Before I go into detail, here are the facts as we know them:
Freddie and Mike Moran wrote and recorded "Exercises In Free Love" as a demo of sorts for Montserrat to impress her and maybe get her to record with them.
Long story short, it worked and they made the Barcelona album.
"Exercises In Free Love" was re-recorded with lyrics and a new backing track, and became "Ensueno".
The Solo Collection comes out years later and features a disc of Instrumentals, including one of "Ensueno."
Now, here's problem:
This "Ensueno (Instrumental)" is actually "Exercises In Free Love" without Freddie's vocal.
"Ensueno," as it appears on Barcelona, has a different backing track than "Free Love". It's very, very similar, but it IS a noticably different recording, right from the first note.
For example, "Free Love" starts with a single hard note before it climbs the scale up through four counts of four. "Ensueno" starts with a florish of notes before climbing.
Mike Moran's performance on both, as I said, is very similar, but he does play it differently. "Ensueno" is played ever so slightly slower, so by the end, "Ensueno" is about 20 seconds longer (in audible time) than "Free Love.
To be certain, I noted the time read-out of each movement of the three tracks (for simplicity, each 'movement' was where the song built to a crescendo and then settled down again):
"Exercises In Free Love"
0:00 - 1:47 1st Movement
1:48 - 2:29 2nd Movement
2:30 - 3:50 3rd Movement
the last few seconds are silence after this.
"Ensueno (Instrumental)"
0:00 - 1:47 1st Movement
1:48 - 2:29 2nd Movement
2:30 - 3:50 3rd Movement
"Ensueno (album version)"
0:00 - 2:00 1st Movement
2:00 - 2:43 2nd Movement
2:44 - 4:15 3rd Movement
If you don't believe me, give each of these a really good listen.
If you're right (and I have no reason to suppose that you're not) then well spotted. I am a stickler for things being right, and to my mind to produce a box set which was undoubtedly put together with such care and attention to make a basic mistake in misnaming a song is a terrible error.
I hope this sort of thing doesn't carry over to the Queen archives - can you imagine being promised an intrumental version of Don't Lose Your Head, only to be given the normal A Dozen Red Roses For My Darling track?!!??
Does anyone here know if Greg Brookes is actually a musician? Yes, he may be a good archivist as archivists go (which actually it appears more and more that he isn't!) but to my mind, the sort of archiving project that Queen's catalogue demands woudl require a 'trained' ear at least helping to pick out nuances and differences between tracks and takes in order to ensure they are catalogued corectly.
Congrats on your meticulous research rhyeking, but I don't think this is a new discovery.
I'm sure it's been mentioned on here more than once before (not that you'd necessarily know that). I certainly was aware of this.
Still, it does beggar belief that mistakes like this were made. It doesn't even need a trained ear , as cmsdrums suggests, to ensure this doesn't happen.
At some point when the content for the boxset was decided, someone must have thought it would be nice to have an instrumental of Ensueno. Now in order to make this, the mastertape of Enseuno would have been found (and presumably it was labelled as Ensueno) and then the vocals removed and a new mix made.
How then did the resulting mix come to actually be an instrumental Exercises? Either Exercises was actually the original choice for the tracklisting and someone mislabelled it a late stage (in which case, why didn't someone pipe up and say 'Hey, we wanted an intsrumental of Exercises, not Ensueno!), or when locating the Ensueno mastertape, the wrong one (Exercises) was selected by mistake, despite it presumably being labelled as Exercises rather than Ensueno.
I don't get it.
You're absolutely right. I believe this has been discussed before. By the way, EIFL sung by Freddie is the only repeated track in the box set (while Montsy's version is absent).