Roger Taylor

The first time I saw Led Zeppelin, Bonzo (John Bonham) just walked on the stage and just warmed up for about 10 seconds. Freddie (Freddie Mercury) and I nearly fell over we just couldn’t believe the power and the sound. People are still today trying to imitate Led Zeppelin, America is full of drummers trying to play like John Bonham.

Paul is not someone trying to be Freddie. He’s someone trying to take this somewhere else… I’m very excited about working it all out.

We’re not going out there with somebody pretending to be Freddie Mercury. We are what we are now; we’re not what we were then, we’re just going out, playing our songs.

His (Freddie Mercury) words got better quickly. There were some very overt lyrics. Don’t Stop Me Now is a good example. He was having a good time, and that was very much a cri de coeur. Some lyrics we wrote together like I’m Going Slightly Mad, which was funny. We had fun coming up with daft things, all those ridiculous phrases. I’d say it was Freddie’s actual musicality which was the cleverest thing of all, the notes, and his harmonic structure was quite brilliant. When he wrote The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, on the second album, he was crossing sections of six-part harmonies, and I thought: “Bloody hell, that is tricky stuff.” Then there’s The March Of The Black Queen, which is almost like prog-rock, and so outrageously complicated that I can’t even remember the arrangement myself. When you write songs that complex, you have to work hard at it, and it did invoke a lot of head-scratching. But then he’d come up with Killer Queen or, later on, lots of simple things like Crazy Little Thing. He had it on all sides. Freddie evolved. I always called him ‘the man who invented himself’. I think the talent was innate, but he dug deep inside himself and forced it out. His determination was quite something.

We (pop stars) are people not androids. We’ve got views. I’ve got opinions and I don’t see why I shouldn’t use a bit of my art to put them over. I think music is one of the most powerful media forces in the world today.

I picked up a guitar and found it very difficult and I sort of graduated to drums because I found them very easy – I suppose it was a case of natural aptitude. Mitch Mitchell was my role model at the time, and I still think listening to Mitch Mitchell, especially the early stuff with Hendrix (Jimi Hendrix), is just fantastic.

Freddie will have been dead for 20 years in November. I was staggered because it doesn’t seem possible that all that time has passed and I still miss him. He was my best friend, my best man. We shared so much and I owe so much to him.

I actually love the audition process, so I’m so happy to fight for things. I would love to read something that I want to fight for, but lately the scripts are not that compelling.

I’d rather be called King than other things I’ve been called.

Being jealous of a beautiful woman is not going to make you more beautiful.

To rock isn’t necessarily to cavort.

A man becomes as attractive as an attractive woman when he becomes successful and is publicly noted. Power’s an aphrodisiac.

Even with my wife, I see her as a representation, as a Marie Antoinette of our time.

I don’t look at negative comments because my parents and family don’t let me. My big sister controls my Instagram, and my big brother controls my Twitter. I also don’t really Google myself or anything like that.

My younger sister and I had the same modeling agency.

Don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions; go over, under, through, and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing, and don’t care if they like it.

I’m keeping the pixie. I hope I inspire people… it’s really cool to have short hair.

I just needed a job. Before being hired as an usher at the CBS Theater, I didn’t even know there was a show business.

It’s sort of a feeling of power onstage. It’s really the ability to make people smile, or just to turn them one way or another for that duration of time, and for it to have some effect later on. I don’t really think it’s power… it’s the goodness.

I realized what Led Zeppelin was about around the end of our first U.S. tour. We started off not even on the bill in Denver, and by the time we got to New York we were second to Iron Butterfly, and they didn’t want to go on!

Well, I think you and I have always felt the same way – that we’re Jewish but we can get away with just being exotic. We’re kind of Jews in disguise.