Sometimes people ask songwriters what a song means, not realizing if they had more words to explain it they would've used them in the song.

I feel that the name Queen actually fitted that time. It lent itself to a lot of things, like the theatre, and it was grand. It was very pompous, with all kinds of connotations. It meant so much. It wasn't just one precise label. I was certainly aware of the gay connotations, but that was just one facet of it.

The thing about my music is, there really is no point.

To start off with, that song was written by John Deacon and he's a very happily married man with about four children. I don't know where you've got that message from, it's got nothing to do with gay people at all. It's basically about everybody, it's just somebody who has a very tough life and he just wants to break free from whatever problems he's got. It's got nothing to do with the gay thing.

If there had been a tornado or something that took the town, it would've been the same song.

I knew Fred since I was 14 and was first going to the Old Town School, Fred used to work part-time in the store. Every time I wrote a song Fred would turn on his really good high-class tape recorder, reel-to-reel, and record it. So he's got recordings of me on guitar singing all my songs in his apartment long before I ever recorded for a recording company. I never found out what happened to the tapes.