timstaffell

Of course I am proud of what became of them. At the time I was moving in a different musical direction. Don’t forget I was only 21, it was just moving from one band to another. It took the global success of Queen to bestow these events with such retrospective significance.

I never personally knew John Deacon but I have remained close friends with Roger and Brian ever since. I rarely saw Freddie after we both graduated from Ealing College.

The Queen establishment own the rights to these tracks and I have no knowledge of any plans to re-release them. Of course, they were released in the ’90s as Ghost of a Smile during a period when (I believe) the rights briefly lapsed.

1. Of course I didn’t feel betrayed, I didn’t want to be there, I’d left to pursue other things. Humpy Bong was very short-lived, and by the time that Queen were accelerating I was working with Morgan.

2. It wasn’t quite as clear-cut as that. It wouldn’t be wrong to see the foundations of the Queen sound in the Smile material. But as I’ve already commented here, I was beginning to become interested in music that allowed the players lots of room to improvise, and Smile’s material didn’t really have the open spaces that would allow that.

3. ‘Doing All Right’ (originally ‘Doin’ Alright’) is as you say a joint composition with Brian, and obviously it continued to be part of the repertoire after I left, so it made sense that it would appear on their album. I’ve always been adequately remunerated.

4. I can’t answer that because I wasn’t close to him during the Queen years – I only knew him at college. But I suspect that the ‘iconic’ Freddie was just a public exaggeration of what he was really like, and don’t ever underestimate the role of the media in the creation of myths.

He was just a great, fun mate at college. The other day after I watched Bohemian Rhapsody, a vivid image came to my mind of him playing air guitar on a 1-metre steel rule in the classroom with Hendrix blaring out of the speakers.