Roger Taylor

“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.”

“Everybody's got an opinion, and I was just lucky enough to have an outlet for mine.”

“It's good to be busy. I prefer that than sitting back and enjoying life.”

“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.”

“It is everyone's prerogative to retire. But it's like giving up on life as far as I'm concerned.”

“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.”

“Most theatrical events range in the inaudible. When I went to see 'Mamma Mia,' I thought they were playing it through a megaphone.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You can't supervise your own history.”

“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.”

“It took about five years until we were properly over Freddie's passing. You learn to live with it.”

“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.”

“There is a sense of melancholy attached to seeing images of yourself from a different era, especially when you see a picture.”

“Obviously, I like the drums to be heard. I think they're important.”

“The only thing I've got is that the ring fingers on both my hands have a little arthritis in each. It's a worn out joint because of too much exertion and stress. But it doesn't affect my playing, which is good.”

“I didn't take a lot of the videos seriously; making videos was one of the most tedious things that you can imagine.”

“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.”

“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.”