Roger Taylor on what made Freddie Mercury a musical “genius”
Not just the drumming hero of Queen, Roger Taylor was also instrumental in writing some of their best-loved songs. Famously, Taylor penned various classics by the band, such as ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and ‘A Kind of Magic’, and sometimes even sang lead vocals. Not just a one-trick pony, he’s also worked with many prominent artists outside of Queen, including Eric Clapton, Steve Vai and Gary Numan.
As an original member of the London band alongside guitarist Brian May and frontman Freddie Mercury – who passed away from AIDS complications in 1991 – Taylor and his curly-haired bandmate are those best placed to comment on the late icon they called friend. In an interview given alongside May, Taylor reflected on what made Freddie Mercury such a “genius”.
“Everybody gets so mixed up with all the other sides: the flash, the sexual ambiguity, the showmanship, the voice…,” the ‘Radio Ga Ga’ songwriter said to Classic Rock in 2011. “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.”
He continued: “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.”
Taylor then asserted that he believed Mercury’s “cleverest thing” was his actual musicality, labelling his harmonic structure as “quite brilliant”. He explained: “I’d say it was Freddie’s actual musicality which was the cleverest thing of all, the notes, and his harmonic structure was quite brilliant. When he wrote ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’, on the second album, he was crossing sections of six-part harmonies, and I thought: ‘Bloody hell, that is tricky stuff.’ Then there’s ‘The March Of The Black Queen’, which is almost like prog-rock, and so outrageously complicated that I can’t even remember the arrangement myself.”
The drummer concluded: “When you write songs that complex, you have to work hard at it, and it did involve a lot of head-scratching. But then he’d come up with a ‘Killer Queen’ or, later on, lots of simple things like ‘Crazy Little Thing’. He had it on all sides. Freddie evolved. I always called him ‘the man who invented himself’. I think the talent was innate, but he dug deep inside himself and forced it out. His determination was quite something.”
Listen to ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ by Queen below.
