I quite like Radio Ga-Ga because it had a mood and a look and we used pieces of "Metropolis which was great.
I am going to reveal something, which many people don't know. If you listen to the record very carefully it doesn't actually say "Radio Ga-Ga"
All you hear is that it's actually "Radio Ca-Ca", which is French for shit.
I liked the title, and I wrote the lyric afterward. It happened in that order, which is a bit strange. The song is a bit mixed up as far as what I wanted to say. It deals with how important radio used to be, historically speaking, before television, and how important it was to me as a kid. It was the first place I heard rock'n'roll. I used to hear a lot of Dorris Day, but a few times each day, I'd also hear a Bill Haley record or an Elvis Presley song. Today it seems that video, the visual side of rock'n'roll, has become more important than the music itself - too much so, really. I mean, music is supposed to be an experience for the ears more than the eyes.
[giving a song to Queen which would have been perfect for a solo record] That sort of thing hasn't really affected me yet because I've only had two solo albums thus far. My output has never been that big with Queen. I've never had more than a couple of songs appear on any one album. I try to keep the more personal songs for myself, I suppose. "Radio Ga Ga" would definately have been on my own album if that's what I was doing at the time.
I wrote it in America actually in Los Angeles and I think.. and I had a young son and er er he just turned around one day and said "Radio Ca Ca" cause he ha is actually half French.
It's quite competitive, now, just within the band, fucking hell, before it's out to the public and is competitive with all the other bands around, it starts off being competitive within the group, because, I mean, there are four good writers, and you know, equally sort of adept at doing things. There are no passengers, especially now Roger's writing very well and so is John, because Brian and I used to be the principal writers, now I think we all write the same, so there's a good fight right at the start, and we just basically come out with our own ideas and present it to each other and just say, “OK, what do you think?” and then the fighting starts if you don't like it. I seem to participate more on, say, John's or Roger's tracks, they let me help them and suggest more things. Brian's got his own sort of writing ideas and they're very sort of strong to start with anyway, so I mean, I don't seem to be able to get into his ideas so much, but in a way that's quite good, I'd rather leave it to him. It doesn't mean I just stay out of it altogether, I let him sort of do a lot of it whereas in John's songs or Roger's songs, I mean, I sort of get in there at a quite early stage, they don't mind me sort of tearing it apart and then piecing it back together again. Sometimes I take the whole song over, like, er, I don't mind saying it, Radio Ga Ga, I just instantly felt that you could build that into a really good strong saleable commodity, and I think Roger was just thinking of it as just another track, so I virtually took it over, and I sent him on a… he went on a skiing holiday for about a week and came back, but it's basically his song, you know, he had the ideas altogether, I just felt that there was some construction elements in it that were wrong to start with and he just said, “OK, you do what you want.” He wanted [to have a hit] very badly and I think he deserves it. It's a big hit in Europe and places.
These days, I find it much easier to write melodically on keyboards because piano is more geared, I think, for songwriting, than any other instrument. The guitar is quite a difficult instrument, actually, when you're trying to compose melodically. You have to have all your chords together, and then you need something on top. With keyboards, you can write the whole song right there. So what I've been doing is using a sequencer or something, and keyboards to write material. I liked the title, and I wrote the lyric afterward. It happened in that order, which is a bit strange. The song is a bit mixed up as far as what I wanted to say. It deals with how important radio used to be, historically speaking, before television, and how important it was to me as a kid. It was the first place I heard rock ‘n' roll. I used to hear a lot of Doris Day, but a few times each day, I'd also hear a Bill Haley record or an Elvis Presley song. Today it seems that video, the visual side of rock ‘n' roll, has become more important than the music itself - too much so, really. I mean, music is supposed to be an experience for the ears more than the eyes.
I have a facility for writing music, but I don't want to know anything particularly technical - like what the chords are called. Even in Radio Ga Ga there are some very difficult chords - I don't know what they're called, but it doesn't matter… I'm a much better guitarist than I am a keyboard player, but now I find melodically it's much easier to write on keyboard. Radio Ga Ga was a completely keyboard written song. I defy anyone to write that on the guitar because you wouldn't find the chords – they wouldn't come naturally to any guitar player I know.
Once this basic structure was sorted out, Freddie would begin the whole process of assembling all the other necessary components to achieve the song. No overall vision of how the song would ultimately sound ever arose before the very basic skeleton had been assembled. So often, the end result would bear little resemblance to the original concept. A prime example of this was Radio Ga Ga which sounded to me when Roger played his initial tape more like the Ave Maria from Verdi's Otello – but that's to come. Incidentally, titles of tracks often changed between conception and fledging. Radio Ga Ga on one of the original cassette boxes is called Radio Ca Ca.
One of our first excursions into real sort of machine type things. We started off, Roger and I together, on this one, strangely enough, with sort of… you know, chucking some ideas around, but we actually split in the end and Roger's half became Radio Ga Ga and my half became Machines, Back to Humans. But it was an interesting time of us sort of blending our skills with the synthesiser world, I suppose.
Ah, the sound of the 80s, Radio Ga Ga. Yeah, this is another really… it was a sort of one of our first uses of sort of almost a techno type approach, hopefully with a bit of… a good melody in there, but it was very much a audience participation song and it has proved pretty popular. The technology at the time… I mean, it was actually fairly basic and now it's very basic actually, but it was effective and using arpeggiator on the fabulous Roland Jupiter 8. And it was actually called Radio Ca Ca, which is French for, French for something that comes out of your bottom. And my boy, my eldest boy, was… at the time was very young and half French and he just referred to radio as being “ca ca” and that was the idea. That was where it came from. And I don't think we ever actually changed it, that we do actually say that on the record and if you listen closely, it's still there!
I like Radio Ga Ga. It was a nice fusion of synthesisers and… what can I call it… epic pop.
I wouldn't really say anything was an accident, but I do remember spending quite a lot of time working on the chords for Radio Ga Ga, which are quite involved. I remember thinking, “That's a good chord sequence.” It took me a while to work it out again when I'd forgotten it. I'd say that's the closest thing to something like that. Radio Ga Ga was really more chordal than I'd been up ‘til then. I just wanted to be rhythmic and melodic.
When we made the record, then it was “all we hear is radio caca”, because Roger wrote it - d'you know what “caca” is? If you have any French friends, “caca” means “shit”, so Roger wrote it because his little boy was saying, “it's caca, it's caca”, because he'd heard some grown-ups talking, so it was called Radio Caca, but our record company said, “you cannot do this! It has to be Radio Ga Ga”, which is the later lyric, so we changed the title but we didn't change the record, so if you go back and listen to Radio Ga Ga, you'll hear “all we hear is radio caca.” Nobody knows this, except you!