Six decades into a long, loud, louche career as a legendary rock’n’roll playboy, Roger Taylor is in wistfully nostalgic mood. Speaking to Classic Rock from his holiday retreat in sunny France, the 77-year-old drummer, singer, songwriter and one-man band admits he’s had a lazy morning so far, playing Scrabble on his computer. This brings back bittersweet memories of his classic Queen days, when he and Freddie Mercury would engage in epic Scrabble battles during downtime in the studio.
“Fred was very good at it, actually,” Taylor muses. “I always liked a bit of Scrabble. It’s not about words, it’s about points.” Quite so. Like most things in life.
Scrabble addiction aside, Taylor once claimed he and Mercury were the “naughty ones” in Queen, sharing a flat and a rowdy party lifestyle in the band’s early days. Does he miss their sex, drugs and rock’n’roll antics today? “Yeah, I do, really,” he sighs. “Because I couldn’t really get up to it all now. Too old. I think it would kill me.”
And yet, against all odds, Queen have kept themselves very much alive since Mercury’s death in 1991, carving out a phenomenally successful new career phase. They are currently in semidormant mode but, as Taylor will later reveal, they have multiple projects on the horizon.
Meanwhile, the band’s most prolific member has been writing and recording his seventh solo album, Violence Insane In A Beautiful World, the follow-up to his warmly received 2021 album Outsiders. By turns sunny and sombre, and shot through with world-weary wisdom, this is one of Taylor’s most musically and emotionally mature non-Queen collections to date. Indeed, it may well be his best so far.
Bookending the album with two different versions, the key track Beautiful World moves from joy to horror as it zooms in on a human race facing possible annihilation through war, political division and ecological disaster.
“It is basically from the viewpoint of somebody outside the Earth looking at it and thinking it’s a great place,” Taylor explains, “then on closer inspection they find rather a lot of bad stuff going on. We seem to be on some course of destruction, or self-destruction.”
Taylor seems oddly cheerful for a man who believes a genuine apocalypse is lurking just around the corner. “There have been, I think, four extinction-level events before,” he says solemnly.
So humankind is heading for another one?
“I think it’s inevitable, don’t you?”
All the same, there is a cautiously hopeful message running through the song’s cheeky lyrical refrain: ‘Don’t fuck it up’. This is not just Taylor’s self-help advice to his fellow humans, but also a smart slogan to live by generally.
“Yeah, don’t fuck it up,” he says, laughing. “Exactly. I mean, you’re gonna fuck up some things, but, yeah, it is a good general watchword.”
How many times has Taylor himself come close to fucking up?
“Well, we all make mistakes, don’t we?” he says. “But I have five children and they’re basically lovely… when they behave. So yeah, I think of myself as a very lucky person.”
Roger Taylor and wife Sarina pose after the drummer was appointed an OBE, during an investiture ceremony at Windsor Castle, on March 30, 2022 (Image credit: Steve Parsons / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)
Taylor’s inspired choice of musical guest on three key tracks on his new album is South Africa’s Ndlovu Youth Choir. The group earned global fame on TV talent shows, but Taylor discovered them last year via their glorious Zulu-language reworking of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which they describe as “what the song might have sounded like if Freddie Mercury’s musical journey had never left Africa, the continent of his birth”. Officially endorsed by Queen, this mighty translation even has an accompanying flamboyant video that pays sly homage to the band’s iconic 1976 original.
“They are fantastic,” Taylor gushes. “They just totally blew me away when I saw their video for Bohemian Rhapsody. A lot of it is in Zulu, and their own unique take on that song, which has been done so much. I thought it was fabulous. Even the costumes were fantastic. And boy, do they sing beautifully.”
Classic Rock suggests that Taylor should enlist the Ndlovu Youth Choir to record more Zulu-language versions of Queen songs, starting with the obvious choice: his I’m In Love With My Car. For a brief moment he appears to take this ludicrous proposition seriously. “No, I couldn’t see that,” he says, frowning. “That’s entirely from a rock’n’roll perspective.”
Chump, another track on the album, is a thinly veiled attack on the USA’s current president. A thematic sequel to Gangsters Are Running This World on Outsiders, withering rant Chump grew partly out of Queen’s decade-long series of legal battles with Donald Trump’s team over his unauthorised use of the band’s We Are The Champions and We Will Rock You in campaign rallies and videos.
Taylor admits he has never been a party-political animal, and can not imagine endorsing any candidate.
“No, I instinctively don’t trust any politicians,” he explains. “The ones I’ve come across usually seem to be incredibly self-obsessed. Like anybody else, their naked ambition seems to shine through. Obviously there are some good ones, I just can’t think of any right now.”
Taylor’s solo albums have always included bolder political statements than Queen, who reportedly made a group pact never to let politics colour their music.
“That’s absolutely true,” Taylor says. “When you’re in a band, there are four characters, all with slightly different opinions. So we never really wanted to be overtly political at all. We looked upon ourselves as entertainers, hopefully bringing a modicum of joy and entertainment into people’s lives. We didn’t want to lecture them too much.”
Alongside all this apocalyptic angst and scathing social commentary, Violence Insane In A Beautiful World also contains some of Taylor’s most tender, personal songs to date. What Really Matters is a heart-tugging paean to the importance of kindness, I See You Now an achingly sweet long-term love letter to his wife Sarina. It seems this grizzled rock’n’roll playboy is a soppy old romantic at heart. “Sometimes,” he says with a chuckle. “Sometimes, yeah.”
The album’s sole cover version is a raw, stripped-down version of John Lennon’s Jealous Guy, which Taylor first performed on Later With Jools Holland in 2024.
“I never met John, to my great regret,” Taylor says. “But I’ve always loved that song. I found it so delicately moving, so open-hearted. He was wonderful. I was a huge fan of John Lennon, everything about him, just his voice and his bravery and his brilliant musical ability. I kept it as simple as I possibly could, just a piano.”
Taylor’s last solo album, Outsiders, was a top-three hit in Britain, his highest ever placing for a non-Queen release. All the same, he feels his day job with one of rock’s biggest-selling bands of all time has mostly been more a burden than blessing when it comes to side projects.
“It certainly doesn’t help being in a big band,” he argues. “People automatically think: ‘Oh, he’s the drummer in that band, what’s he doing by himself?’ So I don’t think it helps at all. I mean, look at the Stones. Their solo efforts really haven’t done a lot. They need that magical ingredient of the band to be taken seriously. I don’t think being in Queen has ever helped my solo efforts. If anything it might have even been a negative factor.”
Almost 60 years ago, Roger Taylor faced a life-changing decision. The future Queen drummer found himself at a career-defining crossroads. In 1967 he left the family home in Cornwall to study dentistry in London. Before long he would switch courses, meet Brian May, and help launch a planet-conquering pomp-rock supergroup. But with the full benefit of hindsight, the key question is: did he make the right choice? His contribution to the pantheon of rock is assured, of course. But he is also, let’s be frank, a sad loss to dentistry. Where did it all go wrong, Roger?
“No, no!” He replies, laughing. “It’s dentistry’s gain that I never became one! What a horrible job. You’re battling decay. I never wanted to be a dentist, somebody just told me they made a lot of money. I really wanted to get to London to join a band, or to make a band. That was all I wanted to do.”
Six decades and nine lifetimes later, amazingly, Queen are not only still going but are thriving. In their heyday they sold 300 million albums, conquered stadiums across the globe, played a legendary set at Live Aid, and weathered multiple changes in fickle pop fashion, including the punk wars of the late 70s, which failed resoundingly in their threat to replace the older generation of glam-rock dinosaurs.
Indeed, as it happens, Taylor was a Sex Pistols fan. “I really loved the Pistols album,” he says. “Great producer, mate of mine, Chris Thomas. Because we were in the same studio for a while in 1976-77, somewhere around there. They were doing their first album, and it was dreadful at first until Chris came in and made a great record.”
During this shared studio time, Taylor witnessed the infamous exchange between Sid Vicious and Freddie Mercury which has passed into rock folklore: “Sid put his head in the studio and said: ‘Hello, Freddie, are we bringing ballet to the masses?’ And Freddie said something like: ‘Oh, Mister Ferocious, we’re doing our best here…’”
Taylor actually has positive memories of the young John Lydon: “John was alright, actually. He was quite a character. We got on quite well. It’s just that Sid Vicious was such a dick.”
Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor shooting the opening section of the music video for Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody at Elstree Studios, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom, 10th November 1975 (Image credit: Watal Asanuma/Shinko Music/Getty Images)
Fast forward another 15 years, and Queen somehow survived their biggest blow yet, the death of Freddie Mercury, a tragic rupture which would have finished off most bands. That was followed soon after by the departure of bass player John Deacon, who was devastated by Mercury’s loss, and felt the remaining trio could not continue without their flamboyant frontman.
Taylor insists there was never a personal falling out with Deacon, but admits they no longer communicate. “John is a real recluse,” he says. “I think he speaks to our lawyers and our accountant and that’s it. I really don’t know what John is doing now. He’s probably sitting in a room somewhere, counting his money.”
Speaking of money, the last decade has proved staggeringly lucrative for Queen. Their careerspanning film Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) became the most successful music biopic of all time, raking in more than £600 million. Indeed, it was beaten only this year, by the billion-dollar Michael Jackson blockbuster Michael. Both films were produced by Graham King, who sent Taylor a sympathy message when their box-office record was toppled.
When Taylor spoke to Classic Rock in 2021, he was scathing about Sacha Baron Cohen, who was initially cast as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, but later replaced by Rami Malek. The Queen drummer dismissed the Ali G comedian as too tall, too pushy and a bad actor who would have been “shit” in the role. People mellow over time, of course, so it’s refreshing to hear that Taylor’s opinion of Cohen remains bracingly sour.
“Yeah, I stand by that,” he says. “I didn’t want a subversive comedian playing my best friend Freddie. He really wanted it to be dark, and pretty scuzzy. We wanted to make great entertainment; that was all it was. But it worked out great. I’m thrilled with the success of the film.”
Adam Lambert onstage with Queen at Chase Center on November 08, 2023 in San Francisco, California (Image credit: Miikka Skaffari/Getty Images))
In the time since the drummer’s last solo album was released, Queen have also concluded their Rhapsody tour with Adam Lambert, a five-year global extravaganza which finally ended in February 2024. Taylor claims Lambert is “on a slightly different path” than Queen these days, so is their partnership over?
“I wouldn’t close the door, no,” he says. “We were with him for ten years, out touring with Adam. It was very, very successful and very satisfying. I really enjoyed working with him. He’s a very unselfish performer, and boy can he sing. He’s got the most amazing natural gift. And he never tried to be Freddie.”
Taylor and May even tried recording new Queen material with Lambert, but he admits that has now been shelved. “We never really finished anything with Adam, which is to my regret, because I am a huge admirer of his voice. I think we could have done good stuff, but he’s doing lots of other things, and it didn’t really work out in the end.”
Last year, in yet another record-breaking mega-deal, Queen sold their back catalogue rights to Sony for a reported £1 billion. The terms exclude live performance and certain territories, but May and Taylor are now essentially signed to the Sony/Columbia label.
“We’re very happy to be there,” Taylor says. “We actually knew ‘Mister Sony’ in the old days, Akio Morita. He used to come along with his family to our shows in Tokyo, so it’s a sort of a final coming round again in a way. And so far we’ve found them very charming people to get on with.”
If that widely reported billion-pound figure is even close to accurate, it dwarfs recent catalogue sales by Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Michael Jackson. Taylor says the Sony deal “might be the best idea I ever had”, but he is coy about sharing the exact price tag. “No I don’t wanna tell you the number,” he says, grinning. “I don’t want to embarrass any other acts.”
On a more personal note, Taylor speaks fondly of old friends and musical comrades who have passed away in recent years, including Jeff Beck and Taylor Hawkins. On picking up his OBE in 2022, he dedicated the award to the Foo Fighters drummer. Hawkins was not just a friend, but also godfather to Taylor’s son Rufus, who currently plays drums in The Darkness. “We loved one another,” he says of Hawkins. “I love the Foos, actually. Not quite the same without Taylor.”
Taylor Hawkins and Roger Taylor (Image credit: Kevin Mazur/WireImage for VH-1 Channel)
This autumn, Taylor completed a modestly scaled UK tour around Violence Insane In A Beautiful World. But Queen also have some fresh schemes brewing, starting this month with a digitally restored cinema and DVD release of their classic 1986 concert film Hungarian Rhapsody: Live In Budapest, one of Freddie Mercury’s final live performances.
Teasingly, Taylor hints that he and May have been in the studio touching up some old recordings, and are also planning some kind of live performance, but he is vague on details. Unconfirmed rumours have already begun circulating about a run of Queen shows at the hi-tech Sphere in Las Vegas, which would see them following in the footsteps of U2, Eagles and Metallica.
Taylor remains tight-lipped, claiming the final plans are still unclear, but something typically grandiose and Queen-sized is clearly in the works.
“Oh yeah, most certainly,” he says. “We’ve got some ideas for some kind of spectacular shows. It’s very difficult, there’s so much computing power needed these days and programming stuff. But Brian and I talk about it quite a lot. So yeah, it probably won’t be the last the world hears of us.”
Queen are rock’s great survivors. Brian May is playing guitar again following heart surgery and a stroke, and Taylor is still writing and recording despite creeping arthritis in his hands. Both he and May are now in their late seventies and could easily be enjoying a luxurious retirement by now, playing endless games of Scrabble inside their own gold-plated pyramid. And yet both are still working, still making new music, still touring. Slowing down, maybe, but not stopping.
“Brian will say the same thing,” Taylor says. “We do it because we love it, and really, this is what we do. Also the idea of retirement is horrific. I’m just gonna sit here and not do much and rot away till I die? No thanks. I find when you’re working, you get fired up, it gives you a reason to get up, you know? Although I got up pretty late today. I don’t do it very quickly these days. It takes a while for an album to assimilate itself. But yeah, I’m very pleased to still be doing it.”
Violence Insane In A Beautiful World is out now via Columbia.
(LouderSound)
Leave a Reply