Book of draft lyrics to offer 'window into brilliant mind' of Freddie Mercury

His voice is one of the most distinctive in pop history, but now Freddie Mercury’s words are to get top billing in a book that will include unreleased songs and alternative versions of Queen hits.

- Lanre Bakare

A Life in Lyrics features abandoned verses for Bohemian Rhapsody and drafts of Don't Stop Me Now. The material from the singer’s notebooks comes courtesy of Mary Austin, Mercury’s former fiancee.

Mercury, who died in 1991, left his house and possessions to Austin along with his creative archive spanning his beginnings with Queen to the end of his solo career.

Austin said: “In 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 for over 30 years.”

Austin said she had found drafts for Mercury’s lyrics written down on loose sheets of paper and in plain notebooks that “entirely belied the wonders within”.