I basically write the tune. I write the song around the melody most of the time. Sometimes a lyric will get me started. Life Is Real was one of those, because the words came first. I just really got into it, pages after pages, all kinds of words. Then I just put it to a song. I just felt that it could be a Lennon-type thing.
The creative process which marked the emergence of the strangely autobiographical Life Is Real started thirty thousand feet up in the air over the Atlantic. We were flying back from New York to London on our way to Switzerland, paying no particular attention to anything when Freddie turned round and said, “Where's your paper and pen? I've just come up with some words.” I always had to ensure that I carried with me, wherever we were, paper and pen for just such an occasion as this. “Go ahead,” I said. “Cunt stains on my pillow,” he replied sotto voce with a naughty grin. I think my face must have given away something because he then turned round and said, “D'you think that's too much?” He then changed the words to “Cum stains on my pillow?” To which I replied, “Next!” To which he replied with a giggle, “Oh, really! This is too much!” I can see us now, reclining on the first class chairs at the front of the plane. He thought about it for another couple of minutes and finally came up with what is now the classic line, “Guilt stains on my pillow!” For the next hour or so, Freddie'd come out with phrases, not necessarily sequential but always following the same concept. We therefore disembarked in Montreux with several pages of entirely unconnected lyric lines for a song without a title. Freddie often took the opportunity himself to jot down a couple of lines which had come into his head. On my pad there is a sheet where he has written, “Please, feel free, Strain all my love from me…” To the best of my knowledge, this couplet was wisely filed away for future use... When we finally got into the studio from the airport, he sat down at a piano and just started playing. He would let his fingers play over the keys until a tune with which he was happy was finalised. Tape was always rolling in case a gem should get away. Perhaps he might just play chords and then progression from those chord bases. The rhythm was dictated by the feeling and mood of the lyrics of the song and the time signature and beat dictated by the metre of the dominant lyric lines. Every song had a working title although the final choice would not be made until the end. Everyone would throw ideas for song titles into the arena. Only the fittest survived.
It's a song which wasn't a hit, but very much from Freddie's heart, and [Kerry Ellis and myself] love it, it has a stark reality to it. It talks about the way Freddie saw life. In Bohemian Rhapsody, you get, “nothing really matters,” but in Life Is Real you get what he feels when he wakes up in the morning, which is a massive stuff which is hard to articulate, and I think it's a very brave song. He expresses his guilt and his fears. It's not a rockstar song - it's not like, “hey, how great it is to get drunk!” It's a song about, really, the vulnerability that he feels inside, so I love this stuff.