Roger Taylor

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.

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.

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.

The greatest Rock’n’Roll drummer of all time was John Bonham who did things that nobody had ever even thought possible before with the drum kit. And also the greatest sound out of his drums – they sounded enormous, and just one bass drum. So fast on it that he did more with one bass drum than most people could do with three, if they could manage them. And he had technique to burn and fantastic power and tremendous feel for rock’n’roll. “When the levee breaks” is the archetypal heavy drum sound – it’s never been bettered – it’s like a steamroller, enormous bass drum. Simple but takes feel.

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. (…) At Ridge Farm, when we weren’t working we would swim, play bad tennis, bad snooker and be beaten at table tennis by Freddie. I think he had been the champion at his boarding school and I never, ever saw him lose a game. That summer was more like a youth club rather than wild parties. In the evenings we would go down to the pub, come back to the barn and play more music.

[on drumming] There’s something rather nice about spending the evening hitting things.

I’m the type to swallow my blood ‘fore I swallow my pride.

I think we’re a band with a lot of history now so it’s nice to come up with something that doesn’t have any history at all.

I couldn’t live without my music, man. Or me mum.

I read while the kids play. I can see them from the kitchen window. And I’m a fast reader.

Parisian men make love all day and have no time to work; American men work all day and have no time for love.

Everyone wants to be black so bad I wake up feeling so exclusive!

Wow. Losing 95 percent of your audience in just five years. That basically makes Obama the NBC of presidents.

This is so nice, it must be illegal.

I think if you ask any of us here, we all dreamed of ending up on Saturday Night Live. I remember thinking, ‘I’ll just keep doing this as long as I can get away with it.’

Guys act strange around me. I swear I don’t know why!

[On her most dreadful crush] I used to drive, pretty pathetically, I’d just drive by their house all the time and they didn’t know who I was. I’d just drive by the house all the time. I once knocked on the window and I thought, “What am I doing? What am I going to say if they come to the door and don’t know who I am?”

I’m not very experienced with boys or the whole dating thingy.

(While accepting the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for Good Will Hunting) Most of all, I want to thank my father, up there, the man who when I said I wanted to be an actor, he said, ‘Wonderful. Just have a back-up profession like welding.’

I was bored one day so my Dad took me to this acting school. I liked it more than having fun – I liked it for a job.

I really love cursing a lot. But as I get older, I realize it’s a little unseemly for women of a certain age.