INSTANT KARMA
ROGER TAYLOR
AN AUDIENCE WITH...
The Queen drummer on predicting punk, cocaine myths, tiger skin trousers and making Kenny Everett scream
Interview by SAM RICHARDS
“New Queen music? I don’t see why not”:
Roger Taylor looks forward
“I totally believed in ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. I thought, ‘If we’re going down this route, let’s really overdo it’”
DAVID Crosby owned a schooner named Mayan. Dennis Wilson sailed up the west coast on a ship called Harmony. And Roger Taylor’s boat? “It’s called Rock And Roll,” he says, with a slightly embarrassed chuckle. “I looked it up and found that nobody else had a boat registered under that name, so I thought, ‘Might as well!’ I’ve recently been around the world on it – we went across the Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Pacific, Australia, Thailand… and it’s just got back into the Med.”
Yet for all his highlife trappings, the affable Queen drummer and high-harmony singer hasn’t forgotten how he got here. Recently, he’s been going through old diaries for the upcoming Queen I boxset. “There’s one entry that says, ‘Just decided Queen is definitely the best name for the band’,” he relates, with a Proustian rush. And so a much-loved British institution was born.
More than half a century on, judging by the weight of the postbag for this feature, Queen remain an important presence in many people’s lives. There’s plenty of interest, too, in Taylor’s solo ventures. “I don’t get much direct feedback, because I’m not a social media person,” he says. “So that’s really nice to hear.”