“Queen bring back Freddie,” announces the Forever blurb. Medical science may be unable to raise the dead. But this latest compilation unearths three tracks that Queen recorded with the late frontman, which now jostle with a career-spanning selection of heart-tugging ballads to “bring back Freddie” to the Christmas market. A consummate Freddie Mercury is at his most confident in opener Let Me in Your Heart Again, a huge piano- and guitar-driven power ballad from the sessions that produced Radio Ga Ga. It sounds like the great Queen single that never was. Another gem is the band’s version of Love Kills – far more stripped down, raw and impassioned than the dancier, Giorgio Moroder-product solo hit for Mercury. However, Mercury and Michael Jackson’s much-trumpeted duet There Must Be More to Life Than This never really takes off. It’s far inferior to the pair’s take on the funk stomper State of Shock, which has remained in the can since Jackson reportedly brought an animal into the studio and Mercury called a halt to the sessions, declaring: “Get me outta here. I’m recording with a llama.”
