Prophet's Song was built around a different tuning - the bottom strings tuned down to a D - and I became fascinated with what you could do with that. It gives the guitar a lot more depth. It wasn't a very common thing to do in those days - I wouldn't go so far as to say I was the first, I probably wasn't - but it was unusual and it gave the guitar a real sort of doomy kind of growl to it. It's different from tuning the whole guitar down a semitone, which a lot of people do - this is actually the bottom string going down a tone, so most of the guitar is still playable in the normal way, in tune with the piano. Because [the fireplace guitar] has a floating tremolo, as soon as you change the tuning of one string, the whole thing goes a little out of tune, so normally I have to have a separate guitar tuned to this. And the end of each riff was different, which is a little kind of obsession that I had. It was a very Queen thing, though: we liked to never repeat ourselves, even in the context of a song - we weren't one of these groups who would say, “oh, that's a nice chorus, we'll pop it in here and in here again.” There would never be that: you would always hear something different every time the chorus came around and it became a little trademark, I suppose, and something which really keeps you on your toes internally as well. You're always looking for new colours, and the new colours sometimes relate to the words - maybe there's a different point to be made in the next chorus because the song has moved on. Songs, to me, are journeys, and if you find yourself repeating a chorus, then maybe there isn't much of a journey to the song. We were very influenced by Japan, I have to say. Even the riff is kind of Japanese-influenced. The words really came from a dream that I had, and it really was a dream. I woke up with all this strange stuff going ‘round in my head about a prophet who had said various things, and it was very vivid in my head - very often, you forget dreams, but this one I didn't, and I could hear some of the melody in there as well. Very often you get little snippets. I don't know where they come from but you get little snippets of some words and a tune at the same time, so this “oh, oh, people of the earth” was there, going ‘round obsessing in my head. I became very interested in delays and the business of canon, and it stuck with me all the years, really, this business of you play something and it will be repeated and maybe repeated again, and what happens when these different delayed signals. It used to be called canon or a fugue, and I discovered that you could do it with what in those days were fairly new tape delays, and I was just fascinated with what they could do, started messing around on the guitar… so the thought came along, “wouldn't it be nice to apply this to vocals as well?” Somewhere there's some demos - I did some demos. I don't know where they are but we did it in the studio and worked it out - certain things worked and certain things didn't - and then chopped up the demos so we had a continuous demo for Freddie, and then Freddie liked it, so we put Freddie in the studio and he did it live with these delays. Everything's experimentation, and we had this enormous sounding backing track, I remember, and everytime I put a solo on, it seemed to make it smaller. You always have this choice: in stereo you only have from here to here to put everything, so you've got a guitar here and a guitar here - rhythm guitars. You put the solo in the middle, but already you're sort of diffusing that the ear is gonna listen to.