Queen’s Roger Taylor and Brian May announced they’ll be releasing a previously-unreleased, “new” song featuring the late, great Freddie Mercury. The pair announced the forthcoming release, called "Face It Alone," during a BBC Radio 2 interview while Queen + Adam Lambert were in the UK for Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee celebration.
“We did find a little gem from Freddie that we’d kind of forgotten about,” said Roger Taylor. “It’s wonderful, actually, a real discovery. It’s from The Miracle sessions (1988) and it’s [coming out in] September.”
Asked how the track was discovered, May revealed that ‘It was kind of hiding in plain sight. We’d looked at it many times and thought “Oh, no we can’t really rescue that. When, in fact, we went in [the studio] again and our wonderful engineering team said, ‘Ok we can do this, and we can do this.’ It’s like stitching bits together. But it’s beautiful. It’s very touching piece from Freddie.”
Last month, Queen’s classic track “Bohemian Rhapsody” was inducted into the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry. The last Queen single to feature vocals from Mercury was “The Show Must Go One,” from the album Innuendo, which was also the last album Mercury would record with Taylor, May, and bassist John Deacon. Mercury died of complications from HIV/AIDS on November 24, 1991. He was 45-years-old. In 2004, Queen returned to the stage, billed as “Queen +,” performing with Bad Company Paul Rodgers before uniteing with Lambert in 2011, a collaboration dubbed officially as “Queen + Adam Lambert.”
As part of The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, Queen and Lambert performed "We Will Rock You" at Buckingham Palace in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators. Asked what the celebration meant to him, Lambert—who was born in Indianapolis—told BBC Radio 2, “This is an incredible honor. We were rehearsing earlier and it's definitely the closest to the palace I’ve ever been on that stage. So, I’m thrilled, and it’s such an honor to be here.”
You can see the performance from Buckingham Palace below.
