A nasty little number which brings out my evil streak. The words came very easy to me.
The words came very easily… Let's say that song has made its mark. I decided that if I wanted to stress something strongly I might as well go the whole hog and not compromise. I had a tough time trying to get the lyrics across… I wanted to make them as coarse as possible. My throat was bleeding, the whole bit. I was changing lyrics every day trying to get it as vicious as possible. When the others first heard it they were in a state of shock. When I was describing it they went “Oh yeah,” and then they saw the words and they were frightened by it. But for me the step had been taken and I was completely engrossed in it, swimming in it. Wow! I was a demon for a few days. The album needed a strong opening and what better way than to have the first words, “You suck my blood like a leech”? Initially it was going to have the intro and then everything stop and the words, “YOU, SUCK, MY” - but that was going too far.
They are both about the same thing. But Flick of the Wristis more generalised. I was aiming it at the music industry as a whole. Death on Two Legs is definitely more personal. It wasn't dedicated to an individual exactly, but I would rather not say precisely who it was pointed at. You know, a lot of people thought Killer Queen was about Jacquie [sic] Kennedy. It wasn't. The critics invented that.
On the first track off A Night at the Opera, I had a gadget which turned out the “kiss my assssssss…” from Death on Two Legs sound to perfection which was a lot of fun. I've got gadgets to do all sorts of things, and quite a lot of things used on Queen records have never been used before as they are prototypes.
The thing with this is moods. When I write songs I get into… It's a very touchy subject, to be honest.
There's a sense of humour to it, but with Freddie, there was a lot of anger there. Musically, it's great too, the riff is great - of course I didn't invent the riff, this is Freddie's riff, cause it was done on piano first, but it works great on guitar. We were a bit taken aback with how vicious Freddie wanted it to be. I remember thinking “ohh…”, but it was what Freddie wanted, you know, and the kind of unwritten law was that the author of the song got his own way.