Queen's recently restored song is moving, defiant - and should have been released years ago, writes Neil McCormick. Photo / Getty Images
Queen's recently restored song is moving, defiant - and should have been released years ago, writes Neil McCormick. Photo / Getty Images
Queen are back, reunited with the late, great Freddie Mercury to release their first new song in the reign of King Charles III.
Face It Alone is a stark, melancholy, defiant ballad, in which Mercury sings out against the iniquities of fate: "When something so near and dear to lifeexplodes inside you feel your soul is set on fire."
Roger Taylor maintains a slow, steady pace on snare and bass drums that echo and shudder in the background of a tune bound by a delicate keyboard arpeggio and long, slow bass notes from John Deacon. Brian May erupts in the middle with a weepy, bereft solo carved out with his familiar tone of reverb and sustain.
The focus throughout is resolutely upon Mercury's vocal, a slight hoarseness adding emotion to a resonant delivery, replete with long stretched operatic vowels. Conjuring a prognosis of doom and gloom, with imagery of burning souls and a moon that has lost its glow, he proclaims "In the end, you have to face it all alone."
Already dealing with his terminal diagnosis of HIV/Aids, it is yet another insight into the stoic loneliness with which the flamboyant frontman met his fate. It is genuinely a lovely piece.
Face It Alone was originally recorded in 1988, during productive sessions for The Miracle that generated so much material. Queen were able to squeeze a couple of further albums from them, including Innuendo in 1991 (the year Mercury died, aged 45) and the posthumous Made in Heaven in 1995. Three more tracks appeared on the compilation Queen Forever in 2014.
Where do they find this stuff? I have an image of studio technicians scouring through dustbins full of old tapes, looking for any scrap of an outtake that somehow escaped attention for 31 years.
"Have you reached the bottom of the barrel yet, mate? Well, dive back in there, you never know."
And yet, I have to say, all the lost Queen material that has appeared so far has been of high quality, and, indeed, would have been deserving of release when first recorded.
"We'd kind of forgotten about this track," said Taylor, "but there it was, this little gem. It's wonderful, a real discovery. It's a very passionate piece."
The truth, I suspect, is that they hadn't forgotten about it at all, but that it simply wasn't in a state to be heard. There are bootlegs of this track, which include Mercury singing the immortal lines "There's something de-de-de-de-oh, de-de-de-ay-oh-oh-oh-oh."
Advances in digital technology allow old analogue recordings to be cleaned up, polished and sonically boosted, with elements that once might have been buried in mixes lifted out and separated, and tracks that may have been played in different tempos and even keys perfectly aligned.
Face It Alone was originally recorded in 1988. Photo / Supplied
May hinted as much when he first revealed the track's existence during an interview backstage at the (actual) Queen's Jubilee concert in June.
"It was kind of hiding in plain sight," admitted May. "We'd looked at it many times and thought 'oh no, we can't really rescue that' but we went in there again and our wonderful engineering team said we can try this and this. It's kind of stitching bits together."
That doesn't sound like a recipe for making magic.
Presumably the repetition of the line "The moon has lost its glow" that makes up the whole final verse was a placeholder for a lyric that never got completed.
But honestly, none of that should matter. What Queen have delivered is a tender and moving performance of a beautiful song that deserves to be heard and should earn its rightful place in the group's canon. Freddie Mercury is dead. Queen lives.
