It was back at the end of the 1980s when I realised that some of the songs I liked were by Queen. My first visual contact with them was through the ‘I Want it All’ clip, which is one of the band’s most powerful videos. Seeing the double bass drum kit and all this liquid (beer) rise up from the floor toms during the video, and the band playing so hard opened something in my heart. The next step was doing chores around the home and getting paid by my parents to have the money to buy Queen cassettes and CDs.

My father was a drummer back in the 1960s and I always had his drum kit in the fireplace room at my disposal, so the first thing I did after seeing Roger Taylor smashing his drums like a devil, was to do the same on this smaller 1967 Sonor kit I had at home. This is how I started to play the drums and started to fall in love with the music of Queen.

For me ‘Queen II’ was a flashlight, ‘Sheer Heart Attack’ the next one, Roger’s voice gave me warmth, and the guitar chords of his Queen songs were always different to those in the other songs, it got me hooked! The next step was to gain information from my father about the rudiments of drumming. I was officially a Queen fan and a “drummer”. My teenage years had shifted in a new direction, the right direction.

After the loss of Freddie and a few years of inactivity by the band members, in 1994 I went to London and signed up as a member of the Queen International Fan Club. I discovered through the fanzines that Roger Taylor would be undertaking his “Happiness?” Tour and, surprisingly, he would be playing several dates in Italy – this was to be a great occasion and one I couldn’t miss. I convinced my busy father to go to Rome and attend the show at the Palladium Theatre with me. At that time there was no internet or much other news about the tour and it was not easy to buy tickets, but we got our hands on a pair by phoning cousins in Rome and we attended for what I still consider the best concert I’ve ever seen – singing Queen songs loudly with other people, crazy like me, was an amazing moment of my life, my life which consists of music, it literally flows in my veins.