should just sound big and like you're in the room with it. We had a big thing about ambience, it has to be said, because we were signed to Trident Studios for our first record, and the Trident Studios drum sound was something legendary, and it was very tight. You could hear it on Carly Simon records, everything was so tight and small, very clear for a certain kind of recording, but it was the absolute antithesis of what we wanted and we had this big argument with Roy, I remember, on one of the first days we were in there, and we said, “No, we don't want this kind of sound; we want the big, roomy drum sound.” We didn't really know how to achieve it - we were just boys, but I remember Roy saying, “Oh, it's alright, we can do it with echo later on.” Well, folks, you can't! It has to sound right on the night or else it's never gonna sound right. So we very quickly - precocious boys that we were - forced everybody into recording the drums the way we wanted, which was in the middle of a big studio with mics everywhere, and not too many mics close to the kit. So, mostly, when you hear Roger's kit, it's not like a mic on this, and mic on that, a mic on that, the way it's very often done even these days - it was really down to a few mics strategically placed at certain distances to get the bigness on the kit. There would be mics on the snare, you could add the close stuff in, but mainly it's an ambient drum sound, that's why it sounds so big - it just needed mixing and there it was! This sort of orchestrating with guitars [near the end] was something that I did as an adornment but totally with Freddie's approval and co-operation. I remember wondering how far I could go in terms of sort of orchestrating it, and also how far I could go towards the end of the song ‘cause it's very big in the middle, this song, and it goes very tiny here. I remember thinking, “Maybe that should be just piano, maybe I shouldn't be doing guitar on it,” but Freddie liked just coming down to a little solo guitar. I think the first thing that we overdubbed was normally the guitar, and there would be a lot of different guitars with different sounds on this. There's a lot of colours quite deliberately - I used all different pick-up settings and different amps even to get different sounds, almost like you were building up orchestral sounds using different instruments. The guitar joins in on Verse 2 and it starts off with little harmonics and it goes “shivers up my spine” and we were very into deliberately doing little colours. There's a little “prrring”, which I managed to make by scratching the strings behind the bridge. There's a little echo of that in mix to make it sort of ethereal. I was always keen that the guitar solo should not be just like playing the tune again, because it's kind of lame, it's kind of weak, so this guitar solo, like a lot of them, is kind of a separate tune, it's a little counter-statement. I don't know where [the melody] came from, but I could hear it in my head from the moments when they were practising, and I thought that would be a nice little counterpoint to what's going on. So, it's a Verse structure, but the tune is completely different. There's three little runs [at the end of the rock section] and they all have completely different sounds, so you get these different colours, different textures coming in the whole time. The last run is double-tracked in octaves to get again a different sound and is followed by the sort of big triumphant piano run-up. So [near the end] you have what is kind of, in my mind - my fevered brow, a trumpet section, and for that I have a special little amp, which John Deacon made, and it's just very good at being overblown and making those kind of trumpet noises, pretty much a fanfare kind of thing, and it's a bell effect because they overlap each other and the notes are held so they add up, and it's a very different sound from the rest of the guitars on the track. It almost sounds like a trumpet when you first hear it, I think. Part of building up the whole orchestra sound in the middle was the percussion, obviously, so Roger's played a whole kit for the backing track, but he's now gonna overdub other stuff, so there's an extra snare and there's some timps, very nicely tuned, and Roger actually did go on to play timps quite a lot - we had timps with us on tour and he used to do a whole timp solo at one time, when we were at our most self-indulgent. I can talk, because I used to do about a fifteen-minute guitar solo. There's [a snare-drum] overdub [in the rock section] for emphasis, and there's a big riff on top of that, the guitar riff. The harmonies at the beginning of this song are not all of us, they're just Freddie multi-tracking himself, and of course he's singing to his guide piano, but the guide piano is taken out in the end because all you want is that a cappella [bit]. He's on his own, that's quite beautiful, I think. Some of these lines [in the operatic section] are kind of strange tunes, and that's what happens when you're doing complicated harmonies. That's not an easy line to sing. These things are quite tricky, ‘cause that's not the kind of tune that you would normally sing. It's moving around little semitones at a time, very tricky! Three of us would sing the line once, double it, do the same thing again, and then probably triple it, so you have three tracks of us all singing the same line, and only then do you move on to the next part. So all these would've been [bounced on a separate track], although some of them would've disappeared because other things got written over them, but they would've been bounced. It sounds like a lot of people singing, and part of it is luck because our voices blended very well - as soon as there was three of us singing, it sounded like quite a lot of people, really, because we were lucky that we had different kinds of voices, the three of us - John opted out, John is not a singer. He took care of the low end. The “let him go” is another section of choir, and Roger is on the top, and there was a particular effect, I don't know if it happened by accident or not, but Roger was sort of carrying on longer and we thought that sounded nice, so the choir sings “let him go,” but the top line - which is just Roger, ‘cause he's got the highest voice, he's the one who can make those top notes really cut - sings longer than anybody else. We're using the ranges of our voices because generally Freddie and I can sing quite low and Roger could sing very high. We can all kind of stay in there up to a point, but there's a certain point where Roger could just make those top notes count, so we're using all the range that we've got. Freddie had this amazing razor sharp top end to his vocals, real crystal sound. He's double-tracked [on the rock section]. In the beginning, I remember it was gonna go [lower] but he changed it towards the end, it went [to a tenor c"], which is a lovely little touch, he takes it way up there. It's not perfectly double-tracked: Freddie could've done that if he wanted to, it's just there's a bit of different expression from track to track, very much like John Lennon used to do with The Beatles. The Beatles were our Bible, it has to be said, in a lot of ways, although we were able to take some things further than The Beatles ‘cause we had better technology and we had the benefit of their experience, but The Beatles just did so many things right, and John Lennon double-tracking stuff would normally make it just a little bit different so you could feel the humanity of the two voices, it wasn't just like an automatic double-track. Freddie was able to double-track himself so precisely that it would actually phase: there's another track on this same album, Love of My Life, where he sings in parts; he sang it three or four times, and they are so close it sounds like one voice but just has extra breadth. In this case it's not - it's a rock ‘n' roll thing, just very, very powerful.