We really put on a very high energy rock n' roll show. We don't go around with our noses in the air. We're very crazy. But I think when we did 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' people thought we take ourselves very seriously.
— Roger Taylor
I understand people who say, 'There is no Queen without Freddie. Just leave it be.' Because that's what we felt, following his death. All three of us said, 'Right, that's the end of the band.' But the band just didn't seem to die.
It is everyone's prerogative to retire. But it's like giving up on life as far as I'm concerned.
Most theatrical events range in the inaudible. When I went to see 'Mamma Mia,' I thought they were playing it through a megaphone.
It took about five years until we were properly over Freddie's passing. You learn to live with it.
I think a lot of big musicals close because of the rules they're bound by that make it impossible for them to be efficient.
Everybody's got an opinion, and I was just lucky enough to have an outlet for mine.
I didn't take a lot of the videos seriously; making videos was one of the most tedious things that you can imagine.
It was Freddie who instilled in us the belief that we had to make people gasp every time.
Our story is in two halves, as the band's career up to Freddie's death was 20 years, and 20 years later, our music is as popular as it was then. It's a sort of everlasting... income.
The sound levels on stage were so loud with all that constant banging and smash, smash, smash; it did untold damage to the fine nerve endings in the inner ear, though it is worse in the left, which is the side of my snare drum and the monitor.
We used to rehearse in unused lecture halls at Imperial and recorded our first album, 'Queen,' in 1971 while I was studying for my biology finals - it is amazing I passed.
Once a musician, always a musician.
'We Will Rock You' we didn't think was a single. We almost saw it like an introduction to 'We Are the Champions,' which is a more classic, very grand song.
Rock bands were never newsworthy. In the '60s and '70s, rock bands weren't in the newspapers because they weren't considered mainstream; they wouldn't sell papers.
The idea of having proper qualifications had been very much ingrained in me. My father had a steady job for the Potato Marketing Board, and the family emphasis was on getting to university.
What was Freddie like then? Alongside the showman, he was a rather shy introvert. But if the attention was focused on him, he was a natural star, as we all saw after we put Queen together. Week by week, we saw him grow into this character, Freddie Mercury.
Freddie obviously knew he was ill long before we did. We knew there was something wrong, but we didn't know what it was. He told us eventually. We didnt want to believe it was true. But we all stuck round him, formed a circle, and gave him support.
We thought Queen were quite tongue in cheek.
You can't live in the past.
Freddie was very much able to ride the neutral wave. We all respected his views because he was such a great songwriter. It was his idea that we share all the credits. It was decided all the songs would be attributed equally to Queen. That immediately got rid of the arguments. That was a fantastic, democratic notion.
When 'We Will Rock You,' the musical, launched, I was amazed at how successful it was. It attracted a new generation of fans. Freddie would have loved it. He was quite into that sort of stuff.
I'm not a musical theatre person, and I never will be, especially after seeing the way it operates. It's so incredibly inefficient. It takes three weeks to effect a change. It can be a lighting change, a script change, a musical change - you have to meet with six different departments, and about a month later, it may happen.
I prefer to stay out of politics, really.
We've been fairly eclectic in our time, and we did branch out. Whenever we got a little bit too far out, people started to moan and groan a bit.
To me, diva means an extraordinary, outrageously theatrical, brilliant performer.
Hearing loss has not affected my vocal range. I can still pitch perfectly, but without the hearing aids, I don't hear the intricate high parts of the actual spectrum.
Our bassist, Tim Staffell, was at art college with Frederick Bulsara, who changed his name to Freddie Mercury and joined the band on vocals after Tim left in 1970.
Freddie was the glue that kept us together. He was a very complex man: very shy but also with a forceful side to him.
Freddie had this unbelievable power and stamina. He had range both in his voice and in style. It's hard to find someone that can do everything he could do.
I reckoned I could meet more girls being in a band than playing soccer.
I know that drummers tend to be the butt of a thousand jokes, usually from the uninformed and untalented, but I always felt I had an important role.
I am a little deaf now. Without my hearing aids in, I miss a lot of peripheral sounds. I had tinnitus, too, for a while.
My own introduction to music came quite early. My father didn't have much of an education, but he was keen for me to get some qualifications, and I ended up winning a choral scholarship to a cathedral school.
Nobody does our music better than us.
You can't supervise your own history.
If people are so obsessed with Freddie that they can't bear to see Queen without him, they should stay home and listen to the records.
There aren't many good frontmen around anymore. Where are they? I can't think of a really young band with a great front person.
We became closer and closer at the end of Freddie's life, and I think we were co-dependent in many ways. We stuck together for an awfully long time, and I think we all felt we needed one another.
Of the Queen tributes, some of them are very funny, and some of them are really not funny at all. The terrible ones are cheesy and pantolike, more about dressing up in a Brian May wig and a Freddie Mercury moustache, and what they're missing out is the fact that the music is quite complicated and actually not easy to perform.
There are an awful lot of bands out there doing our old act. An awful lot of fake moustaches and underwhelming performances.
The sicker Freddie got, the more he seemed to need to record, to give himself something to do, some sort of reason to get up.
I fancied being a lead singer. I've always done a lot of vocals, but obviously, Freddie is the lead singer.
When hearing aids were first mentioned, I pictured myself as that old geezer at the back of the church with the whistling ear trumpet, but you can't see these Phonak hearing aids, and people don't realise you've got them in.
One Christmas, when Freddie and I were flatmates in Kensington, we were trying to cook Christmas dinner, but all we had was a packet of bread sauce that you make with water. We used to dream of a can of beans.
If somebody's going to represent our music live, I'd like to see it represented with excellence and spectacularly and with really great musicianship.
'We Are the Champions' is meant to be 'we,' as in 'all of us,' collectively, not us the band. It's a shame that some people understandably had the wrong take on that. 'No time for losers' is not the kindest line, but it's really more of a 'we all of us.' It's a celebration.
I think people thought we were sort of right-wing or something, which we certainly are not. I think they got the wrong idea from the videos, that we were some kind of neo-fascist band. I heard a lot of that.
There is a sense of melancholy attached to seeing images of yourself from a different era, especially when you see a picture.
I played with a few local bands in the West Country, where I grew up, but when I was 18, I moved to London, which at that time was probably the most exciting musical city in the world. I was supposed to be studying dentistry, but all the time I was looking for a band to join.
