Quote related to 'Man On The Prowl' from 'The Works'

I couldn't remember what happened at the end of Man on the Prowl, it's something I listen to, in the course of a year, like probably no times at all. Interesting to hear it - it's so amazing to hear Freddie singing to beautifully. My god, he's really in the swing, and he's doing his Elvis impersonation in a sense but with a lot more besides, and it's beautifully performed, amazing, and there's some nice little rock ‘n' roll effects on it. Unfortunately the song, I guess, didn't quite make it. Nobody really, to my mind, has ever really noticed it that much, strangely, which shows it all comes down to songs really, whether you can sing them or not, whatever. What happened at the end of the song is: Freddie, by that time, didn't really think he was a good piano player, which is odd, isn't it? Because, actually, he was a very individual and unique piano player, but for that kind of rock ‘n' roll/scat playing, it wasn't his thing, so he got someone in to do it for him, which I think was Mike Moran [sic], pretty sure it was Mike Moran [sic], so Mike Moran [sic] sat down and played this thing. What happens in a situation like this is, you've already recorded the backing track, you've done some singing on it, and it was tape, you know, it's hard to remember tape these days, we all do things on hard disks or whatever, but in those days it was a piece of tape. So, when you've finished your backing track, normally, you would chop it out - in other words, you cut the beginning, you cut the end, you put some leader tape on the end, and that becomes your song. So, when you're doing the overdubs you hope that you've left enough space on the beginning and on the end to cover everything. In this case, the track went on and on and on and on, and eventually it runs out of steam, the backing track stops, but Mike Moran [sic] with his overdubbing is still going on, so he goes “dingy dingy dingy dingy dingy dingy ding”, and the tape runs out so you hear this very sharp cut-off because there ain't no tape, so that's what happened here. Roger actually loved this effect - he loved, like, “Cut the tape”, and I think we used it on a couple of occasions just to stop things as a way of ending a song. We had this thing where we thought fading out tracks - which was very much done in the sixties and seventies - was a bit of a copout. We didn't really like fade-outs and sometimes you can't come to the end of a song and give it a conclusion so cutting the tape is another way of doing it.

Brian May; Fan Club Convention Q&A, November 2015