Queen have discovered an unreleased song featuring vocals by their late frontman, Freddie Mercury.
The discovery, which will reportedly get an official release later this year, was confirmed by guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor, who shared the news during an interview this weekend with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2 over the course of the Jubilee weekend. The festivities included a performance from the rock legends at Buckingham Palace.
"We did find a little gem from Freddie that we’d kind of forgotten about,” Taylor explains. “And it’s wonderful. Actually, it was a real discovery. It’s from the Miracle Sessions and I think it’s going to be out in September.”
The Miracle served as Queen's thirteenth studio album, and was released on 22 May 1989 by Parlophone Records and Capitol Records in the United Kingdom and the USA, respectively. It was recorded in the wake of Mercury's HIV diagnosis in 1987.
When questioned as to who found the track, May replies, “It was kind of hiding in plain sight. We looked at it many times and thought, ‘Oh no, we can’t really rescue that’.
"But in fact, we went in there again and our wonderful engineering team went, ‘OK, we can do this and this’. It’s like stitching bits together. But it’s beautiful. It’s touching.” Taylor adds that the song is "a very passionate piece.”
Since Mercury’s death in 1991 following his battle with AIDS, the classic rock sensations have released a number of previously unheard tracks featuring the frontman, including the 2014 compilation album Queen Forever, which consisted of songs recorded in the ‘80s that had been “forgotten about”.
Listen to the full interview on the BBC website.
