One may have been dead for over two decades an the other for just short of half a decade, but Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson still have unfinished business with the charts as previously never-before heard duets featuring the pair are due to be released later this year. The legendary Queen frontman and the King of Pop are said to have recorded the handful of songs in California in 1983, with a full album in the pipeline, however they only got as far as recording three songs, having to abandon the project to work on their own material.

Freddie Mercury
Freddie continues to inspire people today with his music

Reports are indicating that the pair teamed up for a one-time recording session in Encino, California in 1983, where they recorded three tracks together. After sitting dormant for three successive decades, it has now been announced that the songs have been re-worked and re-mastered to give us the closest possible thing to what the pair may have had in stall with their duets album. Never ones to let an easy payment on Freddie's behalf go by, Brian May and Roger Taylor have begun working on the recordings and aim to release the completed project in two months as “something for folks to hear” - as quoted in The Times - and have enlisted the help of producer William Orbit to speed up the process.

Michael Jackson
Michael got on Freddie's nerves during the short-lived recording session

As The Times also reports, the reason behind the failed recording session was as much to do with Michael's well-known eccentricity as it was anything else, as Queen's former manager Jim 'Miami' Beach revealed. He told the paper that Jackson and Mercury's relationship began to sour almost immediately and MJ put considerable strain on the partnership when he brought a llama into the recording studio. Miami recalled the time when their partnership fell apart for good, saying, “Mercury rang me and said: 'Miami, dear, can you get over here? You've got to get me out of here, I'm recording with a llama.'”

May and Rogers were fist given permission to work on Freddie and Michael's duets by the Jackson estate, which holds the rights to all of Michael's recordings, in 2011 and had been working part-time on the project with limited success. With the recruitment of Orbit, who has worked with the likes of Madonna and Blur in the past, the two are predicting that the song collection will be out in time for Christmas.

Sacha Baron Cohen
Sacha Baron Cohen was due to protray Mercury in a biopic about the singer, but dropped out due to creative differences