Words matter. These are the best Roger Taylor Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There are an awful lot of bands out there doing our old act. An awful lot of fake moustaches and underwhelming performances.
I don’t want impersonators playing our music badly.
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.
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.
I see no end to the possibility and the potential of Adam Lambert. He’s a fabulous performer, and I think it would be very interesting to do something with him.
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.
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 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.
Nobody does our music better than us.
Freddie Mercury and I both loved to have a laugh on tour. If there were shenanigans and good times, Fred and I would be there.
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.
‘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.
It’s good to be busy. I prefer that than sitting back and enjoying life.
Radio is so heavily programmed; you have to fit into a certain box. So it’s harder for anything different to get through.
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.
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.
You can’t supervise your own history.
I prefer to stay out of politics, really.
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.
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.
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.
Everybody’s got an opinion, and I was just lucky enough to have an outlet for mine.
I wouldn’t sit down and work at writing a song like a novelist or something.
Once a musician, always a musician.
To me, diva means an extraordinary, outrageously theatrical, brilliant performer.
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.
Obviously, I like the drums to be heard. I think they’re important.
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.
It took about five years until we were properly over Freddie’s passing. You learn to live with it.
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.
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.
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.
I reckoned I could meet more girls being in a band than playing soccer.
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.
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.
We thought Queen were quite tongue in cheek.
It was Freddie who instilled in us the belief that we had to make people gasp every time.
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.
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.
