Apr 20, 2016
The personal notebook of late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury will go up for auction on June 29 in the U.K. as part of Bonhams entertainment memorabilia sale. The Guardian reports that they notebook is expected to sell for between $70,000 and $100,000.
Mercury carried the notebook from 1988 to 1990 and it contains both fragments and full lyrics to 19 songs that were featured on Queen's The Miracle and Innuendo. These would serves as the bands last two albums with Mercury, as he passed away just six weeks after Innuendo's release in 1991.
Of note are the lyrics to "The Show Must Go On," which were primarily penned by Queen's Brian May, as they chronicle Mercury's insistence to continue performing and recording music despite his worsening health. The Guardian has a photo of those specific lyrics that can be seen here.
The lyrics for "Too Much Love Will Kill You," a song that didn't make the cut for The Miracle, are also in the notebook. After Mercury's death, May arranged a solo version of the song and performed it at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium in 1992. Because of that the song is often mistaken as a tribute to Mercury when it was actually written a few years prior to his death.
The notebook is a rather unique item, according to Bonhams' Stephen Maycock, a consultant specialist in entertainment memorabilia for the auction house.
“We see and sell lyrics from all sorts of different artists but they tend to be one piece of paper for one song. To have a notebook which contains tracks recorded over a three-year period is really exceptional. I can’t think of another one.”
This news comes days after a group of Austrian, Czech, and Swedish researchers released a study confirming that Mercury did in fact have an unparalleled voice. Not that we actually needed science to determine this, but if you want to read the study you can do so here. Consequence of Sound pulled the important information from the study and you can read that information here.
Image by Pim Nauta