The King and Queen of pop are both in the media’s blinkers at the moment, with Katherine Jackson profusely motivating her multi-million dollar law-suit against AEG concert promoters, who she believes is responsible for her son’s death, and Sasha Baron Cohen withdrawing from the Mercury biopic on the grounds of creative differences. Now however, the magnificent pair will hopefully be able to strike a truly positive chord with the release of three tracks recorded in 1983.

This was in fact part of a project the two artists hoped would lead to a substantial body of work, but unfortunately the collaboration fell short of its potential due to time constraints. According to Queen’s manager Jim ‘Miami’ Beach, the lead singer found Michael Jackson’s larks slightly unnerving, “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'”, referring of course to the camelid Jackson graced the California-based studio with.

It is hard to know what form the final outcome of this fusion will take. One would usually suspect that as the songs were recorded by two of the worlds best-loved music icons and have not been publicised yet, that their quality may be dubious. There have certainly been some ‘royal’ partnerships that could have been treated with more restraint… The songs could materialise as the fun, hoppy, synth-driven ballads we all hoped for, ‘Radio Ga Ga’ (1984) meets ‘Billie Jean’ (1982) but on the other hand it could result in the overflows and impulses of two stars who had certainly peaked by that point.