It’s hard not to be awed by the sheer indefatigability with which Brian May and Roger Taylor have worked to keep Queen’s name in the spotlight in the 31 years since Freddie Mercury’s death. They’ve given pretty much everything a go: jukebox musicals, history-rewriting biopics, re-recording the band’s hits with everyone from Luciano Pavarotti to Robbie Williams to Wyclef Jean; and touring the world with former Free vocalist Paul Rodgers or former American Idol contestant Adam Lambert deputising for Mercury. Moreover, they’ve managed to keep up a release schedule that would shame a band with a frontman in the prime of life: there have been 28 “new” Queen releases, including box sets, live albums, collections of radio sessions and 12-inch mixes and a succession of compilations that have rearranged their back catalogue in a variety of ways. You can quibble with their methods and question their quality control if you like, but it has worked: Queen are permanent residents in the album charts; their streaming figures dwarf those of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones or David Bowie.
But there has been relatively little in the way of previously unheard songs. Queen, it seems, just weren’t the kind of band given to recording 30 new songs for an album and picking the best 10. They managed to squeeze out one posthumous album, 1995’s Made in Heaven, a by-any-means necessary collection that involved old outtakes, vocals Mercury completed shortly before his death – some of them fragmentary and worked up into full songs though judicious use of a sampler – and tracks from the band members’ solo albums reworked to sound more like Queen. Two more outtakes were appended to a compilation called Queen Forever in 2014. The deluxe reissues of the 14 studio albums Queen recorded with Mercury managed to grub up a grand total of two unheard tracks between them: both were under two minutes long and one of them was an instrumental with the unpromising title Chinese Torture.
