Quote related to 'Innuendo' from 'Innuendo'

This was a genuinely cooperative effort. We made it a rule when we went into the studio to play together everyday. In Montreux we set the drums in the Casino concert hall - which is a big space - and played for a while just for the fun of it, making sure we kept the tape rolling. The main riff just came out - Roger played the beat and I played a riff, and it went from there. We did the keyboard part, then Freddie put down a guide vocal and it began to take shape. It was nice evolving that one because of the breaks we took from recording in Montreux. Every time we went back there we'd do a bit more on it. The Spanish feel to the track simply happened - no one really made a conscious decision about it. It's quite a good way of working - we do that a lot. When we had the backing track and the major part of it done we took away a rough rape of it at the end of the day to play in the car, just to live with the track a little. All that Spanish stuff is sort of implied in the beginning anyway because of the way the guitar chords move and in the bolero-type rhythm, so we were thinking Spanish from the start. It was sort of natural to do the acoustic Spanish guitar bit and see what happened. Freddie and I were sitting down throwing ideas around, and we'd already sketched out that Spanish/Flamenco bit in the middle. Steve Howe happened to be passing by because he was in a studio over there. Now, Steve is a much better acoustic guitarist than I am so I sat him down and said, “let's do something together - you can do the hard bits and I'll do the easy bits!” So, we did this little duet in the middle and it was great! We recorded the song in sections and arranged it together. We argue long and hard about whether something works or not, and usually whoever is the most passionate wins. Sometimes whoever is in the studio latest at night wins! We don't worry about how we're going to play something live when we're in the studio, but I think this would be really easy to perform anyway - I hope we end up doing it at some point.

Brian May; Guitar, December 1991