[the solo section is like a conversation piece] That's the way I would think of it too - a conversation without end. It sort of disappears into something that doesn't make sense.
It's Noel Coward meets Led Zeppelin!
There's a piece of footage of the recording around which again is very much Freddie, but then that was very much a Freddie track and you tend to want to give the author his head. Even though we said that everything is by Queen, there was still somebody who was basically the original author and everyone else worked on it. It was a good idea as it produced a lot of input, but in the end it was Freddie's baby so it was natural that he would want to get certain things right.
Freddie and I were very disappointed when I'm Going Slightly Mad wasn't a big hit - we really liked it!
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.
Everybody gets so mixed up with all the other sides: the flash, the sexual ambiguity, the showmanship, the voice. It doesn't frustrate me, because I'm just pleased he's remembered. But it's when you delve deeper that you really get his musicality. Actually, at the bottom of it all was just a genius songwriter. We're re-releasing all the Queen albums at the moment, so we're being forced to listen hard to the remastering. And it's just staggering. His words got better quickly. There were some very overt lyrics. Don't Stop Me Now is a good example. He was having a good time, and that was very much a cri de coeur. Some lyrics we wrote together like I'm Going Slightly Mad, which was funny. We had fun coming up with daft things, all those ridiculous phrases.