I don’t much like the ‘It’s A Hard Life’ video. For me that’s too contrived, too dressed up.
We were doing something which we were conscious was very kind of Bohemian Rhapsody-esque, you know what I mean, and Freddie wanted me to do this little tail off back into the vocals, and I did something which kind of blends in, but the thing I would've liked to have done would've got in the way of the vocals.
I was never terribly fond of the [video] we did for It's a Hard Life. Freddie was dressed up as an amorous prawn. It was one of my favourite songs of his and I remember being terribly disappointed that he wanted to wear this costume, but he insisted on it. A good video can make all the difference. I remember loving R.E.M.'s Everybody Hurts, and I never really connected with them before that.
To my mind this is one of the most beautiful songs that Freddie ever wrote, it's straight from the heart, and he really opened up during the creation of it - I sat with him for hours and hours and hours just pouring over every word and trying to get the most out of it. It's a very revealing thing about how relationships are, and he was talking about his relationship, you know, but there's everybody relationship in there, whatever kind of relationship it is, so to me it's one of his loveliest songs, and on the face of it, I think I was mortified that he wanted to make this kind of video, because it's totally distracting obviously. In Freddie's mind, it's … I'm not gonna say a joke, but it's an ironical take… The odd thing is, it's not a joke for Freddie, because Freddie is a man who has everything: he has enormous worldwide success, he has money, he has everybody falling at his feet, but he's desperately unhappy in love, and so it's a joke within a joke, and I think, if you view it in this context, then it all starts to make sense.
I think we look more stupid in this video than any other artist has ever looked in a video. I actually love the record, but I really do hate this video.
An old Queen song of Freddie's which has actually probably never been performed live [sic] and, I have to tell you, it's a tricky one, it's amazing.
When we opened up the old book of Hard Life, I remembered that I must have retuned the guitar for the recording, to get those open string effects… I always liked the clang of open strings, and the fact that you can make them sustain while you're doing other things…
This is a video which we all kind of hated doing, I have to say, at the time, and it's for a song called It's a Hard Life - one of Freddie's most beautiful songs, I think, It's a Hard Life. It's about the pain of love, really, but Freddie chose to make a kind of spoof video… We got bored shitless. Roger and Deacy completely hated this whole thing and, I guess, with the benefit of hindsight, I think it actually was a good decision - we had an unwritten law that whoever wrote the song would decide the theme for the video, so Freddie wrote this song, so he got the choice, and we didn't like it at the time, but I kind of like it now, because I think it gets the message across quite well, in a sense.