ROGER TAYLOR

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

I wouldn't sit down and work at writing a song like a novelist or something.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was Freddie who instilled in us the belief that we had to make people gasp every time.

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.

I fancied being a lead singer. I've always done a lot of vocals, but obviously, Freddie is the lead singer.

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.

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