Technology offers us the possibility to arrange songs new, but in this case we didn't arrange the songs new, so the recordings could have been done just as well ten years back with an analog recording machine. In fact "Too Much Love" was recorded on an analog recording machine. Brian wrote the song at a time when we were still using those machines, Freddie recorded it, cause he liked the song very much, but the track was never used, so " Too Much Love.." ended up on Brian's solo album. It's interesting to compare that one analog song to all the other digital MIH songs. The clearness in the analog recording is remarkable. It always takes us some time till we see where new technology takes us. We follow every technological revolution without knowing where it's heading.
This is a song which I wrote, quite a few years ago with some friends, but it's never seen the light of day yet.
Eventually you will hear a Queen version of this song, actually, which is hidden away in the archives somewhere, because we did it – Freddie sang it, and it's great, it's wonderful, it's very, very different from [my solo version], and I think both versions will see the light of day eventually and people can make their own judgement. We did [the Queen version] very much on the lines of the way Queen are able to do things - it had all the breadth and the dynamics and a lot of power at the end, as you would kind of imagine the song would benefit from.
Too Much Love Will Kill You [with Freddie's vocals] is indeed the original finished mix which was originally going to be on The Miracle album, and was in fact sent out to some DJ's as a promo copy in America. But subsequently taken off the album due to contractual difficulties. It could have been taped off the radio, or from one of the existing DJ copies, which as far as I know are very rare. It's a bit of a shame that this is out there at the moment, since we are putting a version of it on the new album.
If there was ever a song for which I would have wanted to win a prize for, this would have been the one. Perhaps there are two kinds of song. Some songs happen, simply because somebody sits down and decides to write a song. But there is another kind, like this one, which has to be written, because the writer has no choice. This happened at a time when I was going through a very difficult period; it was written as a kind of therapy. In this case I was very much the patient and Frank was very much the therapist who helped me through it. The song was an important part of my life, and really still is, so this award means a lot to me.
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.