{"id":216631,"date":"2025-10-16T06:09:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T06:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/216631\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T06:09:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T06:09:07","slug":"unseen-bohemian-rhapsody-verses-to-feature-in-freddie-mercury-lyric-book-freddie-mercury","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/216631\/","title":{"rendered":"Unseen Bohemian Rhapsody verses to feature in Freddie Mercury lyric book | Freddie Mercury"},"content":{"rendered":"

His voice is one of the most distinctive in pop history and now the words Freddie Mercury<\/a> sang are to be given the rock star treatment in a lyric book that will also include unreleased songs and alternative versions of Queen anthems.<\/p>\n

A Life in Lyrics will feature abandoned verses for Bohemian Rhapsody and drafts of Don\u2019t Stop Me Now. The material, taken from Mercury\u2019s personal notebooks, has been released by Mary Austin, the singer\u2019s former fiancee and closest friend.<\/p>\n

Mercury died in 1991, leaving his house and possessions to Austin, along with his entire creative archive spanning the early days of Queen<\/a> to the end of his solo career.<\/p>\n

Austin said: \u201cIn early 2023, in the midst of cataloguing the contents of Garden Lodge, this wonderful home Freddie had left to me, I began to leaf through the papers my family and I had collected together from where they had lain, undisturbed and unseen, in the house for over 30 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

She found working drafts of Mercury\u2019s lyrics on loose sheets of paper and in plain notebooks that \u201centirely belied the wonders within\u201d.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re my best friend: Freddie Mercury and Mary Austin. Photograph: Courtesy of the private collection of Mary Austin\/PA<\/p>\n

Austin believes Mercury\u2019s handwritten notes offer \u201ca window into his brilliant, creative mind\u201d and , for her, \u201cstirred up many memories from decades past, of conversations, occasions and emotions\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope that by sharing his manuscripts now, contextualised with fresh insights and a sprinkling of vignettes of our lives together, I will illuminate the remarkable creative force of my dear friend for the enjoyment of everyone he continues to delight and inspire, even after all these years,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

Mercury and Austin met in 1969 and he proposed to her on Christmas Day, 1973. They broke off their engagement three years later and remained lifelong friends. The singer had relationships with men and women and described himself as bisexual.<\/p>\n

Mercury was diagnosed with Aids in 1987 and died of bronchial pneumonia, aged 45, in 1991<\/a>. Austin inherited about half of his estimated \u00a39m estate.<\/p>\n

A Life in Lyrics, which will be illustrated with images from Mercury\u2019s personal archive, is scheduled for release by HarperCollins on 1 September next year, a few days before the singer would have celebrated his 80th birthday.<\/p>\n

Last month, another book about Mercury claimed to shed light on an unknown chapter<\/a> in his life. Love, Freddie<\/a> by Lesley-Ann Jones alleges that the singer had a secret daughter, unknown to even his closest friends. The book has divided fans and the people who were closest to Mercury.<\/p>\n

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Lesley-Ann Jones with her book, Love, Freddie. Photograph: Channel 5<\/p>\n

It claims that the child, now a 48-year-old woman referred to only as \u201cB\u201d, was conceived during a fling between Mercury and the wife of a close friend in 1976.<\/p>\n

\u201cFreddie Mercury was and is my father,\u201d B states in a handwritten letter, reproduced in the book. \u201cWe had a very close and loving relationship from the moment I was born and throughout the final 15 years of his life. He adored me and was devoted to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Little is known about B, other than her age and the fact she is a medical professional working in Europe. She claimed Mercury entrusted her with 17 journals that cover the final years of his life, which Jones said are \u201cthe closest thing to a Freddie Mercury autobiography that the world will ever know\u201d.<\/p>\n

Austin, however, said she did not know about a secret child. \u201cThe truth is that I am simply not the guardian of such a secret,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve never known of any child, or of any diaries. If Freddie had indeed had a child without me knowing anything about it, that would be astonishing to me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"His voice is one of the most distinctive in pop history and now the words Freddie Mercury sang…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":{"0":"post-216631","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}