"We all played on the original," says May, "but you wouldn't know it because it's disco. The strange thing is that it was just a quick one, and you think, 'Freddie just tossed it off,' but I took it into the studio about a year ago and took everything off apart from Freddie's vocal, expecting to hear all sorts of interference coming from his headphones, and there was nothing: just a clean, beautifully pure vocal.

"He sang 'love kills', and it's nothing trivial. He wasn't just delivering to requirement. He was writing something that he felt in his heart. And he did find that love kills."