Innuendo was gradually evolved by the four of us, but not every track was done like that: for instance, on the track Headlong, I was in the studio for a couple of days to get some things out of my system. I thought that maybe I'd be left with a solo album, maybe with a Queen album, I just didn't know and I came up with Headlong and I Can't Live with You, and the rest of the guys liked them and were very enthusiastic. So we decided to go for them on the Queen album. They were more or less finished when the group worked on them. Usually at one point one of us says, “Right! I'm going to take this track and finish it and make a proper song.” In the case of Headlong, that was me; on Innuendo, Roger actually decided to organise the words. We had a smattering of words but somebody actually has to decide what the song is going to be about, and in this case it was Roger.
I feel very good about what we're doing. I certainly don't feel that age stops you from doing anything. Music consists of two things: performance and material. I'm very passionately into the material. As time goes by I find I'm more concerned with the lyrics than ever. A lot of people say you can only create when you're in pain. But when I was really in pain, I couldn't create anything. I couldn't even get out of bed. When you're climbing out and beginning to get things in the right boxes again, that's when you can put it into music. There's quite a bit of that sort of thing on this album. There's some in I Can't Live With You; it's very personal, but I tried not to make it autobiographical because that narrows things too much. I tried to express it in a form that everyone can relate to. When you describe an experience in a song, it's nice because you can examine it, inject some humour and put it into perspective. Even though the humour is in there, I think people get the message. It helps both the writer and the listener. For some reason, that track was almost impossible to mix. It was one of those things where you put all the faders up and it sounds pretty good, and you think, “We'll work on this for a couple of hours.” Then it gets worse and worse and worse. We kept going back to the rough mix. It's got an atmosphere to it. I think it sounds so special because we kept a lot of the demo stuff on it. Usually it all gets replaced.
[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.
I walked in and Freddie, Brian, and Roger Taylor were sitting there messing around writing stuff and they were friendly, “Come in, sit down, and listen to the album which we're just making.” So they started playing me all these tracks like I'm Going Slightly Mad and I Can't Live Without You which has been in my mind ever since, I still play it, it's such a powerful paradoxical description of life.
We began using synthesisers and there were many excursions from us all into keyboard territory. My main contributions on principal parts were (in no particular order) in: Scandal, Was It All Worth It, Hang On In There, Too Much Love Will Kill You (which was done with Frank Musker up in his house in the Canyon in L.A. when we first sketched the song), No-one But You (again done on my own, originally for use on my solo album), One Vision (my first ramblings on a Kurzweil gave rise to the opening section), I Can't Live With You, The Show Must Go On (that sequence just got thrust into my head playing around with Roger - I will never know where it came from, but it completely took me over for a long time while the song was in development), and of course, Who Wants to Live Forever.