I had less to do with that than I did with most at the stuff on the album. That was originally something Freddie was going to do on a solo album, and gradually we all played on it. I went in and played guitar and it seemed to work very well. John went in and played bass, Roger put the drums in, so it became a Queen track. I love it. Not many people have spoken to me about it, but I think it's great. It's got a lot of depth to it.
All God's People is my favourite track [on the album]. It's chilling.
[Joint songwriting credits] worked very well for the band, although you can pretty much work out who is responsible for what. There are things on Innuendo, for example, which are obviously me, but by talking about it you obviously destroy what we were trying to achieve… I was obviously involved heavily in Headlong, I Can't Live with You and Hitman, while All God's People came from Freddie at the same time as the Barcelona project. The Show Must Go On came from Roger and John playing the sequence and I started to put things down.
Freddie and Mike Moran remained very close and Freddie thought Mike would bring out the best on the keyboards on All God's People. Freddie after all had only ever got to Grade Three or Four on the Royal Academy of Music's piano exams and Freddie only ever wanted the very best on this album. The four tracks [off Innuendo] whose words and music outline were Freddie's are obviously All God's People and Slightly Mad as well as Delilah, which, as all Freddie-lovers know was written about his favourite cat. And then, of course, there was Bijou, the fourth. One of the tracks that sticks in my brain is Going Slightly Mad when I distinctly remember Freddie coming home and having great difficulty with the lyrics. This again was one of those occasions where he came in and we were searching for about three hours for the elusive words. And with All God's People, he was having his last blast at gospel which he loved.
The secret for making a keyboard sound like an orchestra is that you must play each and every part individually. In other words, if you get the orchestral unions right, if you double up the cellos with bassoons, etc., the end result will resemble what a typical orchestra would sound like. Even today with the great samples that exist, if you put a fist full of notes down, they sound like a keyboard player playing a fist full of stringy type sounds. If you play the sounds individually and then get add the spiky down-bows, you have an orchestra. Fred's level of ingenuity came once the process was nearly finished. He would listen to the passage and say, “something is missing.” He would then add a ninth or eleventh, or some other note that I would never have guessed to add, and then before you knew it, it was Queen.
It was still a solo track at the time, but Freddie had asked Brian to play a solo on it. Brian did a good solo, but decided he could do better and played it again. Freddie said “No, I don't like it,” and so it went on, and I could see Brian getting more and more tense. After another solo, Freddie said “Oh, that's rubbish.” David Richards, Mike Moran and I were all looking at each other. At the time, it seemed horrific. After another solo, Freddie made some comment like “Oh, come on! You and that fireplace guitar… play it like you mean it!” So Brian let rip with this great solo, and, of course, Freddie had this big grin on his face. He knew what Brian could do, and he was just pushing him.
Fred and I went into the studio to work on whatever. We just started to write and we came up with an idea, which was a starting point for a year's work - the whole idea of this, by the way, was to do a solo album for Fred, which was, a non-Queen album. After The Great Pretender, those geniuses in the record company said, “Why don't you do an album of covers?” He said, “I've only got one cover in me, and that was it.” And so we started to write original material, and the first thing we started to write was a tune - then again, the title came from nowhere - called All God's People. I've no idea where that came from, but it was the first thing that we did as a solo thing together. It was hijacked for a Queen track eventually, for Innuendo. There's a story about this: there's a line in here in which Freddie sings “all prime ministers”. This means nothing, it's complete garbage, it means nothing except on the guide vocal, we needed something that rhythmically said [like the melody]. He said, “oh, I'll do a guide vocal.” He sang, “all prime ministers.” And there it still remains to this day. It means nothing, it has no contribution to the overall lyric but here we are. So All God's People came and went and in the middle of this, I got a phone call - it was actually when we were doing The Great Pretender video, I think, I was fast asleep, about four o'clock in the morning, after we'd finished this - and the telephone rang, it's Fred, immensely excited, he said, “look, I've got fantastic news: I've heard from Montserrat Caballé, and she wants to, you know, come and do this thing now.” And I said, “OK, fine.” So we went back in the studio the next day and started to work on a track, we had no idea what to do, and I said to Fred, “we need just a working title,” and he said, “let's call it Barcelona, because that's where we met.” I said, “it's not a bad idea, Barcelona, where you met, let's do something based on that.' I started to do that [bells intro] fairly operatic and triumphant. And the rest is history because, after that, we never went back to the solo album, because the rest of the year was taken up with Barcelona and the rest of the Barcelona album. So there are bits and pieces of tracks that we started and never finished but maybe they'll see the light of day, one day.