This track, Millionaire's Waltz, is a perfect union of Freddie Mercury's undulating Vaudeville music theatre glam rock, their controlled expulsions of their vocal harmonies and Brian May' sweet, glowing guitar fills. May's Red Special has a gorgeously juicy yet remarkably clear tone; it's homemade charm means it practically clicks and clacks under the tough legato play of May and his robust digits; the manual labour he uses to wring out every lick on his cheap rig is commendable considering he still uses the same guitar forty years on and counting! You virtually hear him crank the guitar neck with each bend, wielding away his lightsabre tone in and out of Mercury's feather light piano, velvety vocals and the cooing harmonies to create a tough soft rock ballast that defines terms like soft rock or power balladry.
The Millionaire's Waltz is built around a familiar Queen technique of using hard rock instrumentation to play older styles of music from 'court of the king' pan flute music to olde English maypole folk. The orchestrated melodies re-inacted with such a bracing, tactile and haptic electric guitar is one of their best traits displaying their unique take on Prog rock's established love of classical music forms. This starts with sturdy piano chords, noodle-ey bass machinations and Freddie's big wide voice with fairy voiced Roger Taylor's little harmonies. Deacon' bass notes gurgle and bubble in little up and down patterns before, while Freddie and the dreamers voices caress and soar all at once. But it's Brian May's additions that make it; from the walking guitar line at 2 minutes 30 where he turns the notch up into a powered horror film motif to his twiddling guitar waltz at the three minute mark complete with triangle and gong pinging and piano continuing to plink away; the mix of his overdriven sound and more traditional acoustic percussion backing him up his superb mix of old and new, natural and synthetic as the guitar's range stay central while the piano and drums splash out all over with plenty of air to ring out.
I particularly love how May clenches, clangs the tough piano strings of his franken-guitar, every tweak unfurled in clear sunburst sustains; it's so electronic, analogue in it's texture full of diodes, currants and signals created by wiring and metal over the strings and ivory of the other instruments. His treacly guitar parts sway, ballet and twirl around in a tandem with Mercury's stomping piano and Taylor's air horn vocals; this 'dance' mixing Elizabethan grace and whimsy to art rock arrangement of plonking piano, twinkling triangles, hysterical falsetto harmonies blasting off and Brain May's guitar zapping away. The highlight has got to be the weeping guitar figure at 3.50 which would return at the end of Bohemian Rhapsody too, the glowing sustain practically dripping before revving back up into more fuzzed-out rhythm guitar and a sea of fluffy, sped up guitars gang up on us for one last run through of Freddie's melody.
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