After initially considering that the collection of unreleased demos from the late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury could be used to fill out a whole album, Queen guitarist Brian May has revealed that the band found more Freddie material than they were expecting, and are now trying to write music around it.
May has apparently told Mojo Magazine that he’s surprised at just how much unused material the band found in their archives:
“There’s more in there than we thought, in the Queen source archive. We’ve found some Freddie vocals, some demos… If we find an anlogue 24-track of Freddie singing something that never got finished, the first thing we do is transfer it into the digital domain… We make the copy at the highest resolution you can. Then we start weaving our tapestry.”
May is wary, however, of just how difficult it would be to create enough material for a whole album just by weaving together Freddie’s demos with some new musical ideas. “I’m a little nervous of saying there’s an album there, but there’s certainly a few tracks,” he says. May admits that the band are now “working on spinning some new music around those, which is what we did for the Made in Heaven album, which was possibly the best Queen album we ever made”.
The possibility of new Queen music based around old Freddie Mercury demos is no doubt an exciting prospect, but some fans may find it equally difficult to envision Queen without Freddie at the creative centre, as he appears to be more of a muse for song ideas in this case.
It was revealed earlier this year that collaborative material co-created by Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson was set to be released, yet the music is still being reworked by May and Queen drummer Roger Taylor according to The Mirror. A Freddie Mercury biopic is also in the works, with May saying recently that the film is “in good shape”.
Watch: Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody
(Via Ultimate Guitar)
