Roger Taylor

“To me, diva means an extraordinary, outrageously theatrical, brilliant performer.”

“'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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We are just continually surprised and obviously happy that the interest in Queen and Freddie keeps alive. It's a constant source of pleasure for ourselves.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We thought Queen were quite tongue in cheek.”

“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.”

“Radio is so heavily programmed; you have to fit into a certain box. So it's harder for anything different to get through.”

“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 don't want impersonators playing our music badly.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I prefer to stay out of politics, really.”

“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.”

“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.”