Mr Bad Guy – 40th Anniversary Edition drops in December
The 40th anniversary of legendary Queen singer Freddie Mercury’s majestic debut solo album, Mr Bad Guy, is being celebrated with a lavish new vinyl reissue on December 5th via UMe.
Originally released end of April 1985, Mr Bad Guy was Mercury’s first album away from the group he had co-founded 15 years before and helped steer to staggering artistic and commercial heights. It found him breaking free from the confines of a band, swapping Queen’s chameleonic, arena-sized music for a set of songs that combined his unique songwriting with a driving, dance and pop-inspired sound.
Forty years after it first came out, Mr Bad Guy will be reissued on spectacular 180-gram translucent green vinyl on December 5th, as well as picture disc LP exclusively via D2C.
“I had a lot of ideas bursting to get out, and there were a lot of musical territories I wanted to explore, which I really couldn’t do within Queen,” Mercury said of the album at the time.
Mr Bad Guy showed a very different side to the singer, one that had been hinted at a few years earlier on Queen’s more dance-oriented Hot Space album. It was partly a love letter to the club scene he was immersed in, but also a chance for Freddie to reveal more of himself than he ever had before.
Mr Bad Guy was recorded over a period of several months at Munich’s Musicland Studio, where Queen had made their most recent albums. It was co-produced by Mercury and Reinhold Mack, who had worked with Queen since the 1980s hugely successful The Game album.
The singer had tested the waters for a solo career with his 1984 single Love Kills, a pulsing dance track produced by disco legend Giorgio Moroder, which had appeared on the soundtrack for a restored version of the iconic silent movie Metropolis. Love Kills’ success would embolden Mercury to travel even further down that avenue.
Mr Bad Guy found Mercury shouldering all the songwriting duties for the album, purposefully avoiding asking his Queen bandmates to appear on the album. He enlisted a team of crack musicians, including drummer Curt Cress, bassist Stephan Wissnet, guitarist Paul Vincent, and Queen touring keyboard player Fred Mandel.
Mr Bad Guy was partly shaped by Munich. When he wasn’t in the studio or spending time with Mack and his family, the singer could be found soaking up the German city’s nightlife. The wild heartbeat of its bars and clubs fed into songs such as the exhilarating “Living On My Own,” with its incredible, acrobatic vocal performance and scat-inspired singing, “I Was Born To Love You”’s euphoric rush, and the pulsing, funky “Let’s Turn It On.”
A handful of the album’s songs wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a Queen record. The soaring Made In Heaven showcases Mercury, the epic balladeer, and would be re-worked by the band themselves for 1995’s posthumous Made In Heaven album. The yearning “There Must Be More To Life Than This” had actually been written for Hot Space, and was even considered as a duet with Michael Jackson at one point. A version featuring Jackson would later emerge on Queen’s Forever album, released in November 2014.
But the freedom of being away from the Queen mothership allowed him to experiment musically. The dramatic, piano-led opening of “Your Kind Of Lover” swiftly erupts into playful energy, “My Love Is Dangerous” is unexpectedly built on a reggae beat, and Mercury’s remarkable operatic vocals on “Man Made Paradise” point the way to his collaboration with Montserrat Caballé on “Barcelona” a few years later.
Most outrageous of all is the song “Mr Bad Guy” itself, which features the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra backing Mercury as he gleefully revels in his reputation for devilry. “You can go through all the Queen albums and there isn’t one song that actually had a fully-fledged orchestra on it,” Mercury said proudly of the latter track. “I thought, ‘I’ll be the first one to do it.’ It‘s quite outrageous. I just said, ‘Play all the notes you haven’t played in your life before’, so they went completely crazy. And that’s the outcome. Very bombastic, very pompous, very me.”
Originally released in April 1985, Mr Bad Guy reached No. 6 in the UK album charts and produced four singles in “I Was Born To Love You,” “Made In Heaven,” “Living On My Own” (which reached No. 1 in the UK when it was re-released in remixed form in 1993, two years after the singer’s death) and “Love Me Like There’s No Tomorrow.”
The singles were accompanied by a series of characteristically flamboyant promo videos, including Made In Heaven’s recreation of scenes from Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and “Dante’s Inferno” shot at a replica of the Royal Opera House stage in a North London warehouse and “Living On My Own”’s OTT drag ball-themed video, filmed at the singer’s 39th birthday party.
The new translucent green vinyl reissue features a mix of the album by Queen’s longtime sound team of Justin Shirley-Smith and Joshua J Macrae, which originally appeared on 2019’s Never Boring box set. The new mix stays true to Freddie’s original vision but has the benefits of technology and resources that were not available in the 1980s.
Forty years on, Mr Bad Guy remains a pivotal album for Freddie Mercury. It allowed him to flex his creative muscles and seek out new sounds and styles, ensuring he returned to Queen re-energised and revitalised.
A1.Let’s Turn It On
A2. Made In Heaven
A3. I Was Born To Love You
A4. Foolin’ Around
A5. Your Kind Of Lover
B1. Mr. Bad Guy
B2. Man Made Paradise
B3. There Must Be More To Life Than This
B4. Living On My Own
B5. My Love Is Dangerous
B6. Love Me Like There’s No Tomorrow
